Handbags   (The sad, the bad and the ugly. Non-productive stuff here.)

Recently, whilst moving stuff, got down to strata which had not seen the light of day for about three decades.

Found some interesting software which I no longer remembered I ever had: all vintage, circa 1980’s stuff.

Now, and here’s the rub: all of it on 5.25 inch floppy disks. Do you remember them? The generation prior to the plastic encased variety.

I did not expect the material to still be retrievable. Nevertheless, knew that I had the required device lurking amongst unused junk. Unearthed the required 5.25 inch drive. This had a very heavy degree of corrosion on the massive flywheel at base of drive spindle. Carefully cleaned with fibreglass brush, taking care not to get residue entering the mechanism. Crossed my fingers in hope that this had not had too great a deleterious effect on the balance of the flywheel.

Well, the drive groaned and grated, and squeaked all through its use, but nevertheless, read all the data without error. So, I now have it safely archived on my hard drive.

And, now for the ugly. They are all DOS programs.

Just can’t get DOS to install on the (home-brew) machine that I am using. (Not even when give its own low capacity IDE PATA drive.)

Have got MS DOS 5.0, & 6.22, DR DOS/Caldera and FreeDos 1.2.

It is perhaps no surprise that I can’t get DOS to install on a 64 bit, two core processor machine with SATA, USB PCIE, HDMI etc, but, I have had DOS installed on this machine in the past, and I do not recall having to do anything special to attain this. I only removed DOS from this machine in 2006.

The Caldera, and FreeDos are on CD, and although they will not install, both run fine if run as live disk, so none of the more advanced tech seems to be an impediment to DOS running per se.

I’ll have to unearth some Pentium 4 machines, and see if they fare any better.