Well, that was a waste of time. Anything before woody is going to be a waste of time, actually, because nothing but Virtual PC can emulate a 1990s-era VGA card properly...they all expect you to use VESA, which has only been supported properly in XFree86 since version 4.0. I'm going to need an actual PC of the era to continue. x.x
I decided to try FreeBSD 2.0.5 in QEMU again. The video may not work properly, but at least I cna get it installed there without having to locate an old NE2000 or 3C509!
Something I noticed a while back about old (pre-2000) Quantum drives is that they had both a marketing name, and an internal two-letter family identifier (which was short for a codename). I managed to figure some of them out:
LPS 120/240: Gemini (GM)
ELS family: Pisces (PI)
LPS 270 series: (TB) (Turbo? Thunderball? dunno)
Maverick series: (MV)
Pioneer SG series: (SG) (Sagittarius?)
Fireball 540/1080/640/1280: (FB)
Fireball TM: Tempest (TM)
Fireball SE: (SE) (no idea)
Fireball ST: Stratus (ST)
After this, things get fuzzy as I simply didn't see a lot of new Quantum stuff after 1997-1998. Then they merged with Maxtor in 2000, and everything they made from 2001-2006 was essentially Quantum logic reformatted for Maxtor's production lines.
I'm playing with the old Dell on the bench some more, and I finally did what I've been threatening and installed Debian on it (after putting the 4 HDDs in the thing on the faster LSI SAS RAID). The only stumbling block so far has been the XGI video, again, which is no longer supported by Debian and only works in slow-ass VESA mode. :P
The NVIDIA PCI card still won't POST, but it magically works once Linux starts because Nouveau can boot the card and start the console. So now I have much faster video, and rdesktop is no longer a nightmare. XD
I have a Barracuda 7200.8 200 GB on my desk, and I notice the chassis has "TONKA" molded into it. If they mean "Minnetonka", then I wonder how much of this thing was designed at what used to be MPI in Minneapolis.
IJBM: Googling for old cash registers turns up tons of antique mechanical Nationals and such, but early digital stuff like DTS and FasFax and Par and those huge white things a few fast food places used (and even early digital NCRs!) are nearly impossible to find.
There's sort of an "old, but not classic" hole that stuff falls into where it's not new enough or old enough to be interesting for most people. I suspect these fall into that hole right now.
It seems "Comtrex" was an early point-of-sale specialist that concentrated on dining applications, kind of like FasFax or Micros. Their trademark is dead and was never reassigned, which I'm assuming means they're long out of business; a company in the UK is using the name, but I don't know if they're related. Also, they share their name with a cold medicine, which makes them hard to search for. :P
In other news, I did a build for a PC here that used an MSI MicroATX board that's actually a little smaller than MicroATX. It reminds me of those teensy 386 boards Biostar and *cough*PCChips*cough* made back in the day.
When I went to college the graphics terminals were all sun3s in my first year, except for one room of early sun4 IPX. All running SunOS 4. So basically BSD.
Oh, and rooms of dumb terminals. Some nicer than others.
When I started there in 1995, Virginia Tech had just gotten in a whole load of IBM Pentium PCs to (eventually) replace the hordes of old MIPS and Alpha DECstations they had. This was in the computer labs at McBryde, where they didn't have to co-exist with much else (maybe the odd machine running NEXTSTEP or MacBSD).
Outside the CS building, things got weirder. There were a lot of bizarre old terminals there, still in use...I swear I saw a DEC VT-220 the first day I was there, and there were old Hazeltine glass-ttys and TeleVideo 925s and 950s all over the place in the library. I even spotted an old IBM PC being used as a terminal in one of the humanities buildings.
And somewhere on campus, there was a whole room of VT420s or some such...fairly modern DEC terminals. I never did get to try sixels or ReGIS on them, though.
DEC Ultrix workstations are why I am fluent in ed(1), the line editor with the universal error message '?'. "The skilled user can normally determine what went wrong."
If they die in boot they do not have a cursor-addressable terminal on the console. No vi, no emacs, just ed, or if you're really lucky ex. But that's on a different partition so you may not have that, so ed it is.
yeah, basically the same idea though IIRC EDLIN was actually more full-featured than ed(1).
Of course, real MSDOS hackers wrote things in DEBUG. And real support engineers rebuilt peoples' systems over the phone by telling them what to do in DEBUG. A co-worker of mine rebuilt someone's boot sectors that way.
I've been using FreeBSD on and off since 1995, though I switched to Windows and eventually Linux because BSD kind of fell behind after, oh, 2005 or so. Things seem to be improving in BSD-land now, though.
Also, I've always wanted to play with DSPs (especially for audio stuff), but the price for a devel kit has always put me off. I'm wondering if it might be easier to just do that sort of thing on the lappy these days.
Argh, reading an old book from the mid-1990s about hard drives, and guess what: The author is a SCSI snob. :P
I liked SCSI, but I haaaaaaaaaaaated SCSI snobs. Sure, SCSI did better on certain things, but only if you had the most expensive card (a 1542 or pretty much anything PCI; PIO-only cards were worse than IDE, seriously), and need I remind people of the pain in the ass that was proper cabling and termination, at least before LVD SCSI required active termination?
This guy was complaining, practically lamenting that CD-ROM makers were "copying" SCSI to make ATAPI drives. Cry me a river, dickweed. USB and Ultra ATA kicked SCSI to the curb, and then SATA ate it and absorbed its powers like Kirby. Deal With It.
Also, it looks like that particular book may have been some sort of internal cheat sheet that someone had the bright idea to publish as an actual book. The writing is way too casual (it makes a ...for Dummies book seem forthright), there are uncaught typos everywhere, and I'm preeeeetty sure the drive specifications may have been nicked from a pre-existing source like TheRef or Micro House (I seriously doubt they would have tracked down the data sheets for the really rare stuff).
The old Radio Shack that actually sold parts and such was so much cooler than the strange hybrid of Best Buy and The Sharper Image it wanted to be through the 1990s and 2000s. (Yeah, yeah, Radio Shack still sells parts and tools, but not nearly as many as they used to, and they don't like talking about it anymore.)
It was pretty much over when they dumped the 1974 word mark. Seriously.
Speaking of Radio Shack, I decided to use the catalogs to answer a question I've had for a while: How long has the CR2032 been around? It turns out Radio Shack has been selling it since September 30, 1982, so I imagine 1980-1981.
And I gave up on that and decided to see how long it takes on the lappy. (Answer: with MAKE_JOBS=4, about 2 hours from no packages to fully installed.)
Oh, and I'm reading Linux Today because I'm bored, and OMG INIT FREEDOM LOLOL damn is that still an issue >.<
OH well. I can pull out the G5 tomorrow while I'm waiting for my package, and see if having a 1.8 GHz processor instead of a 700 MHz processor helps. x.x
I used to be able to identify them by sound, or at least by startup sound. These days, they're quiet enough that there's no point, and besides, you can just go to Device Manager or use dmesg anyway...on old DOS or Windows 9x machines, you couldn't do that.
SO I'm playing around on the G3 again, and as a reminder, here's what I'm up against:
This machine, while definitely OK by 1997 standards (indeed, it deserved at lot better than Mac OS 7.5, but Apple needed more time to fix that), is objectively not fast. The IDE is MWDMA2 at a blistering 16.6 MB/s (no Ultra DMA and definitely no SATA without a card), and the on-board video can be coaxed into doing 1366x768, though it's not happy about it. The G3/266 is really not up to the task of handling today's JavaScript-heavy Web applications---it's having trouble just keeping up with me typing this---but bless its heart, it's trying. It's certainly doing better in Linux than it would be in Mac OS!
All that said, Linux does work pretty well once you expand the memory. LXDE looks and works quite well. Iceweasel is probably the heaviest application I'll ever ask this machine to run (it would take this thing days to compile anything really big, though if I wanted something like GIMP, I could always apt-get it).
Well, there's no proprietary driver for PowerPC, and Nouveau only seems to work on newer machines...no one seems to want to put in the effort on old G4s. So right now, I'm stuck with the Open Firmware console and 256 brilliant colors. :P
Comments
rdesktopis no longer a nightmare. XDIt was pretty much over when they dumped the 1974 word mark. Seriously.
This machine, while definitely OK by 1997 standards (indeed, it deserved at lot better than Mac OS 7.5, but Apple needed more time to fix that), is objectively not fast. The IDE is MWDMA2 at a blistering 16.6 MB/s (no Ultra DMA and definitely no SATA without a card), and the on-board video can be coaxed into doing 1366x768, though it's not happy about it. The G3/266 is really not up to the task of handling today's JavaScript-heavy Web applications---it's having trouble just keeping up with me typing this---but bless its heart, it's trying. It's certainly doing better in Linux than it would be in Mac OS!
All that said, Linux does work pretty well once you expand the memory. LXDE looks and works quite well. Iceweasel is probably the heaviest application I'll ever ask this machine to run (it would take this thing days to compile anything really big, though if I wanted something like GIMP, I could always apt-get it).