I set up a DOS computer today

Wat

Limp Gawd
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Jun 23, 2019
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Old piece of industrial equipment needed its programs reloaded. Power outage and on board battery hadn't been changed in years.

No one at work had kept any old software, but I still have totes of old stuff at home. I find my ibm pc dos 6.3 disks, win 95 CD, win 98 CD, ms dos 5.02 disks etc. I grab a bunch of unlabeled 3.5 floppies in case I need to copy the proprietary software to disk to install.

The crazy thing is, every single one of the 3.5 inch floppies was completely readable. They have sat untouched for 20 years. I didn't think any would work.
I also tried to read some CD-r 's I burned in the late 90s, all of them were good too.

I didn't treat any of this stuff with care, the all this stuff sat in a hot attic for a good 10 years.

Anyhow, if you are still holding on to old media, dont just assume it's no good. Someday you might need C:\>_
 
Ya, it can be crazy how resilient old tech can be. My last office still had 5.25" floppies that still worked. It almost made me want to load up dos on the old 8086 I had found and see if I could still remember qbasic lol. You have not lived until you have played monopoly in green monochrome from a floppy :)
 
Meh, all my old floppies grew mould on the magnetic surface and actually stuff the read/write heads of the drive if used, resulting in errors until you run 'clean' media through the drive a number of times.

Living is downloading Monopoly off a BBS using Punter and playing it on a C64 Breadbin.
 
Meh, all my old floppies grew mould on the magnetic surface and actually stuff the read/write heads of the drive if used, resulting in errors until you run 'clean' media through the drive a number of times.

Living is downloading Monopoly off a BBS using Punter and playing it on a C64 Breadbin.
Correction: Downloading titty pictures off a BBS (Boob Broadcast Service) :ROFLMAO:

To be honest in my C64 times I didn't know anyone who had a modem. We just copied C-tapes and floppies. Back then local phone tariffs were so high that joining a BBS for a few hours would have resulted in a hefty phone bill.
 
Correction: Downloading titty pictures off a BBS (Boob Broadcast Service) :ROFLMAO:

To be honest in my C64 times I didn't know anyone who had a modem. We just copied C-tapes and floppies. Back then local phone tariffs were so high that joining a BBS for a few hours would have resulted in a hefty phone bill.

I had ways around the phone charges... ;)

Such good days.
 
I had ways around the phone charges... ;)

Such good days.
What are you, Kevin Mitnick? :D
When I was remote dating my future wife I spent around 1000 FIM a month on phone bill from my 2000FIM monthly salary.
 
What are you, Kevin Mitnick? :D
When I was remote dating my future wife I spent around 1000 FIM a month on phone bill from my 2000FIM monthly salary.

Calling cards or access to a university system with an X.25 network and a PAD my friend! I don't know about Kevin Mitnick, but where I'm from we had some of the best hackers in the world in the day. Not that it was hard when obscurity was classed as security and service usernames and passwords were kept active after installing a system. Furthermore, most people had the same password as their username!
 
To be honest in my C64 times I didn't know anyone who had a modem. We just copied C-tapes and floppies. Back then local phone tariffs were so high that joining a BBS for a few hours would have resulted in a hefty phone bill.
Back when C64 was new (and I was a kid) my uncle used to send me a box of 5.25" floppies about once a month with like 10 or 15 games. Fun times.
 
Yeah I had a bunch of old floppys laying around. Had to dig out my 486 which was the only desktop or laptop that still had a 3.5 drive on it. Sure enough found some interesting stuff. Deleted a bunch of out of date garbage so I could recdycle the unused floppys. Amazing how well that old 25 year old desktop ran with its 64K plus a couple of megs of memory. Think it was still running Win 98.

As to your story. It's amazing what us old time computer guys will still have buried in the back of a storgatgfe drawer. Every once in a while that old gear comes in handy!
 
Now I challenge you to enable and tune expanded memory so you can play Ultima 7 with mouse, keyboard , midi, and sound effects. It was amazing to see a 256 color world come to life.
 
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Yeah I had a bunch of old floppys laying around. Had to dig out my 486 which was the only desktop or laptop that still had a 3.5 drive on it. Sure enough found some interesting stuff. Deleted a bunch of out of date garbage so I could recdycle the unused floppys. Amazing how well that old 25 year old desktop ran with its 64K plus a couple of megs of memory. Think it was still running Win 98.

As to your story. It's amazing what us old time computer guys will still have buried in the back of a storgatgfe drawer. Every once in a while that old gear comes in handy!
What? You mean I may one day have a use for my windows 98 CDs that are still in original packaging? Sadly I tossed all my dos disks (I know I had 5.xx and 6.22 uograde at some point) as they bit the dust a while ago. I think I tossed my windows 3.1&3.11 for workgroups as well as my NT 3.5 disks too. Oh well, I think I'm passed that chapter in my life anyways ;)
 
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