On Sat, 16 Jun 2001 06:00:45 -0400 (EDT), Thomas Mueller wrote:
> (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?
Now that you mention it, I can recall having owned an XT laptop with a
720K 3.5" floppy drive. I still have a Zenith EZ-PC, an XT type of
non-standard design that has two 720K 3.5" floppy drives. It still works.
The Zenith EZ-PC came from the factory equipped with only 512K memory.
I tried to install some 720K 3.5" floppy drives on several "standard"
desktop type XTs. I was unable to get the standard XTs to recognize the
floppy drive type.
> 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.
In my experience in studying computers during the mid-1990s in a junior
college, learning DOS and working with DOS was officially discouraged.
All of us students were told that we need to learn more about windoze
because almost none of the local employers are interested in hiring people
who are skilled with using DOS. Unfortunately this appears to be true.
Sam Heywood
