All posts by johnclute

Looking for a Dos Emulator

A Tale of some Diskettes

Well it started off as a simple task, get some data, well as most things go, it is never that simple, this the adventure I had getting some data off of some 5.25″ disks.


  
There are times when clutter is a bad thing, such as a litter box, clutter in there is horrible.  Unfortunately, there are times when when my wife and I disagree about it’s definition,  bad clutter to me is Oreo cookies cluttering the kitchen. My wife, she thinks extra computers and computer stuff associated with them is bad clutter.  So with me wanting to sell these diskettes is really a clutter issue, to make things no so bad I must tell my self it is really about buying a PS3.

Remember when you actually had fun doing computing?  When you actually had to do something to get the computer to work.  When if you wanted a printer driver, you had to program it.  Well found something exciting, when I was looking at ways of getting clutter out of my life, around my office found these relatively old disks, great for older systems, the ones you haven’t wanted to throw away.  The ones that bring back the memories of being a geek, when being a geek was actually cool.

Surprisingly, I was about to throw them out when a friend of mine stopped me, by saying, “Wow dude, do you know what you have there?”.  Of course, they are my old disks, clutter, he then suggested, these are the ones you want to use for older system, such as Commodore computers, IBM PC’s, 80286, and 86’s in general, and also that I should sell them on eBay.  These are worth a fortune and you would be mad just to through them out.  Well he has several old computers him self and he may have a point.  The disks I’m selling are 5 1/4 size 360k, these are not the ones you want to use when backing up your current system.  There are not enough in the world to do that, for anybody, period.  


Well, getting the data off of them was actually more work then I thought it would be.  Surprisingly finding a computer to read them was quite a chore, I couldn’t find one.  I either gave them away or sold them, on eBay, ironically.   Sadly my wife didn’t want the clutter in the house.  Well, going around to used computer stores, looking for an older system, like an old 286, 386, or even a 486, couldn’t find anything.  One store suggested that they could sell me a old pentium 2 and put the 5 1/4 in it.  Actually thought about it, then reconsidered.  It just wasn’t worth it, my wife would have a cow and I would have to get rid of it eventually.  So there was no point.  Then when I was about to give all hope, my wife comes through she suggested that I talk to my older brother, he never throws anything out, he has an whole basement to prove it.  Well, he had one, yeah….. 



I bring it home, it is an old pentium, the ones that weigh at least 50 lb., because of all the old hardware, and he has it loaded to gills with stuff.  Old network cards, sounds cards, everything.  Well I set it up in my office.  I chose not to bring the monitor, that would be more weight then I wanted to carry, I have a flatscreen, it worked just fine.   Well I start to read the diskettes, nothing, they are getting errors like crazy. After spending a hour going through a lot of them I was about to give up, throw the whole lot away.  The next day, after doing some google searches it hit me, this is an old disk drive and probably the heads are dirty.  So after getting out the rubbing alcohol and a q-tip, I cleaned the heads.  Tad-a, it worked, the disks started to read and the data looked really good.   


Now I start to coping the data off the disks.  I create a directory on the hard drive, don’t want to mess up anything on his system, you don’t know when he actually might use it.  In this new directory I create a directory, name it uniquely, giving a useful name.  Something that will let me know what is on the disk.  Then using a dos command, I copy drive B to this directory.  Great it work.  Data integrity is great, all looks good.  I do another disk.  Do the same thing.  Ok, then another.  Then I look over, I have a whole pile to do.  This sucks, this will take forever.  This is not going to be fun, so why not write a batch file to do this.  Not a good idea, batch programming sucks.  You can’t do anything with it.  So then I remember I have turbo pascal.  I load that baby on.  I’m good to go.  However, I forgot a lot of my turbo pascal programming, it has been over 10 years since I touched it.  Luckily for me I had an old turbo pascal book, because, the manuals that came with it are gone,  they got tossed, again it was a clutter issue.  Ok bygones, I quickly got up to speed on pascal, an evening, and I got a little program written that copies the disks from the B drive, to a Directory it names and creates.  Also it prompts you for a starting number so that it can be unique, the last thing I want to do is copy everything over to the same directory overwriting very thing I did.  Which I did earlier.  We are good to go, I copy everything over it takes hardly any time.  


All the data is saved on the hard drive, GREAT!  Now I have to get them off the computer, I hook up the network, connect it to my router, this should be quick.  No connect.  Great, I need to configure Windows 95 tcp/ip.  Oh great it doesn’t have networking, that module was not loaded.  And my version of 95 got tossed too, again the clutter issue.  Then I tried using a live version of Linux, the computer wouldn’t boot off of the cd-rom.  I also thought of burn diskette data on the the Cd-Rom, couldn’t it was a reader only.  Then I started to look for a usb port.  Nothing, this computer was built before USB’s where even an idea, wonderful.



I have an old hard drive, copy the contents from the hard drive over to it. Then I can get an IDE Enclosure, copy it over to my new computer.  Got the contents over to my hard drive.  I started to look for an enclosure, found some, but would have to buy it.  For some reason, it was not worth it to me to buy an enclosure for a 500 meg hard drive.  Not when USB drive hold lots more then that.  So then I remember a friend of mine told me about his enclosure and was willing to let me use it.  

The big day, we are going to copy the data over.  He came over, and we got his old drive out of there and put mine into the enclosure case.  I hook it up to my computer, look to see if the system recognized the new hard drive, still looking, the led is displaying red, not working.  The computer doesn’t see it.  Great, so we decide to test to see if it is the enclosure, we put his old hard drive back in and hook it up the my computer, it works. Put my hard drive in, again not working.  Oh wonderful, his hard drive works but mine doesn’t, now what.  If only I had my data on his hard drive it would be a breeze to copy it over to the computer.  Then he suggested, why not copy the data over from that my hard drive over  to his hard drive and we can copy that over to my computer.  BRILLIANT, I quickly copy the data over, and bam it is on my mac.  

All this time, I’m telling people what I’m doing, one friend is an accountant, she is asking why am I doing this.  I’m telling her so I can sell these disks on eBay.  She then starts to do some mental calculations, then asks, again why am i doing this.  I tell her, because,  and try to leave it at that.  So she asks me some other questions about what I’m doing, then finally frustrated, just says good luck. I don’t think she is getting why am I trying to copy old Dos programs on to my Mac.  I don’t think my wife is getting it either.  However, my computer friends they somewhat get it.  History, this is data from the past and I want to keep it and remember it.  Also they have some old games and programs I don’t’ want to lose.




Wow, I just impressed my self.

I was goofing off the other day, actually I was thinking of submitting a picture I drew a couple of years ago, to a tee shirt company.  And I was able to create the following picture.

 It was kind of funny, but all I used was my MacBook, it’s built in webcam, a little time, and a few free programs from apple.

First I took the following picture with photo booth.

Then I enhanced it with Iphoto,

Cleaned it up with paintbrush from the apple site.  However, when I tried to look at again after saving it as a jpeg, Iphoto would not look at it.  So I had to add one more step.

Viewed it with preview where I was able to save it into a format that Iphoto could look at it again.

One of the things iphoto does is it automatically posted it into my facebook account.

Here are some of the other iterations of the same pic.

Dos 3.1 doesn’t come with an editor!?!

When I bought my first computer, a an IBM XT clone with a hercules monitor and 20 meg hard drive,

man that was a great computer.  The first thing I wanted to do with it besides play games, was to program it, then, I quickly found out that I couldn’t. It didn’t have a Text Editor, nor BASIC, nor a language I know how to program for that fact.  However, it did have edlin, it is usable, but it is like getting kick in the groin with a pair of high heeled shoes, some people like it, and I wasn’t interested in finding out what that was like,  using edlin was pain enough for me.  I did learn eventually there was another way to enter code into a file, that was by using the copy con command. Where you could pretend you had a full screen editor.  It actually wasn’t a bad option, if I wanted to enter something in quick, it would do.  However, by that time I paid for another text editor, Qedit, and was programming in Turbo Pascal, so it’s IDE was available when I wrote Pascal programs, by this time I was starting to actually buy software, so this was a legit copy.

Eventually I started to buy more software, and ended up getting Dos 5 upgrade.   Even though DOS 3.1 was a decent little system, I found that DOS 5 was better,  one it had manuals; and learned what actually came with it, such as it’s own built in text editor and it had it’s own version of Basic.  Unfortunately I played that Gorilla banana throwing game for way too many hours.

Personally I preferred Qedit.  It had a few features that made coding a little easier, such as using macros, this was a handy feature that I learned about those when I was working on Vax Systems using the EVE editor.  Macros are great, you didn’t have to do alot of the same command over and over.  Eventually as time rolled on, I was exposed to other text editors,  like brief.

However, for that brief period moment of time, all time seemed to stop, you didn’t have to worry about keeping up with some new program or computer, if you wanted a new program, you usually wrote what you needed.  Dos at the time was simple and straightforward, it wasn’t perfect, nothing is.  What I did learn and enjoyed from that time; except how to take a whole evening to learn how C pointers work; is that what ever you have, if you are willing to work at it, you can always make it work the way you want.   You have to be creative and the only thing that stops you, is your imagination.  It is a good thing to remember.

What a kind of power do I have in my Laptop.

Ok, So I have this computer, which if you think about it is nothing more then a glorified word processor.  Be cause that is all we do with them is either surf the web, write blogs/emails, play games, or just watch/listen to some kind of media on them.  Now if you think about it is kind of sad.  The computers of today; laptops or Desktops can do so much more then that.  If all you really wanted to do that, in reality all you would really need is an old IBM PC,  IBM pc article,.  Add a Hercules video monochrome board, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card you could actually have a pretty decent display, 16 different shades of grey.

Ok, you probably couldn’t get that great of sound out of it so get a Commodore computer, it would do all that you need to do.  And it also had 16 bit color.
http://www.c64.com/

That in its self is kind of sad too.  Considering that a Cray 2 computer from the 1985 did 3.9  was clocked doing 3.9 GigaFlops, (billion floating point instructions per seco

So, I got to thinking, what can a MacBook really do, what kind of power do I have available to me?  So I started to look, first of all I was curious what kind of actual flops can it perform? unfortunately,  I got articles about will the mac flop, flop weekly etc.  then I added gigaflops, then I got a bunch of links to Macbook Pro…. Hmmm, this is not what I was looking.  So, I’m doing searches on the duo core processor, which of course I don’t what model it is. Ok after looking at the Apple website for macbook 13, it has a 2.26 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, dang, that is actually pretty impressive.
Looking at the intel site, http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/cs-023143.htm
I found the following information about my processor,

Processor Number Cache L2 Bus Speed Clock Speed CTP in MTOPS GFLOPS APP in WT
1 Way 2 Way 4 Way
P8400 3MB 1066 MHz 2.26 GHz 35407 18.08 0.005424 0.010848 0.021696

SP9300 6 MB 1066 MHz 2.26 GHz 35407 18.08 0.005424 0.010848 0.021696
Q9100 12 MB 1066 MHz 2.26 GHz 68553 36.16 0.010848 0.021696 0.043392


The number I was really interested in was associated with Gflops, (gigaflops)  Billions of floating point instructions per second.  The sixth column, it can do well over 5 times the processing power of a super computer of the 80’s.  Those are the computers Nasa would use to put men into space or map out the Mars’ Terrain.

 Ok, now I’m really curious, so what can it really do in bench marks :D.  My first search, pay dirt, I found a product Xbench, http://www.xbench.com.  After a quick download and install.  Found out that my processor can do about 3.05 Gflops, ok not 36.16, however I do have several apps open at the same time.  That might account for the system drag…  Ok not that much, however, looking at what it can do is still pretty good.  So this means to me, I probably could get an app to map the terrain on mars and feel pretty confident that my lap top is up to the task.

Thanks
John

My starting pages

Recently, I have become a proud owner of a Apple Mac.  So now what do I do?  Opposite of what you may think I’m not new to computers, I’ve been around them for a few years, since the 70s’.  Having seen the world go from not having a computer in a home to where most homes have one and sometimes several more then one.  Also I have owned several computer too.  However, I now have this new computer, it is newer operation system, and in a geeky sort of way it is a new adventure of learning how do something now.