How I spent my Sunday

Post #47,298 by Andrew Grygus 7/28/02 11:57:17 PM Reply	How I spent my Sunday I've been throwing out huge quantities of old stuff that "I'll never ever need again" to make some room so I can find actually useful stuff - but I still keep way too much because, you know, you just never know . . . Like today - I had to put an 8-MHz XT clone up on my network so I could burn an archive CD-ROM of it's contents. Oh, like I really want to do this . . . . So, I dig in my junk piles for an 8-bit XT floppy controller that can handle 1.44-Meg 3" drives. I remember months ago I was going to throw one away, but hesitated, and set it aside. There it is, under a pile of hard disks! Yeah, it's been rained on a couple times and has a lot of leaf debris on it - but - hey, look at that. It works! Next, to find an original Novel 8-bit NE1000 NIC - yup, there's box labeled "XT Network Cards". Now a coax cable, and a 10BaseT hub that does COAX too . . So next, we boot up and SYS the drive to DOS 6.22 so it can handle 1.44-Meg floppys and networking. Now we install NT client for DOS - goes on fine, but, guess what, it doesn't actually run on an XT. Delete to get space. Oooh, look! we still have a brand new Lantastic 7.0 package. Install Lantastic with NetBEUI support - goes on fine, but of course, it doesn't work because no NE1000 NDIS driver. Research time - but I've done this before many years ago and it's coming back - slowly. Oh yes, you get that off that NT client install disk, and then you edit some stuff. Edit the CONFIG.SYS, STARTNET.BAT and PROTOCOL.INI - and behold, it boots with no network errors. Type NET to bring up the network menu and go for server \\\\WOMBAT. Resources! Just XCOPY everything over to a directory on Womabat and burn the damned CD. Gosh, how I wish I'd just throw all this stuff away so I could say, "Nope, sorry, just can't do it" like everyone else does. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #47,314 by drewk 7/29/02 9:48:07 AM Reply	Aha! See that, you're just like them Gosh, how I wish I'd just throw all this stuff away so I could say, "Nope, sorry, just can't do it" like everyone else does. Compare to the sig below. === Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #47,368 by Andrew Grygus 7/29/02 2:00:36 PM Reply	Yeah, but . . . They do and I don't. I now have yet another box to shelve, labeled "XT Recovery Kit", complete with all necessities and a procedure sheet. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #47,376 by drewk 7/29/02 3:11:14 PM Reply	That's so ... so ... I don't know, that's just so something. Geeky? Anal? Help me out here, people. === Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #47,377 by Another Scott 7/29/02 3:16:31 PM Reply	Archival? :-)
Post #47,378 by drewk 7/29/02 3:23:37 PM Reply	Could be But whatever else it is, it's also definitely "more closet space than I've got." === Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #47,342 by boxley 7/29/02 11:59:37 AM Reply	Friday night went thru my pile logistics, 3 bedroom house furniture to be moved 233 miles away using 1 e150 van and one lincoln towncar. Went thru the 5 1/4 disks, out went a good vga 14in monitor, lots of other hard to replace "sniff" stuff. Saturday morning, van loaded for the first trip stopped to let off number 3 son to his friends. Garage sale next door, Sun Ultra 1 workstation $20 bucks, I guess Ill never change. thanx, bill ."Once, in the wilds of Afghanistan, I had to subsist on food and water for several weeks." W.C. Fields
Post #47,351 by Andrew Grygus 7/29/02 12:44:20 PM Reply	Only one monitor? I made the trash guys take 13 of 'em last week. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #47,352 by Another Scott 7/29/02 12:56:00 PM Reply	Cleaned out my in-law's attic... He had boxes of computer printouts from maniframe Fortran programs from around 1982. I almost expected to find rolls of teletype paper tape program listings. Somewhere at home I've got a 4" x 4" magnetic core circuit board from a PDP-8. Something like 1/3 of a 12-bit word x 256 bits. "What? You had magnetic core memory? Why in my day we had to use ...!" :-) Cheers, Scott.
Post #47,363 by drewk 7/29/02 1:42:46 PM Reply	Wish I'd snagged a box from the attic once While checking what was behind unmarked doors in the physics department at UVa, I found the stairs to the attic. There was one large room, about 15m by 30m, filled about waist-high with cardboard boxes in neat rows and stacks. I opened the nearest and found it to be full of punch cards. Checked a few more boxes at random and found more of the same. Wonder what they'd be worth on EBay? === Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #47,364 by Another Scott 7/29/02 1:48:14 PM Reply	My guess - about $50 per ton. ;-)
Post #47,362 by drewk 7/29/02 1:37:45 PM Reply	That makes sense, though After dropping off the son, you had room for the Sun. === Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #47,353 by pwhysall 7/29/02 1:04:15 PM Reply	Best thing I ever bought... ...was my HP D330 and Entria X-Terminal for twenty quid all in. The nuttiest thing I heard of was a friend of mine bought a Stratus mainframe off Ebay. All three racks of it. Total weight, some 450 pounds. From Ohio. He lives in Maryland. He said it bounced around a bit in the back of the truck, but the disks seem OK. Peter [link\|http://www.debian.org\|Shill For Hire] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Blog]

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