(begin quote)
I can acquire 5.25" floppy drives at flea markets around here. 360K drives
go from $1 to $5 each and 1.2 MB drives from $5 to $8. I installed a 360K
floppy drive in my son's 133 Mhz Pentium. Many people on this list and
also some on the SurvPC list to include myself are still using our XTs from
time to time. All of the XTs that I know of will not work with any floppy
drives other than the 360K drives. As late as 1997 I have seen XTs in use
and running in county government offices in Shenandoah County, Virginia,
where I live. At that time many of our elected local officials were
opposed to wasting the taxpayers' money on computer upgrades, except for
the computers used in the county schools and libraries. They felt that
only the young people really needed the latest computer technology.
Things have changed now and they have raised our taxes for unnecessary
expenditures. Nowadays many of the old geezers are letting themselves to
be misguided by the younger generation.
Sam Heywood
(end of quote)
I think XTs will also work with 3.5" 720 KB drives? I think the old laptops had
3.5" 720 KB drives. Those old XTs were capable with spreadsheets, database
(Ashton-Tate, then Borland dBASE for DOS), and word processing (WordPerfect for
DOS). But XTs are very hard-pressed regarding Internet capability, maybe they
could run UKA_PPP aka NOS-BOX for news and mail. Maybe the users were feeling
pinched by pipsqueak hard drives? Even with DOS, a 386 or better is required
for 32-bit applications. I think Arachne will run on an XT but is hard-pressed?
Young people in schools need to learn to use the more modern computers to be in
touch with the modern OSes, including Linux and the BSDs, and others including
MS-Windows, and with the Internet.
