Remembering "the good old days", DOS

[budbd]

Yeah, been having a yearning for the so called "good old days", back in the late 1980's when I got my first computers, having selected IBM compatible over Apple and commodore's, and the low software available Amiga 500.

I had a blast with my first machine, a Commodore Colt IBM XT clone 8088 microprocessor, with dual 5 1/4 drives, with only four color built in cga graphics. I eventually upgraded with the addition of one 3 1/2 720kb diskette drive with the other 5 1/4 drive, an ega 16 color card, onboard 640kb ram(alot of ram at that time allowing me to run most if not all programs)and a 10 mb hard drive, and an ega monitor capable of monocrhrome magenta or green or 16 color ega, DOS 3.3 and GW Basic 3.3
My second machine a year and a third later was a packard bell pre put together system, a 80286 with vga 256 color card preinstalled, rgb monitor for vga, total of 1mgb of ram, 40 megabyte hardrive, one 5 1/4 drive and one 3 1/2 1.44 mb drive(one of the first high density drives).

I enjoyed gaming and word processing, and had a 9 pin dot matrix printer. Joysticks were really garbage, the didn't last, and one time I put together a joystick from three broken joysticks that had rubber band centering of my design(bunch of rubber bands wrapped around joystick base in x and y axis)to replace broken spring/rubber disc centering.

Of course, I enjoyed alot of the 16 color games, that is all they needed, the vga games were good too, but most games didn't seem to benefit from the added vga, seemingly.

I was actually impressed with an acquaitance's tandy 1000hx, cause he had memory upgrades past the 256 kb orignal ram, I believe he had an external hard drive, and had a external 5 1/4 drive too. His DOS was built into the chips, but he also had a later bootable version of DOS I believe. His system was a all in one unit and wasn't very upgradeable, but heck, he paid alot less than I did, except the memory cost him dear.

Actually, I wouldn't mind getting an old 1000hx to play around with if it had extended memory, but I may just get an old 286 machine and some old games(I should have never sold my old stuff six years ago).

[Designer]

Thats a blast-from-the-past.

I remember when I was 14 having a 486DX 33MHz clock speed, 4MB RAM, 420 MB HDD and no CD-ROM or sound card. That was the first PC I built. Then added a sound card, and the CD-ROM connected via the sound card. Then I upgraded the graphics card to a 512K card and got 256 colours.

That brings back some memories.....

[TwoRails]

Sniff... snifff... brings a tear to the old eye... makes me wanta build a DOS box for the good old days

[toomyg]

A Packerd Bell
Intel 486 33 mhz
210 mb hard drive
4 mb ram
1 md video ram
2 speed cd drive (not sure of speed)

Windows 3.11 Dos 6.22

I know that back then you had to know your stuff or learn it to get on the internet

[budbd]

Back in the 1980's and early 90's(like 91), there was no internet, not that I had heard of at least and would have been able to use when I was overseas and in a rural location in the USA, except for government communications of course, they had some kind of internet.
Some people in the big cities used bbs bulletin boards, and I believe they phoned each other up via modem to transfer files or type to each other.

80486 computers were pretty new around 1991, and I had only heard of them so far.

[Designer]

Remember being flash becasue I had Windows for workgroups 3.11 not just standard 3.1, still remember using MS-DOS 5.

Out of interest (I think 95/98's got it) click start>run and type in "progman.exe" and you get windows 3.1 style program manager, also "dosshell" sort of the fore-runner of windows (not sure if that one works though)

[bailey]

loved my kaypro 2
cp/m before dos even came out
I could do as much on that as I can do on this one.

without graphics of course

then got a ibm xt with a 10 meg hard drive, that was heaven.
it even had two floppys 51/4.
DOS 2.0

[GaryRouth]

I really enjoyed Windows 3.11 - it ran so well on my 486/66 (with a motherboard that included the then-new PCI bus, which put an end to the VESA "Local Bus" chaos) - that I postponed going to Win95 for quite a while.

My dad and mom were the DOS experts in the family - doing the WordPerfect and 123 office work on a then-speedy 386.

Had an original IBM 286 with the 5 1/4 floppy drive as our first machine - (my wife's sister let us cut our computing teeth on that one). . . Doesn't seem so long ago!

. . . Gary

[noby]

Anybody used an ONTEL system?
It was a word processor 8086 based with 8"floppy drives
It originated from Ceasar's Palace I think

noby

[Designer]

The one good thing I remember about win 3.1 was i never encountered a BSOD.

And many a time fine-fettling HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE to get enough conventional memory (below 640K) to run a game

[toomyg]

How about those "GPF" errors from years past

[Designer]

If my memory serves me correctly General Protection Faults used to give a blue screen did they not?

[budbd]

I missed out on windos 3.1 and windos 95 cause I didn't have need for a newer computer till internet service was becoming commonly available in my rural area, about 1997-1998 of which you had only a choice between AOL, MSN, and two other services, 1998 being when I finally got me a newer P2 celeron. Ya know what, there are still alot of ISP services unavailable here in my rural location in Southern Oregon Coastal region.
Yeah, I had so many games/applications for my old 286, and had a real nice printer by that time and was real comfortable with Wordperfect 5.0 and Works word processor.
Yep, I had alot of great word processing programs, and with a newer printer that I got working with it, I was doing "Printshop" and all kinds of stuff, at least early 90's capable programs only.
I didn't feel left out till about 1998 when I was needing to really become internet savvy, and surely needed to use newer programs.
But, I had no interest in internet at that time before I got a new computer and internet, only printing and word processing and some flight simulator games.

By the time I got my P2 I was nearly expert with dos, having set up my own menu system, with exe commands, basically a point the mouse and click the directory then click the name, but black screen with words, sometimes with "Norton Uitilities screen menu system", kind of like windows.

[TeenPcknowit]

I love my windows 3.11. Lol. I have an old dell P1 that ran it from the box...we recently upgraded to win98SE! It runs fine!
Dos is what makes the world go round.........or the pretty OS you enjoy today....your pic. The problem know though is that it is becoming a security threat. I know a ba-jillion things a sick mind could do with dos....
I love DOS but it has to go sooner or later.

[dragonxx4]

I remember my first computer was an IBM XT 8086 4.75mhz
640k ram
10 meg HD
5 1/2in floppy
4 color cga gfx

I got it from my grandmother when i was about 13, she was upgrading to a 75mhz Packard Smell. I miss the good old days of DOS. I even managed to find a GUI for DOS that autoloaded from the autoexec.bat file. It was sweet. Had some old D&D games for it to. Think I still have them somewhere round here.

[edfair]

Yeah, and listening for the modem in the middle of the night when people would log in because long distance was cheaper then.
I'm still 90%+ DOS capable(6.22) of all the bootable partitions availble in the house. But no more rebooting 4 times a day to cure the memory leaks and GPFs cause now I can get the BSODs even more often.

[GerBa]

I remember way back getting an Atari 400 with 8 K of memory then an 800 which could hold two 16 mem cartridges as I recall. I could write simple graphics based programs for it but Atari basic was pretty limited it seemed. I then got a Comm. 64 because my brother had one and we wanted to work on some text based game programming and Comm. basic handled arrays much better than the Atari.
My first clone was a 256k machine with one 5 1/4 drive and I had to go to a buddy to get a copy of Dos 2.2 I think it was.
My first online experience was on BBSs. Then I got into Q-link with the Comm. This was the Comm. version of the apple program that eventualy became AOL I hear. I had a 300 baud modem and it was a long distance call so I had to restrict my time online to minutes at a time. The cost for any one of those machines was more than the entire system I have now .
I kinda don't think I want to go back to them though I do still have My old Comm 64 with the tape drive but I can't remember how to get it to boot . Sinility I guess.

[Designer]

I wonder if those old Commodore 64's will be worth some money one day, I've still got one, in the box never opened, still shrink wrapped

[budbd]

Originally posted by Designer I wonder if those old Commodore 64's will be worth some money one day, I've still got one, in the box never opened, still shrink wrapped

I have seen new, un opened in the box c 64's go as high as $20 on ebay. But, I am not sure that is really a high number.

Whenever I see a commodore amiga 500 for sale unopened and mint in the box, bidding goes all crazy like, going to $50 sometimes. I think the followers of Amigas are about as fanatical as Apple and Macintosh followers!

[Designer]

Well, maybe i'll give it about 40 years then maybe it'll be collectable

If i'm right didn't they have something like a 2MHz Z80 processor?

[toomyg]

My first computer I ever got was a Texas Instruments TI-994a
so long ago I can't remember the specs but I wrote afew games for it like hangman with graphics, tic tac toe and a space invader type game and some others. I tried to rewrite these games in q-basic but didn't work out I guess QB is to complicated for me

[budbd]

I might have been a little off on the value of a commodore 64 "mint and unopened", haha, I mean, who wouldn't want one who is interested in old computers. Could be a little higher in value.

I am trying to run an ad locally to get me an old computer Ibm compatible or cpm compatible just to play around with, but one small classifieds only local newspaper wouldn't run my ad unless I paid aa high commercial rate even though I just want one for personal uses.
Hopefully a second small neswpaper will run my ad. It is getting kind of rediculous around my local area when I would have to pay all kinds of money to get something old and obsolete that aint worth anything.

I wouldn't mind getting something off ebay, but the understandable shipping costs of $30 for main unit and lots more for monitors included really scares me, and prohibits me.

I don't know of a way to adapt an old computer vga or ega to my newer six year old monitor that is currently compatible with all new computers I know of.

ANYONE KNOW OF SUCH AN ADAPTOR FOR USING OLD 9 PIN OR SUCH GRAPHICS TO MY NEWER MONITOR? That sure would help if I had to buy something on ebay or elsewhere, by just having to by the main unit.
Too bad I sold my old 286 back when I got my PII, a complete system with bunches of original programs for $50, worked excellent, but hey, at least I got $50 for something totally obsolete by then(regret it now)

[Designer]

Anyone who had an old sinclair ZX**, Commodore 64 or Amstrad CPC464 will remeber this scenario.

Wasn't it great fun to sit there and type out over 500 lines in BASIC to make it play an octave. Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) and wasn't it just.

Half an hour to load a program from casette tape.

If you were very lucky and had the commodore you could get some programs on cartridge, I remember playing Robocop on mine and because the graphics wern't capable enough back then he didn't so much run as moonwalk the whole way through the level.

[TwoRails]

Weren't casettes fun? I had a Mattel "computer" that was a lot more than most people thought, but they couldn't see past the "toy" that the name Mattel conjures up. I had the cassette, a printer, and a 2MB expansion plug in (or was it 4MB?). I had fun with BASIC and programed a "partner" to practice against wihen I was playing competition darts back then.

[budbd]

BASIC never really interested me cause I knew it wasn't real programming, so I thought, cause I understood that programs used "machine language". Besides, the programs seemed too "basic" anyway.
A friend had a program that "looked into" a program and you could see the machine language. I forgot what we discussed how machine language is done, but it was all a bunch of symbols, and some wording.

[TwoRails]

BASIC was (is? I've been out of the biz for too long) a very powerful language. PICK basic was the COBOL of business BASIC. Many of the early talking systems (like, "Your balance is $1.00") were done in BASIC, and many ATM systems if I remember right.

[Designer]

BASIC was revolutionary for it's time. It could do anything (within reason) but it was tedious, especially when doing graphics or sound. It made it harder with the different syntax's used between machines, so programming something universal was a real pain.

[budbd]

Of interest, I bought a Tandy 1000 SX 8088 vintage computer for $2. Came with 5 1/4 and a 3 1/2, and inside I discovered it had a hard drive connected to card. I hooked up the RCA video out and audio out to my VCR and switched that to "Input" and was able to see the computer boot up, but after it shows 640 kb of ram, it goes through the bios, then says that the config.sys file is not present or is corrupted. AT least it came with a really decent tandy keyboard, and for a buck extra I got a tandy joystick(if I ever get to that point, haha). Mhz on this sytem would be 4 and 7 mhz, oh goody, blazing saddles speed.

I feel this is a good thing, maybe, cause maybe the hard drive still works, but just needs a config.sys or a complete format.
Haha, oh well, will try to get some actual Tandy Dos 3.2, and have read numerous sites about these computeres needing Deskmate 3.5 to optimize a hard drive.

Actually didn't even figure this had a hard drive, they originally didn't, but you had to upgrade with extra purchases ram from 384 kb to mnake it 640 kb, and I don't believe the 3 1/2 diskette drives were original equipment either.

This seems like one of the last mostly made in America computers, you should see the American flags stamped on the memory chips, though the other main processor chips have such stamps as "Korea", and "Phillipines".
Someone used this machine obviously for a business, cause there is something taped on it pertaining to Lotus 1 2 3.

If this actually worked, it is alot better than my first computer, a commodore colt 8088, but it got upgraded too back then with fancy graphics and hard drive too.

Worse come to worse, I got that fancy memory upgrade on this and that expansion card even if the hard drive was busted.

[Designer]

In reference to Budbd's post

All you've got to do is (using another PC with DOS/95/98/ME) run edit

and provided dos is installed to the directory "C:\DOS" type the following:

DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE


That will just load some memory management but you can expand on that when you get up and running.

Save is to floppy as Config.Sys and copy it to the other computer. Although it should still boot without a config.sys or autoexec.bat file, should go straight to command prompt.

[budbd]

I do have a copy of packard bell ms dos 3.2. Unfortunately, that is not"Tandy" dos 3.2.

I read somewhere that those tandy comptuers with "eproms" could get their eprom chip scrambled "back then" when someone would try to use dos version 6(likely for tandy). Mainly, I will just wait till Ihave the proper tandy dos.
I might just wait till I get some real tandy dos version 3.2, though, just so I don't screw anything up.

Basically, when it finishes with the bios reading, it stops at "no config. sys, and there is no prompt for me to see a directory, unfortunately, can't do anything else, at least unless I had drive a filled with tandy dos 3.2.