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?"
USB 5.25 Floppy (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been wanting one of these for years... they need to make one that's compatible with all systems, not just IBM Compatible. I wonder if one of the numerous C64 floppy adapters (that uses parallel) would let you write to IBM format.
For DOS, I'm pretty sure FreeDOS would work.
Dear God, why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess it must be the difference between ages that causes someone to think that a cruddy DOS machine is actually something worth bringing back up.
Me, I cut my teeth on Radio Shack Model 4 machines, quickly discovering how much more software I could run once I got Montezuma CP/M running on it and downloading public domain software from the local (multi-user) CP/M bulletin board system.
Once the actual PC came along, I think just about anyone who had run a CP/M system saw it for what it was: a crappy copy that took none of the good from CP/M and just about all of the bad, running on a machine that supported a bit more RAM (not 640K yet, RAM was way too expensive) and a slightly faster processor.
I'm sure users of any of several pre-PC architectures would feel the same way - that the PC came along and the party stopped, kind of like that kid everybody hated at school showing up to a (previously fun) private party with a few of his friends.
It's not that old... (Score:4, Interesting)
At work we have PC's much older than that, running manufacturing equipment. If any of them break down, I have a whole room full of old PC's that I could simply search for parts. Eventually we'll run out of parts (the equipment need ISA bus to operate), but at this rate, we're good for another 25 years or so.
Re:You already know where to go for disks.... (Score:2, Interesting)
CD ROM? on an XT/AT Compat?
You better get an 8-Bit SCSI card and compatible external drive. Oh. 512k RAM? There's no high memory to load the driver!
Re:Pimp tips ! (Score:2, Interesting)
Good One !!!!. I used a t1000 as a X terminal :), tcp/ip over the parallel port (whooping 40KBps) and a DOS X client (forgot the name of the software) worked like a charme and people freaked out to see Firefox running in monochrome on a old computer !
Re:Resurrected an old 386sx packard bell, never ag (Score:3, Interesting)
I had on old 386sx (didn't belong to me originally). I decided to try to make something out of it. I maxed out the ram, which meant buying VERY expensive cache chips (total cost >$80). At the end of the day, I had a very nice, very slow machine. The Oak video on it could do 800x600 at 256 colors, but that was all. Granted, for that time period, it was typical, but not something I would have purchased.
Given that people will pretty much give you their old P4 boxes nowadays, I don't think I'll ever go through this exercise again (I still have the machine btw).
I've been down this road many times before, myself...
I guess my favorite instance of this was an Everex 386-25 that I got in the mid 90s and used to play games from the early 90s. The thing had been stripped of its cache memory so I had to replace that - the fun thing about the machine was it had an 8-character alphanumeric display on the front of the machine... A little research and I found out how to write text to it.
It was fun but after a while it just starts to seem like a huge waste of time, money, and storage space. Consider: there's other old machines that actually offer unique experiences. Emulation can reproduce these machines but the effect isn't perfect. (For instance, emulation of the Commodore 64's sound chip is pretty good, but it's not quite like the real thing...) An old PC on the other hand... is pretty much just an old PC. There's not really anything you can get an old PC to do that you can't get a new PC to do for the same effect.
Re:My advice to you (Score:1, Interesting)
It doesn't always go like that.
I plugged in my Acorn A3000 (From around 1989) in the other day and was pleasantly surprised.
Instant boot (OS in rom chips), easy to use and consistent desktop and applications, and being able to run a DOS session at the same time on the inbuilt x86 PC card is pretty neat.
I thought it would be slower and clunkier after not using it for about five years, but it still felt quite quick. The only things that dated it were the refresh rate of the monitor and... well that's about all.
Not much has really changed over the last 20 years in the graphical desktop. In another 100 years, things will have changed so much that people probably won't be able to tell two old desktops like Acorn RISCOS or Microsoft Vista apart. (Apart from that the RISCOS has more chance of still working.)
Modern DOS will work (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless the system has some funky ROM (like Tandy used that locked in a specific OS) there's no reason not to use a modern DOS. I still have a working XT and 286, and they both run M$DOS 6.00 -- it's MUCH faster than the older versions and a lot more capable, and is extremely stable (my very busy 286 routinely ran for up to *two years* between reboots). M$DOS7 from Win9x is the same as M$DOS6 but adds FAT32 support, and would work just as well. I presume one of the free DOS replacements, like FreeDOS, would also work.
The standard MSCDEX and Mouse drivers (v8.20 is best) should also work. You can get USB-to-some-other-port gadgets -- try cablenbits.com or tekgems.com, both are reliable vendors and carry all manner of oddball connectors and adapters.
What was the question again? :)
Re:OT: sig (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sad Joke... (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually liked the "known unknowns" vs. "unknown unknowns" speech. It made perfect sense to me, and I can think of a lot of stuff in my work that it applies to.
For example:
Setting up the test environment is a "known known"-- I know it needs to be done, and I know exactly how long it'll take.
Implementing my project is a "known unknown"-- I know it needs to be done, but I don't know how long exactly it will take.
On the other hand, a scope change from the client is an "unknown unknown"-- I don't know if it will happen or not, so I don't even know if I need to worry about it, much less how long it'll take.
I dunno, maybe I'm a freak, but it all makes sense to me.
Re:My advice to you (Score:3, Interesting)
Hm. I've got an Equity I and I+ (with HD!). Maybe we should start a group...
Much like you said, I've got collections of old systems myself, and while some are significant in a universal way - an Osborne portable, for example - most are only significant to me.
The Equity I+ has actually seen some use, along with a Tandy almost-PC-compatible that my kids used to play Wheel of Fortune on a couple years ago. While they're nothing special, they are the oldest PC systems I have in working order, and I never had much PC experience until Win95 days. The PC XT and Dell XT clone I have were both given to me already pulled for parts, and I haven't scrounged up the stuff to make them whole again, although they are the more "important" systems.
So far just about every generic 2/3/486 I've come across has gone off for scrap, though.
Re:5.25" floppy disk drives (Score:3, Interesting)
No. the 286 and 386 are very different CPUs and the linux kernel cannot be compiled for it.
The full kernel, probably not, but there are things like the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS) [sourceforge.net] that support Intel 8086 and 80286 CPUs.