8088 day 02/23/24
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With the recent posts about gopher best practices or whatever it was,
I got to thinking about my 8088. I wasn't using it much, so I
disconnected it and set it aside a few months ago (I think, but maybe
it hasn't been that long?); and of course, I've missed it ever since.
Today, I setup a new spot for it, moved some other things around, and
got it back in service.
I'm presently typing on this post on the old pal. So you don't have to
dig around my gopher hole to get the specs, it's an Epson Equity I+,
8088 with 640KB, an 8-bit IDE controller with CF adapter and 1G card
(only partitioned for 256MB I think, was all the hardware seemed to
want to do, but haven't played hard with that), 3c503 ethernet card,
and OTI VGA card. Genius three-button mouse as well, and DOS 6.22. It
has Windows 3.0 (only works in real mode, which is very limiting), but
mostly I use Joe Hass' "HDM" menu system, which is fantastic.
For connectivity to circumlunar space, there is a packet driver and
mTCP telnet, a hop to a local system, then SSH to CS. I have yet to
find a version of SSH that will run on an 8088 and has the right
protocols to speak with any modern system, so I'm stuck with the local
telnet hop. All those men-in-the-middle on my LAN are probably reading
this right now as we speak.
For today's 8088 party, I decided to poke around at gopher using a few
different clients. Then, I decided to try to get a gopher client
running in Windows--which failed miserably, as they all require more
than Win3.0 in real mode :/
Cruising gopher was as good as ever. I prefer my own client, NCGopher
(which came out about the same time as the modern client by the same
name), which is loosely modeled after VF-1 (it even has a tour!), but
which isn't nearly as cool. It's written and compiled to EXE in QB45,
and depends on mTCP's "nc" netcat utility for the network bits. Like I
said, not really "cool", but it works and I like it!
Also fiddled with a couple other clients. PC Gopher III from UMN is my
second favorite, to be honest. It's easy to configure, reasonably
fast, and works well on most gopher holes. I was a little disappointed
that it seemed to choke on .MD files, but otherwise it worked well. It
even worked just fine with tomasino's i item type posts (links were
navigable, etc).
Every client I tried did poorl with baud baby's graphics :( I have to
eat my words on that one, as my own client did worse than I expected
(it had issues calculating the lines and scrolling, so it was
impossible to navigate). I'll have to see if there are any changes to
my code that might mitigate.
Downloaded and tried out gopherus, again. The program says it will
work on a system like mine, but it just hangs on a black screen and
does nothing. Tried two different packet drivers, and a few other
little things, but no luck.
It was a nice 8088 day, and I have it setup next to my main
workstation for now, so it's easy to hop on. I'll have to fiddle more
often.
Some notes: winworldpc and vetusware are both great resources for
old applications, if you need a source. NCGopher is available on
vetusware, where I am a volunteer.
