I bought an IBM 390 laptop on eBay for $9.95 that was advertised without a hard drive. The vendor responded to a question that I asked about booting to DOS from a floppy and he indicated that it would.
It has an EPP capable parallel port as well as a standard 9 pin serial port and I use the parallel port to program EEPROMs as well as EPROMs with external programmers. The serial port works great to program my Zetron (special serial cable) and Pion and Simon and ID-O-Matic controllers. Taking a desktop to a site was not an option for me, and I have found the old IBM (233 mHz) to be the simple answer for remote computer tasks. 73 - Jim W5ZIT --- On Sun, 1/18/09, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: From: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Repeater-Builder] Off Topic To: [email protected] Date: Sunday, January 18, 2009, 12:17 AM Thanks for this Off Topic. In the days of 386's, 486's, etc. desktops & notebooks had RS-232c ports. What can be done with the XP notebooks, like mine, with no Db-9, RS-232c ports, all that is available is USB ports? I am hoping to get an old dest top with Db-9, RS-232c working with my old Windows 3.1 software. This will mean taking this desk top to the repeater site, to program the repeater controller. I have a USB to Db-9, RS-232c adapter w/ a cd software. If I could get a Windows AT program to work with XP. I await your solutions. 73's & Thanks. Jim Kh6jkg. -----Original Message----- From: AJ <aj.grantham@ gmail.com> To: Repeater-Builder@ yahoogroups. com Sent: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 6:32 pm Subject: Re: [Repeater-Builder] Off Topic However... As the previous replies have stated, while you may be able to open and run the DOS application in XP, you won't be able to do anything with regards to controlling external devices via serial, such as a radio in the case of RSS... XP has some rather nasty issues with typing the serial ports for Windows-only applications. .. 73s and good luck, AJ, K6LOR On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Ken Arck <ah...@ah6le. net> wrote: At 07:59 PM 1/17/2009, Mike Mullarkey wrote: Does anybody know if one can get a DOS program to run on Windows XP. <----If it's a RSS program, it won't run inside a DOS window from XP and you need to boot into DOS at powerup (make a bootable CD to do this). Otherwise if the program you want to run WILL run inside a DOS window from within XP, just click START > RUN and at the C:/ prompt, do what you need. Ken ------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --- President and CTO - Arcom Communications Makers of repeater controllers and accessories. http://www.arcomcon trollers. com/ Authorized Dealers for Kenwood and Telewave and we offer complete repeater packages! AH6LE/R - IRLP Node 3000 http://www.irlp. net "We don't just make 'em. We use 'em!" A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps!
