[Coco] Cable assistance

[Steven Hirsch]

On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, gene heskett wrote:

> Even that is of relatively little utility since I built this machine
> several years ago, as this $300 ASUS motherboard has an FDC that cannot
> deal with 256 byte sector disk formats regardless of what I tell it with
> setfdparm. (linux of course)

Gene,

You may want to keep your eyes open for an ancient ISA-bus motherboard 
that can boot Ye Olde version of Linux or MS-DOS.  I keep an early 90s 
Dell 486 around solely for the purpose of reading/writing floppy media. 
It's fitted with a Compaticard IV that can talk to 3.5, 5 and 8" floppy 
drives.  Install the free uSoft TCP/IP stack and a junk-box ISA ethernet 
adapter and you have the perfect "shop" machine.

It can also dual-boot (using LILO, remember that?) to Linux 2.0.something.

I dislike running anything with the uSoft name on it, but for utility 
purposes it's too handy to pass up.

Steve


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