I remember that well. We used DESQView to run our BBS as well. It was only a single line system, but DESQView let us do other things on the computer without taking down the board.
Has anyone played with TriDOS? github.com/prokushev/tridos - it doesn’t look nearly as featured, but has the advantage of being open-source and I thought might be interesting for a project I have in mind.
Back in middle school my friends and I bought an ancient computer from a bank, a Singer 5800, IIRC. It ran on 240v so we had to unplug the dryer to use it. It had a built-in seat, with the tty, processor, memory, paper tape reader, and printer kinda wrapping around the operator’s seat. It even had a little section you could flip down to bridge the last gap, leaving you totally surrounded. It was a hoot and a half going through the 5’ higher stack of manuals and learning how to use and program it. Inside the memory cabinet, where the 4K of core memory lived, someone had velcroed a horseshoe magnet to the door, with “delete utility” written on it.
That’s awesome! I have a MicroVAX-II that hasn’t been powered up for about 20 years. I want to replace the power supplies and see if I can get it up and running at some point. Future project.
MicroVAX-II was the first “real” computer I ever used, professionally. It started me down the VMS road in the late 1980s. I didn’t pick up the One True Religion of Unix until 1998.
Finally had to take VMS (and COBOL) off my resume about 15 years ago to stop all the calls from desperate headhunters trying to keep ancient systems on life support.
oh the memories - I started with Commodore BASIC on the C-64. Second Basic (after 6502 Assembler) was AmigaBasic. Oh god, it was soooo slow. Scrolling though your code, you could watch the lines being printed. Finally I bought (!) GFA Basic - that was great! Probably spoiled my programming habits till now! :)
I bought Windows 95 on floppy disks when it first came out. I think it was 13 disks.
Microsoft used a special format for these floppies, called Distribution Media Format (DMF). It allowed them to fit 1.68MB onto each disk instead of the standard 1.44MB. I just went looking for information about that and found a web page that has not been changed since 1997:
If you have a machine with no current operating system on it that will not boot from a CD-ROM, you must use this method. Setup disks are a set of four disks that form a minimal installation of Windows 2000
I wasn’t aware there were CD-ROMs that you couldn’t boot from.
Booting from CD wasn’t a feature for at least a couple years after the drives because common. Usually you’d use a boot floppy that had drivers for the CD drive.
Back in the day, you needed a floppy drive to boot from a CD ROM (or a special reboot command). It wasn’t until a new BIOS firmware came out that allowed you to boot from CD ROM.
Windows 95 (by default) wasn’t CD bootable, you HAD to use a boot disk before you could use a CD for the rest. I think right after 95 came out the standard came out for CD booting. But before that OEM would make bootable CDs for their recovery media for 95.
I think at least some editions of Windows 98 couldn’t boot from the CD-ROM either but had a boot floppy with the drivers. I hit this problem recently when trying to set up a Windows 98 machine.
It’s nothing new. I remember doing this for fun about 16 years ago, putting a WinXP machine on the internet with no firewall and waiting. Even back then, it was immediately hammered by traffic and quickly started doing dubious things.
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