On Thu, 18 May 2023, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
On May 18, 2023, at 3:09 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
My advice: buy an old desktop computer. Buy a standard PC floppy drive (a dual
drive if possible to give both 3.5 and 5.25 support).
Hmmm.
a modern laptop for connecting to the interwebs.
with sneaker-net of thumb drives to:
a 386 desktop running Win98SE (first version to support USB), with floppy
drives.
That would work but it doesn't need to be quite that old. My floppy-writing
machine is a Gateway Pentium machine, with Ethernet, running Linux. So when
I need stuff transferred I just scp it to that machine, then run whatever
tool I need to do the transfer (rstsflx or dd, depending on what I'm
manipulating).
My imaging system hs an Abit KV8PRO motherboard, with an Athlon CPU,
onboard 10/100/1000 ethernet, 1 AGP 8X/4X slot, 5 PCI slots, SATA and IDE
drive support, 4 USB ports, and a SCSI card. The onboard floppy controller
will handle all formats except 128 byte/sector MFM. I haven't run across
anything yet that uses that format. I run either Linux or FreeDOS on the
system, depending on which tools I need. Dave Dunfield's IMD tools work great
under FreeDOS, and I use Linux to transfer files in and out of the system.
Mike Loewen mloe...@cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
