Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 18:56:38 -0500 (EST) From: "Paul O. Bartlett" To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Public Buying In-Reply-To: <39FB751A.9410.C349BD@localhost> Message-ID: X-PGP-keyid: 0xF383C8F9 X-PGP-fingerprint: E62D2E2C7BCD08CB B742A93726A91532 Organization: SmartNet Private Account MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: opendos AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Sun, 29 Oct 2000, Bob Jonkman wrote (excerpted here and there): > Is this your only computer? Uh, well, no. Buried in the closet and a drawer I still have a Kaypro 4 (CP/M), a Radio Shack Model 100, and a Zeos PocketPC (80C88, MS-DOS 5 in ROM, no disk drives, but I scrambled one of the memory cards a bit back). > If you have an old clunker ("Vintage > PC") lying about you could try an installation of DR-DOS on it to see > how it goes, and get yourself some experience in partition management > before trying to add a DR-DOS partition to your Windows box. More to the point, on a table gathering dust, I have a Tandy 2500 SX/20, one of the last machines Tandy sold under their own label. It is a 386sx/20Mhz with 5MB memory (non-expandable). I ran MS-DOS 5 on it, and it gave me very good service. I was still using it until a little over a year ago. It came with an original 85MB HD on it. I bought (and paid for the installation of) a second HD and managed to use DOS's FDISK to create two partitions on it as D: and E:. So I did accomplish at least that much. If I were to try to use Partition Magic, I might have to do a lot of fiddling around, as the old machine has no CD-ROM drive. However, your suggestion of experimenting on it is an excellent one. Thank you. (I live in a small apartment with two cats, so I would have to scrounge up some room and vacuum the cat hair to use it. :) ) > You need to make a risk analysis -- is the extra functionality of DR- > DOS worth the risk of damaging the stuff on the computer? If the > risk outweighs the benefits then hire someone to do it for you -- > that is, if the benefits outweigh the cost of hiring someone to do > the work... Again, good advice. Thanks. (Although I'm not sure just where I would hire somebody to do it for me. :) ) > > First I think I need to get a new modem, as what came with my box > > was apparently one of those cheesy "Winmodems." (BeOS would not > > use it, and somebody on a BeOS list called it a Winmodem.) > > Some WinModem manufactures (USR, aka 3Com) have come to realize that > Open Source is where it's at, and are releasing the programming specs > for the WinModems to the Open Source community. If I recall correctly (I might not), US Robotics is the only such modem that BeOS will use right out of the package. When I booted a trial version of BeOS, it *recognized* that I had such-and-such a modem installed in this-or-that location, but BeOS refused to use it. > > But beyond that, I do not want to play with the computer as an > > end in itself. > > Nothing wrong with that. But _some_ of us do! And I strongly defend your right to do so. In fact, I have enjoyed some of the historical posts here. -- Regards, Paul mailto:bartlett AT smart DOT net .......................................................... Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA Keyserver (0xF383C8F9) or WWW for PGP public key Home Page: http://www.smart.net/~bartlett