[Coco] Cable assistance

[Steven Hirsch]

On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, gene heskett wrote:

> On Saturday, February 19, 2011 09:30:31 am Steven Hirsch did opine:
>
>> On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, gene heskett wrote:
>>> Even that is of relatively little utility since I built this machine
>>> several years ago, as this $300 ASUS motherboard has an FDC that
>>> cannot deal with 256 byte sector disk formats regardless of what I
>>> tell it with setfdparm. (linux of course)
>>
>> Gene,
>>
>> You may want to keep your eyes open for an ancient ISA-bus motherboard
>> that can boot Ye Olde version of Linux or MS-DOS.  I keep an early 90s
>> Dell 486 around solely for the purpose of reading/writing floppy media.
>> It's fitted with a Compaticard IV that can talk to 3.5, 5 and 8" floppy
>> drives.  Install the free uSoft TCP/IP stack and a junk-box ISA ethernet
>> adapter and you have the perfect "shop" machine.
>>
>> It can also dual-boot (using LILO, remember that?) to Linux
>> 2.0.something.
>>
>> I dislike running anything with the uSoft name on it, but for utility
>> purposes it's too handy to pass up.
>>
>> Steve
>
> I have such a box, has RH7.3 on it IIRC.  But getting to it to hook up a
> monitor and keyboard & mouse, all ps2 stuff as its USB is only partially
> usable, and that only after it is booted.  I need to clear it out from
> under the old desk and maybe put that mobo in a smaller box.  That one is
> an industrial sized steel tower about 32" tall & weighs about 30 pounds
> empty.  It has a 450 mhz K6-II in it and 384 megs of ram.  A monster, in
> its day. :)  Hasn't been powered up since I put DD-WRT on a similar but
> much smaller box, using it for a router.  Up till then, it was my
> firewall/gateway machine.  A whopping big 42 gig hard drive.

I keep a pile of IBM Type M keyboards in the garage loft for just such 
purposes.  In fact, I use them on everything - though a PS/2 to USB 
adapter when necessary.  Just cannot touch-type accurately on anything 
else, since I learned to type on a selectric (dates me, I guess).

> I have got to clean house in my man cave.  Just as soon as I find a good
> pattern to carve me and few friends on this list, a batch of round tuit's.

Tell me about it...  In recent years, I've started ridding myself of the 
large, heavy classic items and have actually scraped down through several 
archeological strata in the process.  My Corvus networking and computer 
gear finally surfaced and I've been bringing my Omninet network back to 
life.  Have Apple 2, 3, Macs and PC talking to it.

Someone on the list has a couple of CoCo Omninet interface prototypes, but 
I haven't been able to convince him to part with them.  My pipe dream is 
to write or reverse-engineer a driver to get the CoCo online.

Steve


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