I have this vintage pc that I dug up and recently powered on, the hard drive seems to be failing (sector read errors) but I have a bunch of floppy disks i tried running today and it still works as long as it’s running from the floppy and doesn’t need to be installed first.

If you guys are interested, I’ll post it running some things tomorrow. There’s a bunch of things I want to do with it like try to replace the hard drive, get it online, and get a compiler so I can port programs or write new ones for it. Maybe install linux if that’s a possibility on 6MB of RAM.

Image of BIOS

Image of directory listing

  • reflectedodds@lemmy.worldOP
    1·
    4 months ago

    Thanks for that. Looked online a bit, I’m going to order an rs232 to usb null modem cable. Then it looks like in DOS I should be able to set the baud and just copy a file to the port. On the receiving side I can program something to just read from the com port straight to a file. Add some automation and voila. 🤞

    • Toes♀@ani.social
      1·
      4 months ago

      Yeah, sounds like a plan. The zmodem protocol was designed for this if you wanna save writing your own tool from scratch?

      • reflectedodds@lemmy.worldOP
        2·
        4 months ago

        We’ll see how far I get. I mean if I can just do copy file \\.\COM# on the DOS side and cat /dev/tty# > file on my laptop side then I’ll be happy.

        • Toes♀@ani.social
          1·
          4 months ago

          Good luck, let us know your results.

          Be sure to check the hash of the files before and after. You could also zip them before transmission for that functionality.