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Yesteryears!
by By Joe Sherry —NOCCC, flaginfo@bigfoot.com - February 22, 2001 at 13:57:05:
Lets go back to the days of yesteryears. Think about DOS 3.2! Actually, percentage wise, considering my age and life experiences, it wasn’t that long agoAs many of you know, the past several years my activities have included fixing-up (remanufacturing actually) old computers for low-income families. Well, last night a phone call came in from a lady in Oregon. Though there was great difficulty understanding her “English,” it was finally determined that she had a very old computer (how old? IBM XT - w/8088 Model 5051!!!) and “it wouldn’t start”
She remembered me and had my phone number from when she was in Orange County years ago. What she wanted, as she explained, was a program to start her computer and a program to write letters like she used to do when she first got the computer (purchased in the early ’80s). She also asked if she could get some blank diskettes.
Our conversation fascinated me, although it took many questions to finally figure out want she actually needed. My mind went back to the requirements of a 5051 XT.
She probably had a 5 1/4 floppy drive using a 360kb diskette. The unit may or may not have had a hard drive. It was decided to assume it just had two floppy drives.
Remembering that the older 360kb drives often had the peculiarity that unless the diskette had been formatted on the same type of drive it probably wouldn’t be read, my search started for an already formatted 360kb diskette and/or an old computer in my warehouse that had a 360kb drive and a small hard drive.
After a while, a WYSE boot diskette was located under a “pile.” It was DOS3.2. Then a Compaq portable 286AT was found that had a 20mb hard drive and a 360kb floppy drive. The unit would not boot up from the C: drive but it would boot from the floppy. However, after booting, I realized that the C: wasn’t being recognized and I wasn’t in the mood to start a troubleshooting procedure on a 286!
Luckily, my ancient storage bin had some 5 1/4 “ diskettes which had already been formatted for use on the older floppy drives. Going to my trusty Pentium with both a 3 1/2 and a 5 1/4 floppy drives, and with the ability to go into the setup and switch which was to be the A: drive, the WYSE 5 1/4 disk was used to boot and a 720k 3-1/2” diskette was then “sys-ed.”
The CMOS was then switched making the 5-1/4 the A: and the new “sys-ed” floppy the boot up. No good! Then remembering that “way back then” it was necessary to copy the command.com to the newly “sys-ed” floppy disk, the drives were again switched, command.com copied to the 5 1/4 and then switched back, and it booted up successfully.
Now it was necessary to search for a word processor to fit on the 360kb drive. Hooray for good old reliable PCWrite Ver.3.01!! It is still a great DOS program for word processing.
So the two boot diskettes and the PCWrite diskette and five blank formatted diskettes were on their way to that lucky lady. Now I hope she can figure out what to do with it all!
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