Old computers and the 'fun' they can be....
Moderator: Moderators
- kellys_eye
- Senior Member
- Posts: 12309
- Joined: Mon Mar 15, 2010 11:49 pm
- Location: Oban
- Has thanked: 357 times
- Been thanked: 1790 times
Old computers and the 'fun' they can be....
I've had a right faff of a time trying to boot a single board computer. OK, it's not your usual PC (even when compared to the older PCs you might have used).
The board in question is an ELAN-104NC, something I picked up on eBay a number of years ago and that has laid in the 'must get around to doing something with that' box in my workshop (it's a frikken big box!) The board is an all-in-one PC with a 486 processor running at 100MHz (no fan, no heatshink so SILENT ), 16Mb or RAM and 8Mb of SSD. Not a lot compared to todays PCs eh?
Anyway it boots from a 1.44" stiffie and here's where the fun begins. Of the only SEVEN disks I could find despite scouring the ends of the workshop and house, I couldn't get a single one to format The best I could do was 78% of the whole disk before it cr@pped out.
After an hour scouring the interweb I found a utility that wrote a DOS 6.22 boot file sequentially to the disk and it was small enough to fit without hitting the 78% limit I was faced with. So good so far.
The I dug out the smallest HDD I could find (10Gb) that I hooked up to a spare WinXP PC and booted that PC using the floppy to transfer the DOS system files to the 10Gb HD (after fdisk-ing the HDD to 2Gb partitions ).
After making up a 20-pin header to connect a VGA display I finally got the single board computer to boot. Success!
Then it was back to the WinXP machine to transfer a (legit) copy of Win95 - another gem from the 'too good to throw away box' - to a partition on the 10Gb disk, slap it back on the SBC and reboot to watch Win95 load in under 2 minutes!
Out of curiosity I navigated to the Windows 95 installed folder to discover the install was a total of 8Mb with another 22Mb in the Program Files folder for a TOTAL INSTALLED WINDOWS (95) disk space requirement of 30Mb
No wonder the frikken thing FLIES!!!!
When was the last time you loaded software that was under 100Mb, never mind an operating system of only 30Mb It makes me wonder why todays OS's (such as the win7 on my lappy) needs 15Gb (not including my Programs File folder )
Anyway I'm chuffed to have this SBC up and running but forgot how primitive DOS command line working was - I've yet to (re)discover the delights of Win95 and Visual Basic 5.0.
Anyone else into the older PCs and operating system? Compared to todays 'switch-on-and-go' systems the older OSes were hard work!
The board in question is an ELAN-104NC, something I picked up on eBay a number of years ago and that has laid in the 'must get around to doing something with that' box in my workshop (it's a frikken big box!) The board is an all-in-one PC with a 486 processor running at 100MHz (no fan, no heatshink so SILENT ), 16Mb or RAM and 8Mb of SSD. Not a lot compared to todays PCs eh?
Anyway it boots from a 1.44" stiffie and here's where the fun begins. Of the only SEVEN disks I could find despite scouring the ends of the workshop and house, I couldn't get a single one to format The best I could do was 78% of the whole disk before it cr@pped out.
After an hour scouring the interweb I found a utility that wrote a DOS 6.22 boot file sequentially to the disk and it was small enough to fit without hitting the 78% limit I was faced with. So good so far.
The I dug out the smallest HDD I could find (10Gb) that I hooked up to a spare WinXP PC and booted that PC using the floppy to transfer the DOS system files to the 10Gb HD (after fdisk-ing the HDD to 2Gb partitions ).
After making up a 20-pin header to connect a VGA display I finally got the single board computer to boot. Success!
Then it was back to the WinXP machine to transfer a (legit) copy of Win95 - another gem from the 'too good to throw away box' - to a partition on the 10Gb disk, slap it back on the SBC and reboot to watch Win95 load in under 2 minutes!
Out of curiosity I navigated to the Windows 95 installed folder to discover the install was a total of 8Mb with another 22Mb in the Program Files folder for a TOTAL INSTALLED WINDOWS (95) disk space requirement of 30Mb
No wonder the frikken thing FLIES!!!!
When was the last time you loaded software that was under 100Mb, never mind an operating system of only 30Mb It makes me wonder why todays OS's (such as the win7 on my lappy) needs 15Gb (not including my Programs File folder )
Anyway I'm chuffed to have this SBC up and running but forgot how primitive DOS command line working was - I've yet to (re)discover the delights of Win95 and Visual Basic 5.0.
Anyone else into the older PCs and operating system? Compared to todays 'switch-on-and-go' systems the older OSes were hard work!
Don't take it personally......