[Coco] Cable assistance

[gene heskett]

On Saturday, February 19, 2011 11:32:50 am Steven Hirsch did opine:

> On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, gene heskett wrote:
> > On Saturday, February 19, 2011 09:30:31 am Steven Hirsch did opine:
> >> 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
> > 
> > I have such a box, has RH7.3 on it IIRC.  But getting to it to hook up
> > a monitor and keyboard & mouse, all ps2 stuff as its USB is only
> > partially usable, and that only after it is booted.  I need to clear
> > it out from under the old desk and maybe put that mobo in a smaller
> > box.  That one is an industrial sized steel tower about 32" tall &
> > weighs about 30 pounds empty.  It has a 450 mhz K6-II in it and 384
> > megs of ram.  A monster, in its day. :)  Hasn't been powered up since
> > I put DD-WRT on a similar but much smaller box, using it for a
> > router.  Up till then, it was my firewall/gateway machine.  A
> > whopping big 42 gig hard drive.
> 
> I keep a pile of IBM Type M keyboards in the garage loft for just such
> purposes.  In fact, I use them on everything - though a PS/2 to USB
> adapter when necessary.  Just cannot touch-type accurately on anything
> else, since I learned to type on a selectric (dates me, I guess).

Thats 30 years newer than my mothers old Remington.
 
> > I have got to clean house in my man cave.  Just as soon as I find a
> > good pattern to carve me and few friends on this list, a batch of
> > round tuit's.
 
> Tell me about it...  In recent years, I've started ridding myself of the
> large, heavy classic items and have actually scraped down through
> several archeological strata in the process.  My Corvus networking and
> computer gear finally surfaced and I've been bringing my Omninet
> network back to life.  Have Apple 2, 3, Macs and PC talking to it.
> 
> Someone on the list has a couple of CoCo Omninet interface prototypes,
> but I haven't been able to convince him to part with them.  My pipe
> dream is to write or reverse-engineer a driver to get the CoCo online.
> 
> Steve

Chuckle, rotsa ruck there Steve.  Now they just passed some new rule over 
at the landfill and I can't even get rid of some old glass monitors.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
<http://tinyurl.com/ddg5bz>
Out of sight is out of mind.
		-- Arthur Clough