Getting a Classic PC Working After 25 Years? 533
tunersedge writes "Yesterday I dug out of my parents' basement a PC they had bought brand new in 1984: Epson Equity I personal computer; 512K RAM; 82-key keyboard; 2 (count 'em!, 2) 5.25" floppy disk drives; 13' RGB monitor (with contrast/brightness knobs); handy on/off switch; healthy 25-year-old yellowed plastic; absolutely no software. (My mom ran a pre-school, and they used it to keep records and payroll. I cut my programming teeth on this thing. GW-Basic was my friend. Kings Quest screens took 2 minutes to load when you walked into a new one.) When I resurrected this machine I pulled the case off, dusted out a little, and plugged it in. It actually fired up! I'm stoked, except the disks we had are missing. What I'm looking to do is either buy some old working disks with whatever I can find (MS-DOS 3.22, GW-Basic, whatever), or try and recreate some using a USB-based floppy drive and some modern software. Has anyone tried to resurrect a PC this old before?"
You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:5, Informative)
Ebay is your friend!
FreeDOS (Score:5, Informative)
FreeDOS probably would boot on this machine.
I actually know the machine you're talking about - except I had a HDD. I know for a fact the thing will run MS-DOS 5.0.x
Watch out on the usb floppy.. (Score:4, Informative)
5.25" floppy disk drives (Score:2, Informative)
Quality that lasts. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:3, Informative)
True enough - I did the same thing with my ancient Mac Plus. Between Ebay and the dedicated enthusiast forums, I was able to get all the software I needed to get it up and working.
Re:Watch out on the usb floppy.. (Score:5, Informative)
This might help... (Score:5, Informative)
This [wikispaces.com] might help with that part of the restoration (cheap and DIY)...
Disks? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Contact Customer Support? (Score:5, Informative)
http://files.support.epson.com/pdf/e1____/e1____ps.pdf [epson.com]
There's a reference to a few HDD controller mentioned, jumper positions, etc.
I'd bet you could hack a modern fdd into it fairly easily...
Re:Contact Customer Support? (Score:4, Informative)
I used to do this all the time with game companies back in the nineties. Often times they'd send me free copies of their C-64 programs and whatnot. It is absolutely worth a shot even though nowadays the operator on the phone is probably not going to even understand your request and/or believe that such a product ever existed.
Re:5.25" floppy disk drives (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Watch out on the usb floppy.. (Score:5, Informative)
Just a thought - unless I'm mistaken, the floppy cable that plugs into a 3.5" drive also fits in a 5.25" drive - and the power connector for regular PATA hard drives also fits the 5.25" floppy drive. If that is still the case, all he needs to do is put his old 5.25" drive next to a new computer, plug in the cables and fire it up. Create a boot floppy using the Windows 95 'create a boot floppy' utility or however you make boot floppys now (I have a .img file of that boot floppy I use to create boot CDs, so it's been a while since I made a boot floppy - format a: /s maybe?)
Put the 5.25" drive and your new boot floppy back in and Voila! you are all set.
Awesome find!!! Here's some software suggestions. (Score:5, Informative)
What an awesome find! You can actually download all the software you'd ever want for the system here - http://www.vetusware.com/ [vetusware.com] - which is a website with hundreds of abandoned software titles for download free. They do have various versions of MS-DOS, which I'd suggest MS-DOS 5.0 or higher because I still have nightmares of edlin *cringe*. They do have MS-DOS 6.22 for download along with GWBasic, QBasic, Borland C++ for DOS, etc for development. I assume since you said the system is from 1984 that's it's an 8086 or 8088 which rules out Windows 3.x.
After years of using TRS-80 systems I moved to an 8088 XT clone in 1990 running MS-DOS 3.3, and as you that's where I really started learning to code with GWBasic. About 6 years ago I had some stuff in my closet shift one evening and that old system fell from the top shelf to the floor never to boot again. I wish I still had it, but a few years ago I did pull out an old 486SX system I picked up used in college (around 1996) and played with some of these old DOS languages and games.
Have fun though... so many people cast away these old systems as boat anchors, but they're awesome to work with if you have some patience.
Still have the manuals... (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/supDetail.jsp?oid=14213
Gotta hand it to Epson for their corporate memory and support abilities... Someone else mentioned contacting them to try and get your hands on some disks but now I'm thinking that might actually work...
I wonder what standard the internal HDD uses? I don't think ATA-1 showed up until '86 or 87... I was thinking you could pull the drive and plunk an image down onto it, but that might not be a viable option.
I have experince with this. (Score:5, Informative)
You need to upgrade the RAM to 640 KB. Generally Radio Shack has some SIPPs you can add to the motherboard to add the last 128 KB.
You will need to find a Double density 3.5 floppy drive with a Card edge adaptor. This will allow you to use double density 3.5 floppies in the computer. (High Density will not work.)
You can network this be getting an 8-bit NIC that has a BNC and AUI port, then adding an AUI to UTP tranciever, but you can't use DHCP with it. The WATTCP stack for Dos will require a static IP.
If the video card is in an ISA slot, (and some times even it it isn't.) get a 16 bit ISA Trident VGA Card. This will give you VGA, EGA and CGA support. You can then plug the Computer into a standard monitor.
Vintage Computing (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to mock an actual comment from the almighty one, I prefer "What's a network?"
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:5, Informative)
Sad? No, actually it's annoying. Bill Gates never actually said what you think he said.
Maybe RTFM? (Score:2, Informative)
I know I will be modded troll or something but I was just amazed that you can find an actual manual [epson.com] by googling [google.com]! It's probably useless but anyway, kudos to EPSON.
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:4, Informative)
Thrift stores.
You should check out thrift stores.
I see 5 1/4 inch floppy disks in those places all the time. Cheap.
Bootstrap via serial port? (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, this may not help but then again it might...
I dug up an old Laser 128 (Apple II compatible) with no working software and was able to get it working using the following method. I don't know if your machine has a compatible feature, though.
http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/bootstrap.html#Starting_from_bare_metal [sourceforge.net]
In short: using a second machine (In my case, running Win98) and a homebrew serial cable, configure the machine to be revived to treat serial port input as keyboard input, then keyboard input direct into memory (like a DEBUG prompt) - If you can do that then the rest of the procedure might actually work with compatible software.
The support machine "types" the software directly into the host machine's memory and executes it. In the link above, you start with a ProDOS image which then gets written to disk so you can boot the machine normally.
=Smidge=
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:3, Informative)
Double density is what these drives used, and high density are easier to find. Is that what you meant?
Single density disks weren't that commonly used. The only reasonably common system I can think of that used them was the Atari 8-bit machines, and even then only if you had the original 810 5.25" disk drive. The later 1050 used double density disks (but could read and write single density disks with a lower capacity).
Re:Watch out on the usb floppy.. (Score:1, Informative)
That's right, and in fact the old 360k/1.2Mb 5.25" drives are still supported by modern motherboards, since the floppy cable standard never changed. You will still find the option in your BIOS if your motherboard has a floppy cable socket, which it probably does.
Ironically, SATA has helped to keep this dinosaur standard alive, as the easiest way to install Windows XP on a SATA disk is to use a floppy drive to load the required SATA drivers.
Another IBM PC Compatible (Score:3, Informative)
This looks like a more or less standard boring old IBM PC compatible computer. There are truckloads of great old DOS programs floating around out there if you look around (although sadly most people only feel inclined to preserve games, not utilities and such)
Probably the easiest thing to do is connect a 360k drive to a somewhat more "modern" networked computer that has an internal floppy disk controller, and write disk images or files directly to it. One hint though, do not write 360k floppies with a 1.2mb 5.25" drive, they usually won't work due to differences in the size of the magnetic track written. If you need 5.25 floppy disks, you can usually find them on eBay - heck there are still 8" disks and punch cards floating around!
That system might be able to run up to MS/PC DOS 6.22 or perhaps even FreeDOS, but if there is no hard drive you probably would be best served with DOS 2.x or 3.x, they take up less disk space and memory.
There are various other OSes for 8088/8086 IBM PC compatibles (CP/M 86, and Xenix come to mind) as well as GUI shells (Visi-On, GEM, GEOS, and Windows 1.0 through 3.0) but most of the useful stuff for that class of machine is for plain old DOS.
If you are looking to add hardware, there is also plenty of old ISA stuff floating around on eBay. You might be able to add a 720k 3.5" floppy drive (check the physical bay size and connector compatibility) or a 1.4mb drive using an ISA controller card with a BIOS. 8-bit MFM/RLL hard drives and controllers, I'm sure I have even seen 8-bit IDE controllers before. There are ISA VGA cards that will work in 8 bit ISA systems (often they look like 16-bit cards but will still fit and operate in an 8-bit slot)
Anyway, lots of options but not as unique as TI-99/4a, Apple II, TRS-80 or such.
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:4, Informative)
16 bit SCSI card, my friend. Adaptec 1542CF is what you want. Actually, a 16-bit IDE host adapter should be fine. I might even have one of those as well. Reply if you're interested...
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:3, Informative)
I think the issue is that a computer of that age is not likely to have 16-bit ISA slots, but rather only 8-bit ISA slots. Your 16-bit SCSI card won't work in it anymore than a PCI-E one would.
Essentially, a computer of that age just isn't going to take a CD-ROM driver. That's a technology from a later time.
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:3, Informative)
Some of the old AT cards would work in XT slots - that's why the notch was there! Half the card hangs out in space.
That said, many Adaptec SCSI cards did not work in 8-bit XT slots - I can't recall the specifics for the 15x1 cards - because they justifiable required all 16-bits for a data pathway.
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:3, Informative)
Deja vu... [slashdot.org]
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:3, Informative)
I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didnt - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
So, maybe "640k out to be enough for anybody for an entire decade!" would be little more accurate.
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:4, Informative)
I've used a couple models of Epson Equity. The custom DOS version 3.2 on the XT model (Equity I) is easy to find online, but there's really nothing special about it. The AT model (Equity III) had DOS 4.01 and it was a generic version.
MS-DOS 3.3 is probably the easiest to find and is the ideal version for an XT-class system. A full 3.3 will have GW-BASIC on disk 2.
-uso.
laplink (Score:3, Informative)
If you can get to a DOS prompt don't forget about the old trusty program called laplink. You can transfer files via serial or parallel port and you only need to have the laplink program on the one computer to get started but you gotta have da DOS first.
P.S. You gotta get a hard drive... you'll go mad with floppies very quickly.. remember 512MB is the limit for IDE without using the umm overlay ummm I've forgot what it was called... o well nothing of value was lost...
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:3, Informative)
You're right. It's a 4.77 8088 with 8 bit ISA slots. Now I've seen 8 bit IDE host adapters, but they were odd-ball in 1990, let alone now. As for whether or not it would "take" a CD ROM driver, of course it would. DOS is the same on 8088's and 286's. You would just need an 8 bit host adapter to connect it to. That would most likely be SCSI.
I remember my first CD ROM with a proprietary 8 bit SCSI adapter from the DAK catalog. Expensive and slow, but it worked!
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:2, Informative)
one problem with those 8 bit ide adaptors.... they have to use 16 bit IDE drives.... which makes them a pita.
I know I did get 32bit ide drives working on 286's with the help of a Y2k type replacement bios on an isa card made by SIIG... I got another one, perhaps I'll dust off my 5150 and see if it can use that (cheating I know, but trust me it's diffucult to find good working 16 bit ide drives that don't crap out).... also I am sorry, st/506 drives and controlers rll and mfm, although built tough are a bigger pita than 16 bit ide is... you can't just have a controller die and slap the drive on another controller.
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:3, Informative)
The later 1050 used double density disks (but could read and write single density disks with a lower capacity).
You had to get the doubler ROMs to get true double density 180k, otherwise the drive did some weird 1 1/2 density 160k...
The 1050 supported 130K "enhanced" density" [faqs.org]. The later XF551 supported true double density and apparently was also true double-sided [atariarchives.org], but that came out pretty late in the day and it wasn't that cheap by the standards of the time.
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:4, Informative)
No, it isn't. Are you trolling, or just never botherd to listen to it? If you had listened to it, you 'd have to admit HE DOES NOT say "640 k should be enough for anyone".
The only part you could be referring to is:
Which if YOU READ THE FUCKING THING, is him speaking in 1989, years after the design was set (1980 or 81), saying that 640k was certainly not enough.
You found a paragraph where Bill Gates mentions "640 k". Unfortunately, it's not remotely close to the "quote".
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:4, Informative)
Double density (AKA "standard density" or 360K) cannot reliably be formatted for high density (1.2M) use, or vice versa, because the coercivity of the media is significantly different.
IBM-compatible PCs have never used single density as a standard disk format, and many IBM-compatible PCs can't actually deal with single density, though some can. The first disk drives shipped on PCs were single sided, though IBM switched to double sided fairly early on. The format progression for media on the PC, AT, PS/2, and compatibles was:
There were, of course, other formats not supported by IBM DOS, but used by other vendors or other software.
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:3, Informative)
Think about how easy it would be to misinterpret it if you wanted to. "...640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time."
Digging through an old story here on /.: [slashdot.org]
Do a Usenet search on the phrase. Though usually dated 1981 or thereabouts, the first time it appears on the record is August 1992 (in a Mac newsgroup). Never has anyone cited the circumstances, the place and exact date, he's suposed to have said this.
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Quite so. The actual remark was made by Steve Jobs to Steve Wozniak regarding building a card to expand the Apple II's memory from the max possible on the motherboard of 48K to a full 64K (the "language card"). Jobs' statement "Who would ever want more than 48K?" has been misattributed and misquoted for years, as have many statements made by some that sound so much better coming from someone else. The answer was, almost everybody. When the IIe came out it had 64K on the board and could accept a second 64K card. The IIc came with two full 64K banks installed.
Jobs was frequently at odds with Wozniak over technical issues. Jobs wanted no more than 2 slots in the Apple II. Woz wanted 8 and put them in. Jobs argued against color. Woz put it in, first in blocky lo-res, then in an awesome hack that resulted in 16 color (including two blacks and two whites) hi-res. Other examples exist, but these two illustrate Jobs' penchant for one-upsmanship: When he built the first Mac, it had no color and no slots.
Jobs' quote was in many MOTD files during the late 70's and early 80's, until the misattributed Gates quote started replacing it.
(The part in your post starts at around 22 minutes in case anyone else is reading this and doesn't want to sit through the whole 1.5 hours.)
Re:Pimp tips ! (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. The old BIOSes would support drives of up to about 500MB, and past that you'd need your disk manager utility.
You're thinking of MS-DOS 3.3 and earlier not supporting disk partitions bigger than 32MB, and before 3.3 not supporting more than one partition per drive.