PCMCIA/CF flash cards as boot devices (was Re: Modern replica/implementation of a dumb terminal?)

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Nov 27 12:35:00 2002

--- Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org> wrote:
> Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I'm thinking more towards commodity laptops because they are much
> > more common...

> > The LX palmtops certainly qualify for an out-of-the-box
> > device that's easy to add a terminal emulator to.
>
> The 95LX/100LX/200LX have the terminal emulator in the ROM...

I didn't know that. The screen size is a limitation, of course.

Does it act like a tiny VT100 (ANSI escape sequences)? Is there a
UNIX termcap for it?

> If you want to go the commodity laptop route, I wonder if the easiest
> solution wouldn't be a flash device with an IDE connector. Just install
> it as the "disk drive" and put FreeDOS and your favorite MS-DOS terminal
> emulator. These things do turn up on eBay fairly regularly.

I have several adapters - 3.5" desktop (fits in a drive bay, takes a
full-sized PCMCIA card) and two models of CF adapters (mounts in place
of a 2.5" IDE drive). What I lack are enough CF or PCMCIA cards to
dedicate them to a task. I've been looking around for 2MB-4MB PCMCIA
flash cards for a couple of years now, and not finding them. There
must be a cache of them somewhere. They _used_ to be common for digital
cameras. I'd buy a dozen if they were cheap enough - I play with floppy-
based Linux routers. 2MB of flash is plenty for what I'm doing.

At the moment, I have 1 8MB CF card and a couple of 16MB CF cards. Plenty
of space, but I'd rather not lock them away for an indeterminate amount
of time.

Anyone know where to get a stack of low-capacity PCMCIA or CF cards? I'm
thinking in the $0.50-$1.00/MB price range (since 16MB cards can be had
for $10 retail).

-ethan



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Received on Wed Nov 27 2002 - 12:35:00 GMT

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