Note: this is an older text written before few weeks. I only now copied it
here.
I am ill these days so I'm lying in my bed and trying to do something at least
remotely usefull. I decided to review some of my DOS-related stuff. Thus I
fired up the MC600 (which has a MS-DOS 3.22 in this read-only memory). The
machine has an excellent keyboard and well-readable 640x200 passive LCD screen
(probably just because of CGA mode limitations: the SIBO-based MC400 has
identical screen but with 640x400 resolution - I think that they are identical,
just the highest resolution is not used on the DOS box).
The software here is limited by several factors: the RAM size (1024 kB), the
80186 processor and the storage size: there is no traditional disk nor floppy.
One has to usefour PSION SSD cards or the 1024 kB of internal RAMdisk (C:).
I have several such SSDs: tho types of them are available. The flash-based
ones must be Type I (te newer Type II can be larger than 1 MB but the machine
cannot see them; there are probably no DOS drivers for them). The RAM-based
SSDs (batterry-backed up) can be larger than 1 MB (I actually have a 2 MB RAM
SSD and it works) but they rare. At the moment I have here 6 MB of total
storage, unfortunately divided to 6 logical devices. It means that there is
no way to install larger things here (say the TeX). But some stuff can fit
here:
* Kermit - it's pretty usefull to get data in and out; the DOS version also
supports emulation of Tectronics terminals, so if is posible to hook up the
MC600 to serial output of SGI workstation and use Gnuplot on SGI to make
pictures on the MC600 screen
* Volkov Commander - not only it works as a file manager but it also provides
time display and (much more importantly!) command line history; at the moment
I uase also it's interna; editor, as I;m not able to find working VI clone
(the Elvis is too bloated and the XVI is unavailable for download)
* Power C compiler (fast and effective - I purchased if few years ago)
* Matlab - the old, public domain version (the differences from the
current Matlab or the GNU Octave are odd sometimes, for example - matrices
are defined as: a=<1,2 ; 2,4>
* SC spreadsheet - the old but good one (vi-style controls)
* Gnuplot - the easiest way to plot data (as no the SC nor the Matlab have
possibility to plot stuff)
It looks like I have found a bug in my own software right now - but it is a bin
uneasy to hunt the bug in more than 4000 lines of code on such device. I will
try to catch it later on my SGI (hopefuly it's not a DOS-specific problem).
After all, it seems to be still possible to do some lighter stuff on such
computer. Text writing is OK (I miss an access to a dictionary and a calculator
while typing). Programming is OK if the code is short (say up few hundreds of
code lines) - if the code is long the compiling taks a lot of time and the text
editors may became slow, too. For some lightweight computing it is OK: the
Matlab even allows to play with matrices and vectors and the SC is nice for
small tables. The only real issue is that these two programs don't offer any
way for plotting - one has to export data and plot them with use of the
Gnuplot. The Gnuplot is even capable of 3D graphs but in that case it is very
slow.
Not everything is nice: for example the old Matlab only accepts one-line FOR
statements. So it is near impossible to use it in a modern way: as a simple but
effective programming language for resting of ideas and algorithms. I als have
no games here (surely games for old IBM PC exist but there is no free space at
the moment).
And it is surprising how large number of DOS software is actually 32-bit (or
requires at least SVGA resolution...) and thus incompatible with my old
machine.
The battery life is... excellent. I have had to replace the batteries after a
month of (well, not so frequent) use. The work time can be about 40 hours (I
never measuret it precisely).
