Question:
I need some under 2 gig IDE hard drives, 6 or more would be nice. I am
sure they would be dirt cheap, but I am not sure where to look. I also
need a matching number of those removable hard drive carriers. This is
for backing up a mission-critical DOS system.
Searching ebay for "ide under 2 gig lot" does not get me much. Anyone
know where to look for lots of old computer parts?
500 meg drives would work too.
Answer:
The computers where I work don't even boot over the net. The Windows
desktop is in Guelph and we only connect to it using our "terminal".
I guess it saves having expensive hardware in the warehouse.
(Citrix and some terminal company from the mainframe era feature
prominently during the cold-boot process.)
A router is not a general-purpose machine. Linux can easily be made to
mount all drives read-only. It wouldn't be very fast, but routers need
little disk I/O speed, but lots of net I/O speed. None of these is true for
the DOS system he describes. While I have no doubt that a CF card would
work (for a while), replacing burned-out card would get expensive.
I have something similar of about the same age. I have two systems I run
for my local sailing club, one for the regular club racing and the other
for open events. The oldest parts of them date from 1982 but they went
through a major rewrite in the middle '90s so I don't know how much actual
code from '82 is still there, maybe 10%. It runs fine in a DOS window
under Vista. I cheat so far as the printer is concerned, I write a print
file and print that on a USB printer from Windows.
You can of course force even a new machine to boot into DOS rather than
use a DOS window.
