Looking for stuff that you forgot to throw out

[Ben Scott]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Bill Freeman <f at ke1g.mv.com> wrote:
>>> USB, of course, would solve many
>>> problems, but 3.11 drivers may be exciting.
>>
>>   Don't forget that prior to Win 95 also means MS-DOS.[1]
>
> Win 95 (and 98 and ME) was DOS too (as I now see that you've mentioned
> below).  It was just better hidden.

  The practical difference being that you really couldn't have a
stand-alone Win 3.x system -- you had to get most stuff working under
DOS for it to work under doze.  With Win 95, you could usually ignore
the DOS stuff as long as you had Win 95 drivers.  And Win95 is close
enough to Win ME that one can still sometimes find drivers for it.
DOS and Win 3.x are several eras behind, so you're really digging
deep.

  (Side story: We had some ancient test equipment at work  It ran some
custom software on top of Win 3.x -- software that simply refused to
run on 9x or NT.  So I kept it alive on a frankenputer held together
by chewing gum and bailing wire, replacing components as they died.
Finding a video card that has Win 3.x drivers is quite challenging
these days.  Fortunately I saw this coming and started squirreling
away parts years and years ago.  No PCMCIA stuff, I'm afraid.)

> I'll bet the BIOS can't boot over ethernet either.  But I seem to recall
> using floppies for such things.   --   My memory hurts.

  I'd be flabbergasted if that old thing could boot from network via
main BIOS.  Even on modern PCs, it's usually the network card's BIOS
that provides PXE.  Integrated (onboard) Ethernet just means the
"card" BIOS is part of the mainboard firmware image.  I dunno if
anyone ever made a PCMCIA NIC with boot ROM.  Seems unlikely, given
that the whole idea behind a laptop is mobility.

  But, for cards that don't have a boot ROM, it is (was) indeed
possible to get boot floppies.  But the floppy has to include drivers
for your particular NIC.  Check out Etherboot if you want to go that
route -- it's basically a FOSS net boot framework.  Kind of like "PXE
on a diskette".

> Maybe my Yggdrasil disc is still readable.

  If that's not old enough, I think I still have a Red Hat 2.1 CD
around somewhere.... ;-)

> Though it's not going to have USB drivers either, I think.

  Nope.  I forget when exactly Linux got a working USB stack, but it
was well after "Plug and Play Linux" went defunct.

> Yeah, but as stated before, I have need of a legacy serial port.  Even
> the new Latitudes don't have them anymore.

  Oh, right.

  There are (or were) such things as PCMCIA RS-232 cards.  Perhaps one
of those on a somewhat newer laptop?  Of course, you prolly don't have
a somewhat newer laptop.

  I wonder if you could wire the SD/RD lines of a USB/RS232 adapter up
to the control lines of the weather station to get sufficient
signaling rates.  Of course, that would still require you to reverse
engineer the protocol first.

  Oh, hey, I just thought of something:  I've got an old and
semi-broken laptop you can have free if you want.  The bottom sticker
says "Winbook XL2".  I forget the CPU, but it has 64 MB of RAM, and
ran Linux.  I just checked, and it has a male DE-9 connector, so it
prolly has onboard RS-232 with 16550-compatible UART.  No battery, but
it does have an AC power cord.  The hinge mounting posts in the LCD
lid broke off years ago.  I stuck it in my closet thinking I might try
and fix it some day, but never got around to it.  If you're not going
to be moving it around you could just duct tape the LCD to a tree
stump or something.  No onboard NIC, but it does have floppy, CD, and
two Type I/II PCMCIA slots.  (Dunno if they're CardBus, too.)

  (I didn't mention this earlier because I was looking for cards, not
laptops.  I actually had to move it aside to get to the box that might
have had a PCMCIA card in it, but didn't.  Forest, trees, etc.)

>>   Any which way, good luck!  ("You're gonna need it.")
>
> Only if I want to succeed.

  Well, if you want to fail, doesn't that mean failure would actually
be success?  :)

-- Ben