Compaq Deskpro boards/hard drives from the late 1990s

[Grant Taylor]

On 7/23/21 11:23 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> Win95: 13 disks.

That's fewer than I remember.

Though, Windows 3.1 was 6 disks and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was 8 
disks.  That was on top of MS-DOS 6.22 which was 3 disks.  For a total 
of 9 or 11.  So, 13 isn't that big of a jump.

> Win98: 38 disks.

Maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

> Netware 3.1: can't remember... lots:

I have 29 disk images in my collection for NetWare 3.11.

> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/diskette-puzzle/

Ya.  I remember NetWare being a puzzle of disks.

> Ha! Trying to google, I found a piece I wrote myself!
> https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/07/16/netware_4_anniversary/

$ReadingList++

> I think it was circa 20-25 disks. I remember I had to copy them before
> installation, in case. And at that time, the DOS 3.3 DISKCOPY command
> didn't swap to disk or XMS/EMS, and with 640 kB of RAM, copying a 1.4
> MB floppy could take 3-4 reads and as many writes.

Oh good $DEITY!

I would have borrowed a 2nd floppy drive from another system, done the 
copy, and returned the floppy drive.  It would probably have been faster.

> It took me over an entire working day to duplicate all the disks, IIRC.

Ya.  I bet.

> There was, and I think in some markets -- Japan maybe? possibly
> because of non-adherence to CD standards? -- it was sold on floppies.

<ASCII shruggie>

> I also have unpleasant memories of trying to install Slackware from
> floppies, because it couldn't see my SCSI card, and the only CD-ROM I
> had was SCSI. The command switches for Linux kernel modules weren't
> standardised and I couldn't find out how to tell Linux about my cheap
> & nasty built-in AHA1520 SCSI controller's IRQ and DMA settings. I
> knew what they were, but I didn't know the syntax to tell the
> module...

Ya.  Early Linux, which Slackware in the '90s definitely qualifies as, 
often had a chicken and egg problem.  You could create a new boot disk 
and / or modules for hardware /if/ /only/ you had a functional Linux 
system to do it from.  Bootstraping Linux in the '90s was ... touchy.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die