Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Mercury Thirteen via Freedos-user]

On Thursday, March 11, 2021 12:49 AM, Nils Stavlid  wrote:

> Dear all,,, personally I like it whenever topics spiral out on a side track 
> like in this case.
> ...

As do I! It's refreshing to see all the diversity of thought in everyday 
FreeDOS users. Cool stuff! :)___
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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Nils Stavlid]

Dear all,,, personally I like it whenever  topics spiral out on a side
track like in this case. It’s refreshing and we can always choose to ignore
each other’s views if we want to. A quote with some relevance to this:
“Let’s be clear: the work of science
has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of
politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who
happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are
verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is
irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.” –Michael Crichton

So let us agree to not agree for the sake of science.

BR
/Nils





tors 11 mars 2021 kl. 00:27 skrev Aitor Santamaría :

> Hi,
>
> Indeed the discussion became offtopic.
> Eric incidentally hit a different sensitive spot of mine...  (sorry!)
>
> On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 at 23:57, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
>> If you are interested in alive dragons, visit a Komodo Dragon.
>> Those lizards do have some dragon-like properties, but they are
>> not dinosaurs either - too "modern" species for that.
>>
>
> Why wouldn't a dinosaur be modern?
> We live surrounded by some extant 10,000+ species of them which have
> adapted very well to modern times. I see and hear them every day, as most
> of us folks on this list.
> (What's more, in my personal belief, the second most alive intelligent
> species after Homo Sapiens is one of them).
>
> Aitor
>
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 5:07 PM Jon Brase  wrote:
> On 3/9/21 4:35 PM, dmccunney wrote:
> > As a general rule, consumer machines are I/O bound, not compute bound.
> > The CPU spends most of its time in an idle loop waiting for stuff to
> > be read from/written to disk.
>
> Actually, as a general rule, on a consumer machine, both the CPU and the
> disk spend most of their time waiting for user input to give them
> something to do. Disk waits are nothing compared to the eternity between
> the keystrokes of a fast typist, and that's if the user is neither away
> nor lost in thought.

I can't agree. We are not in the single-user, single tasking DOS days
when one thing was going on at a time. At any moment, there are a
number of things going on in a current consumer computer. Some of them
will be OS routines, and some will be programs.  Users may well start
a program that will take time to do what it does (like compile code to
create an executable,)  push it into the background, and do other
things in the foreground.  There may be an audio program so they can
listen to music while they do things like work on code in an editor,
or review documentation, and a download manager or a torrent client
uploading/downloading in the background.

The human is the slowest component in the chain, but waiting for the
human is *not* the only thing that machine will be doing.

I have occasionally started long running processes and gone to bed,
assuming they would be domn in the morning.  I'm out of the loop, but
the machine is not in a wait state.  It's still doing work.
_
Dennis


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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Aitor Santamaría]

Hi,

Indeed the discussion became offtopic.
Eric incidentally hit a different sensitive spot of mine...  (sorry!)

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 at 23:57, Eric Auer  wrote:

> If you are interested in alive dragons, visit a Komodo Dragon.
> Those lizards do have some dragon-like properties, but they are
> not dinosaurs either - too "modern" species for that.
>

Why wouldn't a dinosaur be modern?
We live surrounded by some extant 10,000+ species of them which have
adapted very well to modern times. I see and hear them every day, as most
of us folks on this list.
(What's more, in my personal belief, the second most alive intelligent
species after Homo Sapiens is one of them).

Aitor
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Re: [Freedos-user] DOS Audio

[Volkert via Freedos-user]

Interesting to read about the possibility of patching in support for newer
southbridges, Michał. Can you provide a link to any more information on
that? I tried googling a bit, including seraches limited to the Vogons
forum, but nothing came up.

thanks.

On Mon, Mar 8, 2021 at 5:45 PM Michał Dec  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> You may need to patch the driver from Yamaha. They stopped caring at some
> point, but you can still patch in support for southbridges up to ICH6 and
> VT82C686B.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Michał
> W dniu 08.03.2021 o 17:15, Jerome Shidel pisze:
>
> Hi Everybody,Thanks for all the advice and information.Just some rough 
> machine history.I originally bought that Pentium Pro new back in late 95 at a 
> computer show. About a decade ago, I migrated that machine from it’s original 
> case to a 2U rack mount case to conserve space. The original case was 
> enormous and was about 3ft tall. If I recall correctly, it had 14 5.25 drive 
> bays. 10 external bays and 4 internal with room for 4 more internal ones. 
> But, I was very busy back then to play around with that machine. So, I didn’t 
> really do anything with it other than boot it a couple times. A year or so 
> later, the CPU fan went bad and I changed it  Then about 5 years or so back, 
> the CMOS / Clock battery finally died (20 years, not bad). However, it would 
> forget all BIOS settings after changing them left it booting from floppy or 
> cd/dvd only. Being inside an IC soldered to the mother board, I 
> procrastinated fixing it. Not trusting my de-soldering skills, I had a friend 
> remove the old clock IC. Then, I soldered in a socket and plugged in a new 
> clock. Yippy, all is good again with since 2019. Now finally, I’ve gotten 
> around to messing with it. Installed FreeDOS 1.3-RC3 straight from the 
> LiveCD. Got networking working. Now working on getting sound support. Wish I 
> could use ISA instead of PCI.Being in a 2U rack mount chassis, it has a PCI 
> riser for the expansion cards. I wish I could put an ISA card in there. I 
> have (in my opinion) the best sound card Creative Labs ever released. The 
> Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with daughter board to max’d RAM. When looking at 
> sound cards on eBay, I found that card sells from $150-$300 without the extra 
> RAM module. No, I’m not selling it. I’m using it in the docking station for 
> my 486DX2-66 notebook. :-)After the great advice you all gave me, I found a 
> NIB (opened to verify contents, but card still factory sealed) YMF744 based 
> sound card on eBay for $25. So, I ordered it. I don’t recall if the mother 
> board for the Pentium Pro has a SB-Link. It is a server board. So, probably 
> not. But, it may have DDMA support.  I guess I’ll find out when the card 
> arrives and I install it. The sound card should arrive next week and I’ll 
> slap it in there soon after. I’ll post the results.Thanks again, all the 
> information was a huge help.:-)Jerome
>
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Eric Auer]

Hi!

First, a short note to Dave, Mercury and Random: You can safely
ignore the mails with "[OT]" in the subject, as the thread has
been forked to keep faith and BIOS separate topics. Thanks :-)

https://www.discovery.org/m/2020/04/Scientific-Dissent-from-Darwinism-List-04072020.pdf>

"The Discovery Institute (DI) is a politically conservative
non-profit think tank based in Seattle, Washington, that
advocates the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design
(ID). It was founded in 1990 as a non-profit offshoot of the
Hudson Institute. Its "Teach the Controversy" campaign aims to
permit the teaching of anti-evolution, intelligent-design beliefs
in United States public high school science courses in place of
accepted scientific theories, positing that a scientific contro-
versy exists over these subjects when in fact there is none"

That perfectly matches the statement in Felix' signature.

"The Hudson Institute is a politically conservative[8] American
think tank based in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1961 in
Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist,
and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND
Corporation."

"Critics question the institute's negative campaigning against
organic farming, since it receives large sums of money from
conventional food companies."

"The New York Times accused Huntington Ingalls Industries of
using the Hudson Institute to enhance the company's argument
for more nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, at a cost of US$11
billion each. The Times alleged that a former naval officer was
paid by Hudson to publish an analysis calling for more funding."

Sounds a bit like a place where people can buy their own truth,
while as far as I know, nobody makes profit from the promotion
of evolution as state of the art in origin of species science.

Sure it gets harder to measure things as they get more far away
in space and time. Yet evolution is also happening in regions
where it is easier to observe and humans have become quite good
at extracting good quality measurements from hard to get sources.

There actually is a philosophically interesting Futurama episode
about evolution and intelligent design, related to the idea that
any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic. So you could still say the evolution that we SEE behaves
like what we teach about evolution without excluding the chance
that it STARTED in some magic or divine way. However, intelligent
design is a much weaker claim than "evolution is just something
people believe". The latter would also imply that evolution is
not happening at all. You know, the usual "static" approach of
"Species always were what they are now, there is no change over
time in them and they all have been invented by a deity" etc.

https://theinfosphere.org/A_Clockwork_Origin

https://transcripts.fandom.com/wiki/A_Clockwork_Origin

> Galileo, Bacon, Pascal, Newton,
> Kepler, Leibniz and more were Christians.

How is that related to the question whether evolution exists?
Humans can know a lot - including that evolution DOES exist -
while still being free to decide whether or not they believe
into a non-observable divine cause of anything the can or can
not measure. So saying "there is evolution going on" is really
based on observation, not "indoctrination". It does not, however,
necessarily make any statement about how it started and nobody
is suggesting to abandon religion.

Regarding the issue of dinosaurs having been unknown, or called
dragons or other mythical things, how is that related to whether
evolution exists? Cavemen did not have the technology to wonder
about them, but that does not make dinosaurs exist any less. And
they were not having dinos as pets either, as they have died out
before humans existed. Similar to Egyptian drawings not showing
astronauts, caveman drawings do not show alive dinosaurs. If they
would, how would you explain the age difference in cavemen versus
dinosaur skeletons? And where would you say dinosaurs LIVE today?

If you are interested in alive dragons, visit a Komodo Dragon.
Those lizards do have some dragon-like properties, but they are
not dinosaurs either - too "modern" species for that.

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Felix Miata]

dmccunney composed on 2021-03-10 16:56 (UTC-0500):

> Felix Miata wrote:

>> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-09 17:35 (UTC-0500):

>>> ...It has 20GB RAM

>> What is that, a pair of 2GB and a pair of 8GB?

> Nope.  It has four DRAM slots, and came with 16GB as four 4GB sticks
> in those slots.  I replaced a 4GB stick with a 8GB stick to bring it
> to 20.
Odds are that 32GB capable board features dual channel RAM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architecture

IME when RAM is not used in matched pairs in correct slots in a dual channel
board, RAM speed (memtest86) is cut by nearly half. Did you test RAM speed 
before
and after the change?
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
is based on faith, not on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/


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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Dave Salyers]

I agree. I’m on this list to discuss FreeDOS not religious opinions.

Thanks!

Dave Salyers

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 2:24 PM Random Liegh via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> Is this a conversation that really needed to happen on a public,
> technical list?
>
> No, it is not. It could and should have been moved to private emails.
>
> I'd like to request that it continue there so the rest of us aren't
> forced to have our inboxes filled with unwanted nonsense.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Mercury Thirteen via Freedos-user]

Agreed. I guess we can thank Tom for that! lol


Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐
On Wednesday, March 10, 2021 5:23 PM, Random Liegh via Freedos-user 
 wrote:

> Is this a conversation that really needed to happen on a public,
> technical list?
>
> No, it is not. It could and should have been moved to private emails.
>
> I'd like to request that it continue there so the rest of us aren't
> forced to have our inboxes filled with unwanted nonsense.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Freedos-user mailing list
> Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user




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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Random Liegh via Freedos-user]

Is this a conversation that really needed to happen on a public, 
technical list?


No, it is not. It could and should have been moved to private emails.

I'd like to request that it continue there so the rest of us aren't 
forced to have our inboxes filled with unwanted nonsense.


Thanks!



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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Felix Miata]

tom ehlert composed on 2021-03-10 22:15 (UTC+0100):

> "Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
> is based on faith, not on science."

That's a signature block. 

> either give us a pointer why you think you must annoy us with that,
> or please stop with that (mostly religious) nonsense.



There is no proof of anything that happened 10,000 years ago or 1,000,000 years
ago, much less what happened 4,500,000,000 years ago. All those time frames are
based on guessing, and an assumption that how things behave now is a reasonable
indication of how things behaved then. "Scientific method" cannot be applied to
those times.

So-called evolutionary trees all have gaps, missing links, because no such links
ever existed, not found even though the search has been diligent for nearly 200
years, using more and better technology in the search.

Evolution is nothing but unprovable faith in the assumptions made by the
"scientific community" of the past 200 years. Galileo, Bacon, Pascal, Newton,
Kepler, Leibniz and more were Christians.

Our public schools have been indoctrinating kids at an early age, where books
about "dinosaurs", start with the words "Millions of years ago...". The word
dinosaur didn't appear in any dictionary until the late 19th century. The words
for dinosaur before then were dragon, behemoth and leviathan, creatures that
humans observed and pictured on cave walls. 


Thus "evolution" is purely faith-based, a religion.
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
is based on faith, not on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/


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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[Jon Brase]

On 3/9/21 4:35 PM, dmccunney wrote:

As a general rule, consumer machines are I/O bound, not compute bound.
The CPU spends most of its time in an idle loop waiting for stuff to
be read from/written to disk.


Actually, as a general rule, on a consumer machine, both the CPU and the 
disk spend most of their time waiting for user input to give them 
something to do. Disk waits are nothing compared to the eternity between 
the keystrokes of a fast typist, and that's if the user is neither away 
nor lost in thought.




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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Eric Auer]

Hi everybody,

my impression of "evolution is faith, not science" is that
it is a bit like "my leg is not broken until I believe it"
but actually I rarely read signatures at all, so I have not
even NOTICED Felix' statement until Tom complained about it.

Sure, free speech could let you say almost everything. Still
it is somewhat far fetched to reply to "lots of experts have
investigated evolution" with "that is what YOU believe".

However, as nothing of that is related to the BIOS versus
harddisk question, it kind of feels like a non-issue. Yet
OTHER belief issues have really gotten out of hand in the
last decades, think qanon, antivaxxers, covidiots etc.

If everybody just says "Life is so complicated, everything
merely depends on what you believe", the problem no longer
are people believing questionable things. It is that they
stop believing into actual facts and truths, being way too
busy searching for "the truth they want to hide from us".
I guess we could discuss that in a separate thread. As far
as I am concerned, I still believe the BIOS SATA PATA IDE
question can give us faith-independent excitement as long
as the mail content counts more than the signature :-)

And to add a thought about Christianity: Evolution and
having life on earth at all could be both signs of quite
"intelligent design", so both sides could get some credit.

Cheers, Eric

PS: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/simulation-2




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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 3:00 PM Felix Miata  wrote:
> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-09 17:35 (UTC-0500):
>
> > The current desktop uses a quad core Intel i5 CPU and 3.5 ghz, with an
> > automatic turbo mode to 3.9 ghz.  It has 20GB RAM
> What is that, a pair of 2GB and a pair of 8GB?

Nope.  It has four DRAM slots, and came with 16GB as four 4GB sticks
in those slots.  I replaced a 4GB stick with a 8GB stick to bring it
to 20.  The theoretical maximum for the mobo is 32GB, using  four 8GB
sticks.  I didn't actually need 20GB, but was buying other stuff and
my SO told me I needed to spend more to take advantage of financing
provided by the store brand credit card of the retailer where we
bought it.  Additional RAM was something to toss money at.

One thing I found for 64 bit Windows was an open source RAMdisk
driver.  Right now it has a 512MB RAMdisk dedicated to Firefox browser
cache ()since FF makes it easy to specify where cache is place if you
d0on'\t want it in the profuile direcrtory, but I may experiment with
large volumes for other purposes.  (The macghine the current destop
replaced had 8GB RAM, and I seldome used even half of that.  On ehg
prest machine, for my use cases, I have RAM to burn.)

> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[Jon Brase]

On 3/10/21 10:50 AM, dmccunney wrote:


The fascinating bit for me is that the distinction between RAM and
disk is steadily blurring.  Things like nVME make it possible to have
what works like RAM but is non-volatile storage whose content will
survive a reboot.

We are just scratching the surface here.

I don't think this will make as much difference as people often think. 
Remember, we've been there before: Core memory was non-volatile, and 
some of the really early machines had drums for main memory, but systems 
that were born on architectures with storage that was 100% physically 
non-volatile still ended up with a distinction between logically 
volatile working memory and logically non-volatile long term storage, 
and were thus able to transition to volatile transistor RAM with minimum 
fuss.




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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Mercury Thirteen via Freedos-user]

I'll step in for a brief moment to answer this in my own way prior to Felix 
doing so. Sorry, Felix. :)

As to why you must be "annoyed" by anyone else's choice of email signature, I 
would point out the Christo-American concept of free speech. Felix has complete 
freedom to say whatever he wants whether in person or via email signature, just 
as you have complete freedom whether or not to be annoyed by it. It's basically 
the same concept everyone else here applies when reading one of your overly 
dramatic responses; we understand you have freedom to say anything you want, 
and we choose to not let ourselves be bothered with taking it seriously.

And as for the heart of the "nonsense" itself - if you are in fact genuinely 
interested in the subject and not in simply firing off one more snippy email - 
I would start with the works of Dr. Stephen Meyer, Eric Metaxas, Dr. James 
Tour, and John Lennox, Professor emeritus of Mathematics at Oxford University. 
A brief catalog of some of their relevant videos, which may be easier to digest 
than the sum of their published works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y02a28FrMKs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FKmIDApbe0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7Lww-sBPg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5tUDJ23Kms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBio3y0Rrbc

Granted, these fellows aim more generally towards the scientific community as 
opposed to schools, but the same conceptual parallels remain.

*donning my best announcer's voice*
And now, back to you, Felix!
:)

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‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐
On Wednesday, March 10, 2021 4:15 PM, tom ehlert t...@drivesnapshot.de wrote:

> "Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
> is based on faith, not on science."
> either give us a pointer why you think you must annoy us with that,
> or please stop with that (mostly religious) nonsense.
> Tom
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[Jon Brase]

Accidentally responded to Liam instead of the whole list, resending.

On 3/9/21 3:40 PM, Liam Proven wrote:

On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 22:28, Jon Brase  wrote:


On 3/3/21 7:30 AM, Liam Proven wrote:

Yes. Use a disk manager. It will install a tiny overlay before the OS
boots and that will allow you to use arbitrarily-large disks without
problems. (Probably not with Linux, but with DOS, Win9x, OS/2 and
maybe even NT).

Actually, it looks like, through kernel 2.5., Linux explicitly
detected and worked with both OnTrack and EasyDrive. Since that version,
it has a tunable offset parameter that can be set appropriately for
either one by the user (63 sectors for OnTrack, 1 for EasyDrive). All
other avenues seem to have failed, so I may well be going that route 
next.
That is actually quite impressive! I did not know that. Thanks for the 
info.


Once installed, it's a good, simple, easy solution. I used to use them
a lot back in the day (late 1990s, roughly.)


Unfortunately, it's not working. OnTrack sees the same ultra-small 
capacity for the drive as the BIOS and Linux see on that machine. It 
picks up the other 40 GB 2.5" PATA drive, but the SSD + Adapter can't be 
extended from what the BIOS sees to the actual size of the drive. I even 
tried a different SSD on the adapter, and got almost the exact same 
crippled size (130 MB), so I don't even get to test if Linux's offset 
parameter works, even OnTrack isn't seeing the full drive size.


My working theory at this point is that the adapter is detecting that 
it's working wtih an old BIOS and "helpfully" setting up a temporary 
Host Protected Area on the drive, after which it refuses to acknowledge 
that any area after the 130 MB mark even exists until poweroff. I 
haven't been able to boot an environment that has hdparm(8) available, 
so I haven't been able to test this.


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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Alvah Whealton]

I'm not annoyed.

Al

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 4:17 PM tom ehlert  wrote:

>
> "Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
> is based on faith, not on science."
>
> either give us a pointer why you think you must annoy us with that,
> or please stop with that (mostly religious) nonsense.
>
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[tom ehlert]

"Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
is based on faith, not on science."

either give us a pointer why you think you must annoy us with that,
or please stop with that (mostly religious) nonsense.



Tom





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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[Felix Miata]

dmccunney composed on 2021-03-09 17:35 (UTC-0500):

> The current desktop uses a quad core Intel i5 CPU and 3.5 ghz, with an
> automatic turbo mode to 3.9 ghz.  It has 20GB RAM
What is that, a pair of 2GB and a pair of 8GB?
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
is based on faith, not on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/


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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 10:10 AM Liam Proven  wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 23:37, dmccunney  wrote:
> >
> > On my old XT clone, I had a replacement 10mhz motherboard with a NEC
> > v20 CPU.  The V20 was compatible with the Intel 8088, but had better
> > microcode, for a cheap 5% speedup.  It had 640K RAM and two Seagate
> > ST-225 MFM HDs.  I got it an AST- 6Pak K addon card that added another
> > megabyte of RAM.  AST software let me make 512MB of the RAM a RAMdisk,
> > 256K a dick cache, and he oter 256K could be EMS for apps that could
> > use it.  (I made the RAMdisk first in my PATH, and put frequently used
> > apps like LIST there, and set TEMP and TMP to point to it so things
> > that honored that would use the RAMdisk for temp files. It sped up
> > Zipping stuff a treat. A freeware utility could  map unused video RAM
> > to DOS.  I used a Hercules video card, so 64K were available to be
> > mapped to DOS, and the machine booted reporting 704K DOS RAM.
> > Performance was acceptable, thank you.
>
> That sounds like a *very* seriously tricked-out XT-class machine! Wow!

I had fun with it.

I had a Unix machine at home before I got the XT clone.  I was Tech
Support Manager for a small Unix systems house that resold AT kit
when AT was in the computer business, and an AT 3B1 joined the
family.  The 3B1 was the beefier sibling of the UNIX-PC, an early
attempt at a single user Unix workstation.  It had a 10mhz Motorola
68010 CPU, with up to 4MB RAM (mine had 3.5MB) and a 72MB MFM HD.  It
ran Unix System V Release 2.  There was a well crafted GUI called FACE
that could be used on the mono console (and a character mode version
that could run on attached terminals.  The keyboard had a variety of
special keys that did things when pressed.  One of the things I wanted
was compatibility between apps I used on the 3B1 and on the PC.  I was
able to compile Daniel LAwrence's MicroEMACS "out of the box" for the
3B1, and had fun writing an ME macro that examined KB input and would
do the appropriate things when I pressed one of the special keys.

Because I started as a Unix guy, I wanted to make the XT clone look as
much like a Unix machine as possible.  (I also got my SO a 3B1, and
she thought DOS was a brain damaged Unix.  Well, yes.  As of DOS 2.X,
MS adopted a hierarchical file system, tree structured directories,
I/O redirection and other Unix concepts, but implemented thyem very
differently.)

After looking at an assortment of freeware and shareware versions of
Unix commands, I bought a commercial package called the MKS Toolkit.
The toolkit was a product of Mortice Kern Systems in Canada.  They
were consulting engineers who wrote it originally for internal use,
and released it as a product when it was sufficiently developed.  It
became the tail that wagged the dog, and their principal business.

The toolkit implemented full versions of all Unix commands that made
sense in a single user, single tasking environment.  The selling point
for me were complete versions of the Unix vi editor and Korn shell.
(The Korn shell had everything save asynchronous background processes
because DOS didn't *do* that.)

Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, when the PC was booted,
CONFIG.SYS got processed.  It loaded the RAMdisk, cache and mouse
drivers that were common to everything. But instead of COMMAND.COM as
a boot shell, the Toolkit's INIT.EXE was loaded.  INIT printed Login:
on my screen.  Enter a userid and (optional) password and INIT called
LOGIN.  LOGIN looked for the ID in a Unix compatible /etc/passwd file.
IF it found a match, it changed to whatever directory was specified as
that ID's home directory, and ran whatever was specified as the ID's
shell

I had IDs that ran the Korr shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, and
DesqView.  Exit those programs and INIT was reloaded.  I could switch
environments *without* rebooting.  When I was booted into the Korn
shell, you had to dig a bit to discover you *weren't* on an Honest-to
$DEITY Unix machine. (And I was able to craft an equivalent of the
Unix lp print spooler using the DOS print command and Korn shell
scripts and aliases.)

The Toolkit stayed in use when I got a 386 and started running Win
3.1.  The shell for Win3.1 was Program Manager, but you could
substitute something else. What was used was defined in the SYSTEM.INI
file.  I had custom SYSTEM.INI files to run different shells, and
Toolkit IDs that copied them over the real one so Win3.1 ran the one I
wanted to use.  But because Win3.1 was a multi-tasking shell on top of
DOS, I could choose not to run it, and boot into COMMAND.COM, 4DOS,
DV, or the Korn shell.

Lots of fun while it lasted.

> MS OSes were always a work thing for me. My own computers went
> Sinclair -> Amstrad PCW (the last new CP/M computer) -> Acorn
> Archimedes.

Right. You were in the UK.  I'm aware of the stuff you ran, but never
have a chance to play with it here.

> For £800 – probably under $1500 at the time – I had an 8MHZ RISC
> 

Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 23:37, dmccunney  wrote:
>
> On my old XT clone, I had a replacement 10mhz motherboard with a NEC
> v20 CPU.  The V20 was compatible with the Intel 8088, but had better
> microcode, for a cheap 5% speedup.  It had 640K RAM and two Seagate
> ST-225 MFM HDs.  I got it an AST- 6Pak K addon card that added another
> megabyte of RAM.  AST software let me make 512MB of the RAM a RAMdisk,
> 256K a dick cache, and he oter 256K could be EMS for apps that could
> use it.  (I made the RAMdisk first in my PATH, and put frequently used
> apps like LIST there, and set TEMP and TMP to point to it so things
> that honored that would use the RAMdisk for temp files. It sped up
> Zipping stuff a treat. A freeware utility could  map unused video RAM
> to DOS.  I used a Hercules video card, so 64K were available to be
> mapped to DOS, and the machine booted reporting 704K DOS RAM.
> Performance was acceptable, thank you.

That sounds like a *very* seriously tricked-out XT-class machine! Wow!

MS OSes were always a work thing for me. My own computers went
Sinclair -> Amstrad PCW (the last new CP/M computer) -> Acorn
Archimedes.

For £800 – probably under $1500 at the time – I had an 8MHZ RISC
computer with 1MB of flat unsegmented RAM in 1989. And none was used
for the OS, because it ran from ROM chips.

When my Archimedes died, I got a 486DX 50MHz notebook -- not a DX/2,
just DX -- and I ran OS/2 2.0 on it. Even though it only had 8MB of
RAM, it ran well.

> The current desktop uses a quad core Intel i5 CPU and 3.5 ghz, with an
> automatic turbo mode to 3.9 ghz.  It has 20GB RAM, and boots and runs
> from a 256B PAnasonic SSD.  Performance is lovely.  There are faster
> machine out there, but since I'm not doing things like heavy video
> editing or compiling a large application from a source tree, it's
> moare tyhan adequate for what I do.

That is a pretty good spec! O_o

Yes, I find that since the point at which quad-core CPUs were
affordable, performance no longer matters much. I buy used kit if
possible, mostly laptops now, according to things like keyboard
quality and screen resolution. So long as it has, say, a Core i5 and
enough RAM or the RAM is cheap to add, it will do. I still have some
Core 2 machines in use; they're fine for light use, despite being over
a decade old.

Koomey's Law has truly supplanted Moore's Law now.

--
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053


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