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?"
Re:512k! (Score:2, Insightful)
har har har har. That stupid fucking joke is about as old and lame as his computer. It stopped being funny about 24 years ago.
Contact Customer Support? (Score:5, Insightful)
They do host the manual [epson.com] that indicates you have a parallel port and a RS-232C serial port to play with and also something that looks like expansion slots designed for peripherals. Good luck and have fun!
Pimp tips ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool, it is very educational to work with old computer's
Nice things to do: :)
- add extra ram by using an ISA memory expansion card (up to 2MB !!!), running windows 3.0 would then be possible !
- 200mb+ IDE/MFM drive (the latter where mostly smaller though and a bit hard to get)
- ISA VGA card
- ISA Soundblaster
- ISA ethernetcard
- run Arachne and surf the WEB !!!!!!!!!!!!, heheh yes you can this baby on slashdot
- a lot more upgrade options, FPU etc.. etc..
Greetings and Enjoy and good luck hunting down Dos software
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Quality that lasts. (Score:5, Insightful)
OT: sig (Score:5, Insightful)
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I'd like my operating system to have more than two possible settings. Operating systems are complex because the world is complex.
Re:Watch out on the usb floppy.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:2, Insightful)
What's really sad is that many of us had RAM-hungry applications *at the time* and were waiting for small computer systems to catch up to the problems we *already had*.
Re:My advice to you (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually trying to use the machine is not likely to make him happy, either. When I've messed around with older nostalgic machines from my childhood, it was cool for the first 10 minutes until the nostalgia wore off and I started to see how painfully slow and primitive they are. These things were great in their time, but they don't age well.
Since the machine is so generic and non-interesting, he may have a harder time finding any sort of enthusiast group for it, but the Internet is vast, so who knows what he could find if he spent enough time digging.
Re:512k! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevertheless it's a tradition deeply engrained in slashdot culture.
In other words, you must be new here.
Re:My advice to you (Score:5, Insightful)
This would be an incredible teaching aid. Students could be shown (not just told) how technology has advanced over 25 years. Real, side-by-side comparisons could be demonstrated using simple programs designed to run on both the new and old systems (first-hand demonstration of backwards compatibility, performance comparisons, etc). This could be an excellent system to teach the importance of efficiency in programming.
When my son is old enough to have an actual computer, I plan on giving him a system that has limited capabilities so I can teach him on a system that doesn't provide built-in distractions (I'll probably pick something newer than 25 years though). Of course, I'll teach him BASIC first, then maybe COBOL and some other simple languages before introducing him to modern languages and objects.
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:5, Insightful)
True.
And what Rumsfeld said about "known unknowns" was logical (albeit paraphrased in a place where the original quote would have been better.)
And Al Gore didn't claim to have "invented" the internet; he said he "took the initative in creating the internet", which given how you would expect a Congreeman to take initative (recognizing a good program, giving it attention and money) is true.
And Sarah Palin's speech was actually coherent, not beautiful but coherent, if you read it.
And Quayle's spelling of potato isn't the most common, but is technically a valid alternative. (Although the potato incident was dumb for other reasons.)
People who you dislike rarely say the dumb things you think they did, as you'll address a quote out of context (or misrepresentation of that quote) from someone you like, but not from someone you don't. You're more than happy to assume people you don't like are retarded.
Re:OT: sig (Score:1, Insightful)
because computers are a tool for a job - if you need a dumbed down document editing terminal - just get that. I don't brag around asking for CNC lathe to be simple to use, who use them needs to have control over them.
so the question is why do people insist they need a computer? why they insist their computer to be "simple"? it's not simple, it will never be.
nasty things happens tho users which just use their pc without undesrstanding the basic principles of operating systems, most of the time is the same people which call over a literate friend to find out where they saved their documents which they somewhat have lost
and they insist blaming the computer! so they want a simpler one! why documents, image and desktop folders! simpler simpler! we don't want to lose our documents anymore, so let's add a simple indexer with a search functionality embedded in the start menu! lets mandate that files can be saved only on the desktop! so we the literate have to work with sub par systems for the enjoyment of those people, who never needed a computer in the first place!
I'm totally going to create a facebook group for simpler lathe, with only an "on" "off" switch
Re:Quality that lasts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus I don't think I've seen a whole lot of 5.25" USB floppy drives; 3.5" USB floppy drives are much more common. I think one would have to scavenge a 3.5" USB floppy to use it with a 5.25" drive.
It'd probably be best to take the floppy drive out of the old computer if he needs to try to recreate install discs using a newer computer.
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:1, Insightful)
So, basically Bill Gates said "I never said that 640k thing that people ridicule me with."
Well, that's good enough for me! After all, he couldn't possibly have gotten where he is today without being a very honest man!