I can't get the IDE to work on the Compaq 386 portable. I
tried a few verified working drives, both under the 500mb
limit, and neither worked. One was a physical drive, the
other a CF with CF->IDE adapter. Fdisk didn't see either
one. It could be a bad cable, but I don't have another
one around to test with (most of my stuff is packed.)
Anyway, the system boots/works from floppy just fine, and
I happen to have the following floppies sitting around:
1. Bootable DOS 3.3, plus full dos operating disk set
2. Bootable DOS 6.22 disk
I figured I'd have some fun. So, I copied gwbasic.exe
from the DOS 3.3 disk to my DOS 6.22 boot disk (I don't
want to write to my original DOS 3.3 disks.) Then I wrote
the following small program (GET.BAS):
10 OPEN "O",#2,"SENT.OUT"
15 OPEN "COM1:9600,N,8,1" AS #1
20 PRINT #1,"Send file now..."
25 QUIT=1
30 WHILE QUIT
35 A$=""
40 IF LOC(1)>0 THEN A$=INPUT$(LOC(1),1)
45 IF A$<>"" THEN PRINT #2,A$;
50 IF A$<>"" THEN PRINT ".";
55 K$=INKEY$
60 IF K$<>"" THEN QUIT=0
65 WEND
70 CLOSE #1
75 CLOSE #2
I connected a null modem from my linux box to this 386,
and ran "cutecom." I started my gwbasic program, and then
in cutecom I set my character delay to 100ms (50ms also
worked for me) and sent over the file "TED.COM" a text
editor that shows the following when you run it:
TED 1.0 (c) 1988 Ziff Communications Co.
PC Magazine * Tom Kihlken
After renaming sent.out to ted.com, the program worked. Now
I have gwbasic and a text editor to use on this old thing
until I can do more testing on the IDE. So, while it's not
quite as fun, it's still some kind of fun for now!
***
It's only a 360k floppy, so space is at a premium. I don't
really have more sitting around, sadly. So, I had to transfer
ATTRIB.EXE over with get.bas and got rid of DRVSPACE.BIN (66k),
and the deleted ATTRIB.EXE.
I'm happy about get.bas, as I feel the value of modern
computers rests heavily in the ability to share things with
others computers. Next I suppose I need to write send.bas
or download some other very small program to this thing to
meet that need.
Maybe it would be better to get the IDE working, as the
machine does have a NIC... or even just get more floppy
disks.
