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| Author |
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| 25 new of 269 responses total. |
keesan
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response 75 of 269:
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Apr 16 20:01 UTC 2002 |
The computer now recognizes files on both hard drives. We had to remove the
sound card. We had disabled the secondary onboard IDE controller. Cannot
think of much use for a sound card anyway, or a CD-ROM drive but we can plug
that into the primary controller if we can find a use for it.
We have one CD-ROM drive (from Klaus) that has in addition to the headphone
jack and volume control some things normally found on CD decks - a > >> (play,
forward?) button and a [] (square) next to the open symbol - stop? You could
in theory play CDs with this by booting from a floppy with the correct driver
(MSDOS mscdex?) and plugging in a headphone, with no need for sound card, or
monitor, or keyboard (disable that in setup). Or we can plug in a cord that
goes to a receiver and amplify the output, using this as a CD-deck. In theory
an XT ought to make a good CD-deck, right?
Jim has a couple of DOS wargames on CD-ROM. He is not interested in learning
to use them. Would the library have any DOS CD's with useful info on them?
We do not have a CD-burner or I suppose we could store photos on a CD.
But a 1.44M floppy holds about two cameras full of photos already.
What are CD burners selling for nowadays?
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glenda
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response 76 of 269:
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Apr 16 21:22 UTC 2002 |
STeve and I use Ranish boot loader (www.ranish.com shareware, he wants a
postcard of your town or school) to boot between OpenBsd and Win2000 (and
soon Linux in my case, as soon as I decide which flavor to install). But
hitting F8 is really much easier and less complicated.
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keesan
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response 77 of 269:
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Apr 17 00:03 UTC 2002 |
Only problem is if you forget to hit f8 then you have to reboot or wait a
while. I will look at ranish soon. In the meantime I checked simtel/dos
under bootutil and found seven possibilities. One seemed outdated and was
full of dire warnings. Two were graphical and required VGA or even VGA video
(I like to use a TTL monitor with Hercules graphics card). One said you
needed TASM to compile it and was written by a Ukrainian (15K download).
The graphical ones were by a German and a Hungarian and the latter wanted a
registration fee but did not say how much it was.
That left losbm by a Turk written in some unknown language, 22K download, year
2000; BOSS by a Dutchboy (age 15), 32K download, 1997, written in ASM and
C++; and mwrboot named for the author's initials, written by an English
speaker, 51K download, 1995-199, ASM and C files supplied with exe and com.
They all unload with fdisk /mbr. I tried putting one on my a:drive and turned
it into a 37M file in upper ASCII so had to reformat (it said to try this at
your own risk).
Jim just borrowed the PQMagic CD from his neighbor, discovered he had to plug
the CD-ROM drive into IDE controller 2 not 1, and found a PQboot bootmanager
on it. He has been unable to partition the hard drive so that all four
partitions have 2K clusters - C: has 2K and the rest have 8K. So he left it
at C: and D:. The PCI video card went screwy with PQMagic - anyone ever have
that sort of problem? - so I gave me an old VGA that goes screwy with lynx
and that worked. If we need sound I will look up the Soundblaster jumper
settings and try to disable the floppy drive controller on it.
Jim claims to understand how master boot records and partitions and this boot
business stuff but cannot explain it coherently. Would anyone reading this
item want to give it a try, at beginner level? The programs put some sort
of file into the MBR which when you boot gives you a menu with a default and
a default time after which it goes to the default OS on the default partition
and you can sometimes have 8 OS's on 4 partitions. The fancier programs let
you configure more things like the color in which they display.
This will also let us, hopefully, switch between MS-DOS and DR-DOS to test
things, and maybe even between two versions of the same OS with different
autoexec and config.sys so as to boot with interlink off the hard drive.
Which F8 does not do.
I will look at ranish now, thanks.
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keesan
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response 78 of 269:
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Apr 17 00:15 UTC 2002 |
Wow, Ranish.com is a good site. The 2.40 version, 93K (says it is 60 at the
site) is the latest stable version. This is not only a boot manager but a
partition tool that lets you make dozens of partitions on your drive. Jim
is rather discouraged with fdisk for partitioning as it will make only 1
primary disk (MS wants you to do things the Windows way and Windows only wants
one primary partition). PQMagic messes up the video and won't give him 2K
clusters. I had not known there was a freeware partition manager. We have
not tried the other programs yet (except for the one that expanded my floppy
disk to one very large illegible file). The best programs are often free like
this one. I also saw links there to a partition manager discussion group and
many other things. Will go back soon. I downloaded 13page of partition.txt
(my name - see /a/k/e/keesan/partition.txt) which explains how hard drives
and partitions and master boot records work.
I suggested that Jim make himself a second computer so that I can have my desk
back. He likes to format things in the middle of running a program. It is
not like we are short of computers!
Jim says he knows how to put several operating systems on the same computer
with a sys program, somehow. He won't tell me how, too busy checking the
throughput of a 486DX4 against a 5x86 P75 with 133MHz cpu. They are similar.
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keesan
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response 79 of 269:
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Apr 17 12:12 UTC 2002 |
Boot managers, says our neighbor, will hide all but one partition so you
cannot use files on the other one. This is not for us as we want to be able
to use DOS to work on Windows files and vice versa. THere is a way to set
active partitions and reboot without hiding any partitions. When you boot
it will change to the one you booted from last time. If you set the DOS
partition active it will always boot in DOS if it did last time. D: will be
active with C: for Windows. To get into Windows after that you reset the
active partition to C: and reboot (you cannot just type Win as in Win31).
Fdisk might do it: select bootable partition (3 with MS-DOS). Reboot.
Boots in C: after changing your drive letters around - what was E: is now
called C:. So on the Win95 computer we would have to set up all the programs
to refer to themselves as being in C:. We had C: (Part1) D: (Part2) E:
(Part3) E: (Part4) and booted from Part3 which became C:. Part1 - D, Part2
- E:, Part3 - C:, Part4 - F: (as it used to be). This does not sound
promising for use on a computer with MS and DR-DOS. If on the Win95 computer
we booted from DOS in Part2 (C:) then the old Part1 (formerly C:) would become
D: and we could work on the files in D:. It would switch C: and D: I could
use this as a DOS computer most of the time and Win95 when needed.
There is another program for changing the effective drive letters.
Since Jim now has a 500M drive with 80M files (including installation files,
three browsers, an office suite, some images viewers and photos) he could have
four copies of all the files and call each drive C: and boot in four versions
of DOS, I suppose. But why bother when you can boot from a floppy disk.
The drive changing program is called 'assign' but some programs do not work
with it.
I am tempted to have two DOS computers and one Win95 computer instead.
Is there no way other than F8 to stop Win95 from loading, without hiding
partitions or renaming the drive letters?
Jim wants to try the fdisk approach on the Win95 computer. I could just use
Part2 for booting and for installation/zip files and use Part3 (which will
not get renamed) for everything else as it is a huge 400M (same as my old hard
drive). Win95 is using F: (Part4) for CAB files.
If I want to run Win95 I would have to boot in DOS, run fdisk, and reboot.
After which I would run fdisk in a DOS window to get it back to DOS active.
One link at the Ranish.com site said the reasons fdisk can only set one
primary partitions is that MS did not want to make it easy to use more than
their OS on a computer. Win95 has gone a step further. I hear Win98 is
worse.
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scott
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response 80 of 269:
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Apr 17 12:53 UTC 2002 |
Partition-hiding depends on the boot manager, and also on the operating
systems in question. Most Linux-geek-oriented loaders (lilo, grub) will
generally let one OS see the partitions for another, if you don't tell it not
to.
I do recall using Norton "System Commander" a few years ago with Windows and
DOS, and the manual gave rather dire warnings about what Windows 95 (and
especially the "Plus" add-on) would do if allowed to roam free on your hard
drive.
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keesan
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response 81 of 269:
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Apr 17 15:08 UTC 2002 |
What is the 'plus' add-on and what would Win95 do?
I tested out two of the boot managers but since Jim had figured out how to
unhide all our partitions they did not work. LOSB (Turkey) and BOSS
(Netherlands) were small and simple and easy to use. They both let you choose
to boot from any of four partitions. BOSS is a bit larger and includes an
automatic backup of oldmrbt.bin (?) and a restore program. With LOSB you use
fdisk to save the record and then fdisk again to restore it in order to
uninstall. BOth let you adjust the default time. BOSS lets you adjust screen
color. Jim adjusted it from white on blue to a nearly illegible pale green
on slightly darker green, with the active partition highlighted in black.
He says he likes the black green contrast and he never reads the words anyway.
Is Win98 worse than Win95 and if so how? Does it hide DOS so you cannot find
it at all?
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scott
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response 82 of 269:
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Apr 17 15:45 UTC 2002 |
The Win95 "Plus" add-on does things like disk compression, and includes some
utilities and games. Apparently if you installed it default it would search
the hard drive for other partitions to format for Windows, regardless of
whether they had something else on them.
Win98 is basically Win95 with some bug fixes and with Internet Explorer as
the "active desktop" (replaces Control Panel with IE running a control panel
Web page, for instance). IE makes Win98 less stable than Win95.
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keesan
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response 83 of 269:
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Apr 17 23:11 UTC 2002 |
We managed to get IE out of Win95, also MSN and whatever it was that tried
to sign you up with AOL or Compuserve. I wonder if Win98 users have any idea
when they are actually online.
I got out a library book Experts Guide to Win95 and DOS for WIN95 for Dummies.
They both suggest hitting f8 while booting to reach DOS. The Experts' guide
says you can also add the line multiboot=1 to msdos.sys using Notepad and it
will stop and offer you the choice of its DOS or Windows, or you can boot from
your choice of OS on a floppy disk. The Dummies' book assumes that you want
to boot in DOS every time and says to add (via ECHO... >>) to msdos.sys the
line bootgui=0 to cancel out theprevious line bootgui=1. It does not think
you know what a text editor is so it adds the line at the end. Would it work
just as well to change the 1 to a 0 or delete the bootgui line (under
Options)? I think we will take the Dummies approach or boot DR-DOS from a
floppy disk with one line in autoexec.bat (which runs autoexec.bat from the
D: drive).
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keesan
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response 84 of 269:
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Apr 18 00:04 UTC 2002 |
The funny looking file that Marcus extracted a .png from was a 'TIFF graphic
in a WORD file' - how and why would someone have created this? What should
I tell them to do with their scanner software in order to create a png or gif
BW file without dragging it into WORD? Why could nobody actually read this
WORD file?
The DOS for Win95 for Dummies books gives useful instructions on how to write
a batch file. First, if you are lucky enough to have upgraded (?) from DOS
or Win3.1/DOS6.22 you will have an EDIT program that you can use. If not,
try at the c:> prompt typing WORDPAD and if that does not work try WRITE -
and insist on saving the file as .txt as you cannot save a .bat file, then
rename it with DOS rename command. Or use Notepad the same way. Imagine a
text editor that will not let you name files the way you want!
It also says you can do a batch rename in dos: rename *.txt *.bat.
But there is no way to do this in Windows. It gives several other examples
of things you can do with one command in DOS but that take 5-10 mouse clicks
in numerous boxes with Windows, or cannot be done at all. And it says Win95
is simply Win31 with a new user interface and 5% new (and buggy) files.
What have they added to Win2000/ME/XP that makes it harder to use? Are there
any improvements other than more drivers?
Jim wants to put Win95 on a separate computer from CD (Klaus gave us a working
computer with CD-ROM drive and sound card that we will practice on - 200M hard
drive should be plenty) and experiment to see which parts of it he can chop
off and still have it work. Any ideas where and how to start?
We are aiming at something that will run an HP scanner and do Netscape and
Realaudio and the Pivot monitor. Today at the Visions 2002 technology fair
for the reading disabled he learned that there is a locally run website with
recordings of interesting nonfiction articles (read mainly by the volunteer
who put it together) in .ram format and for that you need Realaudio 5 and
possibly Win31 will do it but it tends to crash very often with Realaudio.
There was also a JAWS for Windows program which reads you the contents of hte
screen and can even convert HTML to text while online. I have a DOS version
that I hope to get working with lynx. It will read you one letter at a time
as you type, or one word at a time, or the whole sentence. And WKAR has a
piggyback (sideband) station for the blind that reads newspapers and
supermarket ads to you, and there is an 800- free service that also reads
newspapers but it is done by a computer. The WKAR one is read by human
volunteers and much of it is national, particularly the all-night part.
It was rather difficult to hear JAWS and the webcast because for most of the
day a very amplified jazz band was making it nearly impossible to talk, which
is particularly bad as most of the people there were unable to read lips since
they were blind. I felt really sorry for the nearest booths but also sorry
for us since we did not get enough moments of silence to visit them.
We heard that the previous fair was in a very crowded location - which is sort
of stupid since people there were mostly walking around with canes, or in
wheelchairs (with MS), and had trouble getting through even wide spaces.
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glenda
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response 85 of 269:
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Apr 18 18:02 UTC 2002 |
If you want to over ride the automatic .txt just put " around the file name.
I use Notepad for most of my html coding and type "filename.html". There is
a way to tell Notepad to recognize other .extensions I just don't remember
how, I would have to find it in my notes.
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gull
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response 86 of 269:
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Apr 18 18:53 UTC 2002 |
Re #72: I think there's a way to do it, but I couldn't tell you what it
is off hand. Search around...there's a site somewhere that explains how
to make Win95 boot to a DOS prompt, and exit to a DOS prompt when you
Shut Down. It probably only works with original Win95, though, not
Win95 OSR2, because they made some changes to how Shut Down works in
OSR2. Win98 is hopeless because it spins down the disks when it goes
into shut down mode, and DOS doesn't know how to spin them up again.
You might try installing TweakUI and tinkering with it, I remember it
has a number of settings for the boot menu. You can make it sit and
wait for you to do something instead of defaulting to Windows 95, for
example.
Re #84: It's kind of simplistic to say that Win95 is just Win31 with a
new user interface. It also has much better 32-bit application support.
There's the Win32s addon for Win31, but it never really worked right.
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keesan
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response 87 of 269:
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Apr 18 19:48 UTC 2002 |
We have a computer dated 1995 (BIOS) - would this be the original version of
Win95? How do we find out the version number? So they caught on that people
were managing to use the computer with DOS and tried to make it harder yet,
with OSR2 and Win98? Very interesting.
Are you saying that there is no way to modify msdos.sys in Win98 so it will
boot in DOS, or that you cannot go from Win98 to DOS during/after shutdown?
Glenda, thanks for the info. Jim will see whether his little 4K text editor
works on Win95 files in the DOS window. He does not know what it will do with
long file names. The DOS for Win95 for dummies book said that Win95 DOS can
recognize and also rename them, but only if you put "filename".
The most recent person who I suggested send me a scanned copy in the form of
a gif, png, or pdf, sent a BW jpeg! I hope it does not look a whole lot worse
than the gif in which case it will be illegible.
The DOS prompt on the Win95 computer says 'version 4' - is that the Win95
version?
We are not terribly concerned with shutdown>DOS but do want to be able to boot
in DOS. Will report our results eventually, but first Jim wants to put Win95
on a spare computer and see if he can get it to 40M. We will start by
removing all the .bmp backgrounds/wallpaper and the system sounds - what else
can be removed without confusing Win95? How does one remove the Internet
Signup and MSN?
More progress on free webspace for use with lynx. free.prohosting.com wrote
back saying that they fixed their signup page so the script should work.
Might even work with lynx, I will check. They had the most intelligently
written site that I ran across of the advertising variety
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gull
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response 88 of 269:
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Apr 18 20:24 UTC 2002 |
Re #87: you can't go to DOS after shutdown in Win98, though you can
still reboot in MS-DOS mode. I think if you go to Control Panel/System
it gives the Win95 version. Win95B is OSR2, which has a number of
bugfixes and incorporates IE more tightly. I generally prefer Win98
because it has better hardware support -- Win95 doesn't support USB or
IRDA very well. Win31 doesn't support PCMCIA either without some ugly
hacks. Win98 also makes it much easier to download bugfixes and updates.
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keesan
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response 89 of 269:
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Apr 19 00:48 UTC 2002 |
We don't have anything USB or PCMCIA and are trying to avoid IE. The latest
version of Realaudio is 8 and requires a 233MHz pentium with 64M RAM.
Versions 7 and G2 require 120MHz 16M RAM, which we have, but they say they
also need IE 5.0. Is Netscape 4.08 just as good? I get the feeling a lot
of software and hardware companies are being bribed to not mention the fact
that they don't need MS software to run. Anyone know how big version 7 is?
Version 5 was 'only' 1Mb or so. We hate having to download all the video
stuff that we don't want to use but there is probably no way around it as they
use it for advertising.
The assistivemedia.org site does not mention which version it needs - just
'click here to download the latest version of Realaudio'. The site has been
improved and it is now easy to find the older versions.
Jim just discovered that you can use one large black ink cartridge instead
of 4 small cartridges in different colors in the Canon printer. He has not
got the small black one to print which may be why we have the printer. Is
this likely to be a problem with the cartridge? The color ones print. It
worked a few times last month, will try cleaning it better.
Thanks for all the info on Win95B - so you have to completely shut down the
computer and reboot instead of switching to DOS? Have they made it still more
difficult to reach DOS in Win2000 etc.?
We took a brief break from high technology and replaced the foam on two
speakers. Apparently large speakers are also going obsolete due to better
magnet material for the small ones. (drift)
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gull
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response 90 of 269:
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Apr 19 02:07 UTC 2002 |
Re #89: They aren't getting bribed. It's just no longer worth their
time to write drivers and provide tech support for anything older than
Windows 95/98.
No, you don't have to completely shut down the computer in 95B or 98.
You can open a DOS prompt like usual, or you can use the Restart in MS-
DOS Mode option.
The operating systems that no longer have MS-DOS are Windows NT and its
descendents. (2000 and XP) They still have a command prompt, and they
emulate enough of MS-DOS to run a fair amount of software, but it's not
really MS-DOS, though the syntax is mostly the same. There's no such
thing as MS-DOS mode in those operating systems.
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keesan
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response 91 of 269:
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Apr 19 14:39 UTC 2002 |
I was referring not to the need to use the MS operating system, but to the
fact that Canon is not letting its users know that they can print in DOS mode
(nowhere in the manual do they mention this) and Realaudio, which used to say
Netscape or IE were needed to use their software, now lists only IE 5.0 or
later (or various UNIX-type things). Is this true? I will try with
Netscape anyway.
We keep getting crashes when trying to browse with Netscape / Win31 (some sort
of memory conflict) but I was able to listen to something at
assistivemedia.org with Realaudio 5 and a 33K modem. 100% of the bytes were
received ontime at 23K bps with bandwidth only 16K in very clear voice. Jim
wants to speed up the (rather slow) reading so I tried to download the 10 min
.rm file but it was going at .4K bps (59min) so I gave up. Is there some way
to make lower quality .rm files that would download faster?
Will the WIn2000 DOS emulator let you use any DOS-based software with it or
do you then need a boot manager?
Jim says he found a backup msdos.sys on the Win95 computer with 0 instead of
1 in the bootgui= line and now he can boot in DOS.
Next challenge is to disable the controller part of the 16-bit sound card that
we want to set up in the other Pentium. (Chat request, bye for now).
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keesan
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response 92 of 269:
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Apr 19 15:47 UTC 2002 |
Jim reports that 4DOS works while shelled from Win95 to DOS and can read long
file names, and that if you boot in DOS it will not read long file names. You
need to be in a Windows box to do that. His little text editor will not read
long file names either way, he says. He also reports that once he sets the
DOS window to be full-screen it keeps that setting next time even after going
all the way out of Windows first. Alt-Enter will switch back and forth
between full-screen (Win31 style) and DOS window.
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gull
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response 93 of 269:
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Apr 19 18:02 UTC 2002 |
"Well behaved" DOS programs will work under Win2K. DOS programs that try to
access the hardware directly (which is most major ones) won't.
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keesan
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response 94 of 269:
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Apr 21 13:10 UTC 2002 |
I was just reading about some obsolete computers. There were kits for the
8008 and 8080 chip, with 256 bytes or even as much as 4K 'words' of memory.
You could buy programs to let you use them with an audio-cassette tape drive
(big in the early 70s) or even an oscilloscope. One computer came with a 32
character screen (sort of like a word-processor but shorter line).
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gelinas
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response 95 of 269:
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Apr 21 22:30 UTC 2002 |
Audio-cassette drives were "big" in the '70s because they were *available*
in the '70s; not much else was. Not to the average person, anyway. The
floppy drives I saw back then were all special-purpose: the word processors
used them, but every company's was different. (Probably strictly a
data-format decision, I'd guess. The harware was probably the same.)
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mdw
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response 96 of 269:
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Apr 22 04:38 UTC 2002 |
Floppy drives & floppies were much more expensive back then. $5 for a
floppy; $200-$500 for a floppy drive, plus another $200+ for the floppy
controller card. Early floppy drives were also pretty unreliable --
head alignment problems were a big problem, and data seperators were
tempermental and not well understood. There actually were a number of
different hardware standards for 8" floppies; you had a choice between
hard-sectored (more reliable and simplier, but lower data density) vs.
soft-sectored, single vs. double density, single vs. double sided disks,
MFM vs. group encoding of bits, sector sizes, and # of tracks. There
was a standard of sorts, the 3540 format that IBM used, but since there
were no standard electronics to do that, and incentive to do something
different (lower cost or higher storage density), plenty of people
choose to do something different.
Memory was also expensive -- and large amounts of memory consumed power
and made plenty of heat.
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drew
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response 97 of 269:
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Apr 22 05:28 UTC 2002 |
I want to place an AUTORUN.INF on a CDROM that opens an HTML file (also on
the CDROM) using the default browser. Can this be done? What lines should be
in the Autorun file?
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keesan
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response 98 of 269:
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Apr 22 18:49 UTC 2002 |
The company that cannot send me faxes unless I am there to press start
(because their machine is even older than mine and we both have to press a
button at about the same time) sent me two bmp files today. There must be
an infinite number of wrong ways to send scanned files. I stopped downloading
(at 1.7K bytes/sec) when the count for the first one hit 300K and asked them
to compress to a png file and make sure it is BW and 300x300 dpi scan (not
a colored gif or a scan optimized for screen display or a greyscale jpeg).
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gull
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response 99 of 269:
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Apr 22 19:55 UTC 2002 |
PNG is fairly recent. Really old scanner software may not know about
it. A black-and-white GIF probably wouldn't be any larger, though.
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