Many CP/M computers had 8 inch drives as being the only ones they (nominally) supported. The IBM/PC and IBM/XT had only 5.25 inch drives. One had to add special hardware and software (and an external box for the drive/s) for 8 inch capability. And that is what i did..
Ther seem to be a number of apps that require net access for registration, and a few give one no alternative(s).
I seem to recall all the first PC's with floppies had 8". An 8" floppie had vast amounts of storage available!
Is it just me or was it *really* that long ago??
Ken
The first system I used 8-inch floppies on was the Intel MDS-800 they had at college (it used an OS called ISIS-II that was similar to CP/M). I seem to remember the disks having a capacity slightly higher than 1.2MB. That was a single-sided disk, which I made into a flippy. Some people said those are less reliable, since when you use the other side, the disk will be spinning the other way and redepositing dust on the disk surface.
-- 103 days until the winter solstice celebration "Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles" -- James D. Watson
And I would have known that at the time.
It would have been hard to do with 5 slots (one needed for video) and
16KB*1 chips.
I guess the 64KB chips were unavailable or cost too much when the original IBM PC came out.
Yes, you could get 704K on later machines. I had a program for my
80386 that would enable the extra RAM (as well as upper memory blocks in C8000-FBFFF or so).BTW, I never had a 80286. I didn't have much money then.
-- 103 days until the winter solstice celebration "Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles" -- James D. Watson
I wish I could always avoid programs like that, and they would tell you of that limitation before you've already paid for the thing.
-- 103 days until the winter solstice celebration "Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles" -- James D. Watson
It's been a few years, but I seem to remember paying $149 or less for it (router / 4 port hub / modem).
-- 103 days until the winter solstice celebration "Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles" -- James D. Watson
Was that necessary to say that?
or unnecessary ?
-- http://uk.geocities.com/swift240/mikes_page_1.html
With this walk down memory lane. Remember the Altair? Having to set the switchs to get enough info to let it read the boot.. sector of your
8" floppy, if you could afford one, and then you had to write all the utility code to access the printer, send the information to a 40 character x 12 line screen, one of the really big ones back then. Then the world discovered CPM and the S100, Altair bus, opened up the tech world to the possibilities. The 5" drive came out with 35 track single sided media and Wangco drives, I don't remember who preceded them, became on of the first 40 track floppy drives that really worked. I paid $6,500 for my 1st CPM machine with, wow, 64k of memory and 2 Wanco drives. My Altair began to gather dust. Of course my fabulous purchase had the "highly reliable" 16k Motorola gold lead memory chips that were defective from the beginning and never did really work well. It was replaced with a Radio Shack "Trash 80" Mdl I that was expanded, with their expansion interface and the Wangco drives, from the 1 to 4 drive capacity to 8 drives by taking advantage of VTOS which became LDOS where you could reprogram the drive selection, which I did, and add a CMOS, the early chips that lead to the laptop machines of today, interface board I designed that took the 1 floppy drive cable and allowed it to feed into 2 cables with up to 4 drives each. Then came the "really big" double sided 80 track drives at $500 retail each. I added 8 of them to the system with a "double density" card that gave me 750k of storage on each floppy. Wow. The first 5 megabyte hard drive was just about to arrive for the micro systems. By this time we were into the 80's and the lid was blowing off the whole system with new hardware, and software, releases tripping over each other. Those were the "good?" old days. Well the old days anyway. Now with molecular electronics and nano technology coming into the foreground we will see another world changing evolution in the entire computer world. I love the old but also can't wait for the new to arrive. Enjoy all. Memories are great but the future will likely be even more unbelievable.James Taylor (no relation as far as I know)
Ken Taylor wrote:
Heh, exactly the type of systems I used at work for 8080/8085 program development, the old MDS systems from Intel running ISIS. We even had
1 system with the harddrive optional equipment from Intel. We had at least 3 or 4 of those systems all with the ICE-80/85 in circuit emulators. Ever play the Startrek program written for the ISIS systems? It was a blast. Seems like eons ago. The old PL/M-80 programming language was our mainstay for creating programs, and I'm still amazed at the extent of functionality that we created in a 4k programs. I recall with clarity the EPROM burning and erasing necessary for the dedicated programs I wrote. Well, I guess I have wandered way off topic here, sorry.-- Best regards, Kyle
Everybody here is talking about Zone Alarm, but it is no longer the best. Even the free version has become bloatware, and the earliest free version was a little more bloatware than it should be. Recently it started blocking Windows updates, and it wasn't any specific block that I specified, so I got Kerio.
Kerio is much smaller. Kerio became all commercial, but you can get the last free version here.
It doesn't matter that this is a few years old. Firewalls don't need to be updated like anti-virus.
-- Reply in group, but if emailing add 2 more zeros and remove the obvious.
I'm sure that there are others, but some of SMC's older Barricade routers have a serial port to hang a modem from. It's a great way to protect yourself on dialup, especially if you are connecting a pre-SP2 WinXP box for the first time. I used to haul mine around when I travelled, just for the extra level of protection. I have since donated it to a family member that does not have broadband available.
The devil made me do it. I can't stand silly twits.
Art
Computers use electrons to represent ones and zeros. :-)
BTW, are you running Samba, with Windows computers in the LAN? I've been trying to get mine to show the LAN in the "Network Neighborhood", but I need something that isn't going to take me all day to figure out how to configure. Slack 10.0 on the server, with stock Samba, and 4 ea. W2K computers on the LAN.
Thanks, Rich
On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 12:40:02 -0500, Gary H wrote: ..
Not on an IBM, but I once worked at a place that had an S-100 Cromemco or something like that, in a cabinet about the size of a PDP-8, with an 8085 _and_ an 8088, running MP/M-86, with four terminals. It used 8" floppies.
I remember a time when people made their own flippies - somebody was even selling a modified paper punch that would cut that write-enable notch on the opposite side, but they kind of fell out of favor - it was either that the flipping makes the disk spin the opposite direction, so all of the dirt that'd been captured by that velvety lining is suddenly going downstream, and gets all on the head; or because they came out with two-sided drives within about a year.
Cheers! Rich
Oy! I remember buying my first 40 MB drive. It was $400.00, in 1986 dollars. It was, of course, "full-height" i.e. about 3 inches tall. About a year later, it crashed, at which time, of course, I started to back stuff up. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
Is this supposed to be some kind of firewall checker? All I get is page after page of ads for stuff they're trying to sell.
Thanks, Rich
I used the MDS in assembly language class, and never got to play that game (I would have wanted to). I did use the attached EPROM burner a couple of times (for simple machine language monitor and traffic light controller projects).
Later, I got a Commodore 64 at home, and wrote a BASIC extension (which I called BASIC PLUS) that fit in 8KB (could be loaded from the very slow disk, or you could use a EPROM cartridge). That would take a long time to write, assemble, and test.
BTW, I still have one of those cartridges (with EPROM disable switch and reset button).
-- 103 days until the winter solstice celebration "Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles" -- James D. Watson
I remember hearing that the name "Altair" came from Star Trek.
I was reading electronics magazines then, and knew a lot about the Altair. It would have been interesting to have one of those machines, but didn't have enough money then.
-- 103 days until the winter solstice celebration "Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles" -- James D. Watson
there is a free router-project aviable called fli4l,
Also take a look at
hth
-- Michael Wieser
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