Old DOS on topic yet?

From: Zane H. Healy <healyzh_at_aracnet.com>
Date: Thu Sep 25 21:33:16 2003

> Well, fun-ness for me is defined as am I being paid to do this thing or
> am I just doing cause I want to. I will probably want just some sort of
> telnet on it. I could just serial port it to the Linux machine and
> use a Terminal emulator of some sort I suppose.
>
> What I would really like to do is build up a single floppy (or two
> floppy)
> Linux that had vi and perl or python. Classiccomp is the wrong place to
> bark up that tree though.

OK, since it does in fact have PCMCIA, I'm going to *assume* that it's at
least a 386sx, which means it can run Linux. I don't know how big Python
is, but I'm going to guess you're not going to fit it onto a Linux floppy.

It might actually make sense to run a *old* version of Linux. I can't
remember when it got PCMCIA support (networking was around June of '92 as I
recall). I do remember getting a PCMCIA SCSI card (and maybe modem) working
in '95 or '96 under Linux. Do a Google search on floppy based Linux
installs, there are a couple of cool things out there for doing them.

I think I'd personally try to fit PC/TCP (I was lucky enough to get a brand
new copy recently that I'm not about to part with) on an MS-DOS floppy. You
can easily do a second bootable floppy with several different terminal
emulators on it. You know, you're making me tempted to break out the P166
IBM Thinkpad I've got that I've been threatening to load MS-DOS onto. I've
even got a copy of Desqview/X somewhere :^)

                        Zane
Received on Thu Sep 25 2003 - 21:33:16 BST