16 ms·

I still work on several old DOS systems. The only way to get anything off off it is with a floppy or an IDE HDD reader. Upgrading basically means full contro

• webmobdev 4y ago
  God, why!?
  • brnt 4y ago
    I worked on an old but perfectly functioning device that scanned medical samples. The only way to get its data out was by way of floppy. Upgrading the device would cost far more than the time savings of cutting out the floppy transfer.
    • bitwize 4y ago
      My ophthalmologist had a peripheral vision testing machine that recorded data on floppies -- 5 1/4" floppies -- as of the mid-2010s.
    • chrisseaton 4y ago
      Do you not worry that it's obviously going to stop working at some point, and it'd be better to get onto a newer system while you have the time now and you aren't doing it when it's actually broken?
      • bombcar 4y ago
        You’re often better running the old one into the ground - the new one will be just as expensive when it comes time but you’ll be getting the current model at the time.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
      • Dalewyn 4y ago
        A wise sage once said: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
      • sbaiddn 4y ago
        In grad school (07-13) at a top 10 engineering school world wide some of the fanciest equipment in the department (microscopes?) ran connected to windows 3.1 machine. The facilities manager kept spare parts in the closet. The manufacturer had long abandoned the equipment and no alternative software was available. The equipment would cost millions to replace and what they had apparently worked great. So the 386 chugged along.
        • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
          >The equipment would cost millions to replace I don’t buy this. Worst case scenario, the microscope talks to the PC using a proprietary hardware interface (say, an ISA card). It would cost far less than millions to hire a competent electronics engineer to reverse engineer the ISA card and the driver that talks to the ISA card, and fabricate a modern interface. Best case scenario, the microscope talks to the PC via a standard interface, and would be even cheaper to reverse, since you’d just need to worry about the software layer. On the other hand, it would truly cost millions when the aforementioned ancient interface inevitably breaks and becomes impossible to reverse engineer, necessitating purchase of a brand new microscope. >what they had apparently worked great This is the real reason: because the scope works fine right now, nobody thought it prudent to invest the tens of thousands it would take to future-proof it. Exactly like companies that prioritize short-term profits over long-term success.
          • sbaiddn 4y ago
            Lets say it costs 100k to reverse engineer a card, drivers, and software (I doubt it will stay on budget, I see how the software industry operates. The Uni will probably get hooked on SaS contract) So now the department is down 100k for a hack. Does the hack even work? Probably not. The "engineer" probable over sold himself and got hired anyway because of the talent shortage. So the uni is down $100k, the system chugs along with Win3.1 just fine, and every research group understand that when it finally breaks they'll all have to pitch in for a new one. Btw, as to your comment on this department's myopia, the university is top 10. The department is top 5 world wide.
  • grapescheesee 4y ago
    Well in short, if it works don't change it. But, it's the story of industrial, and difficult to replace (technically) components.
    • tinus_hn 4y ago
      It’s also the story of why I don’t care anymore if some ‘engineer’ comes crying his XT that he needs 10 minutes ago doesn’t boot anymore when ‘it was working perfectly fine yesterday’. Yes it costs money to stay up-to-date and if you don’t want to pay and it breaks, you get to keep the pieces.
      • sbaiddn 4y ago
        How about the OEM who abandoned their million dollar equipment so you cant replace the XT even if you wanted?
        • tinus_hn 4y ago
          Should have specified that in the contract when you bought the device.
        • IYasha 4y ago
          You've just described life of a typical apple user :)
          • grapescheesee 4y ago
            And the cycle of companies who only do R&D for project based work. This is the real issue. I would say it's a problem with middle and high level management, but I am still not sure if that is fair.
    • oneplane 4y ago
      That's a little short-sighted isn't it? If you define "works" as "worked the last time we tried it", that's not really something you'd want to have to depend on for anything reasonably important. I'd say if if you cannot replicate the system it's already time for some investment. But even before that people should have the foresight to keep systems up-to-date or at least bridged to contemporary systems.
  • tinus_hn 4y ago
    You could use a serial connection to transfer data to a modern computer.
    • ale42 4y ago
      Or an Ethernet card... there is software supporting Ethernet on DOS. Even almost-contemporary Intel card still have DOS drivers...
      • teddyh 4y ago
        Yup: http://crynwr.com/drivers/00index.html http://crynwr.com/drivers/00index.html
      • ok123456 4y ago
        Then you have to make sure that there are no IRQ, DMA, or IO Port conflicts on what is probably an industrial control device device with data collection boards boards using all kinds of non-standard resource addresses. And then, god knows if the device driver for the Ethernet card can coexist with all the other drivers and TSRs, or even if it's running a mainstream version of DOS. Maybe it has a DOS Extender that makes something fail in a non-obvious way. Adding hardware to Old PCs isn't what you're accustomed to.
        • Moru 4y ago
          They often have a serial or parallel port, especially the industrial ones. Was the only way of communicating with them. That port might be used for the actual job the computer does though.
          • ok123456 4y ago
            Depending on whether or not you have ECP/EPP parallel ports on your machine, LapLink might be the best solution.
        • grapescheesee 4y ago
          Yes, exactly. On these old systems you often run into issues with IRQ conflicts for PCI cards. It is common to disable USB and use a PS/2 port for a mouse and keybord.
• cout 4y ago
  Can you not find an ISA Ethernet card and copy the files over the network? There are plenty of TCP stacks out there -- I was even able to use ssh when I tried it years ago (though I had to use ssh v1 and increase the handshake timeout since my 386SX was struggling to keep up).
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Fighting with DOS Ethernet is way harder than using a floppy and a USB floppy drive.
    • EvanAnderson 4y ago
      An NE2000 in a box without a bunch of other ISA cards competing for IRQs isn’t too bad. A DOS packet driver is pretty plug-and-play and will open up various DOS tools for common protocols (FTP, HTTP being the most useful for file transfer).
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, but anything still running and important these days (and not already virtualized) likely has one or more custom ISA cards doing undocumented things. You could get it to work, probably, but do you want to explain to the boss why the mass spectrometer is dead because you didn’t like using the floppy?
• oneplane 4y ago
  Will the next system you get have the same problem? Or will this issue be taken into consideration.
• walrus01 4y ago
  i wouldn't say the only way, though not fast, if you don't want to implement ISA 16-bit 10BaseT ethernet, you could use a rs232 serial port and something like 57600 8N1 connection and serial cable to a nearby linux system. at least then there would be no need to physically move media between systems.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  > The only way to get anything off off it is with a floppy or an IDE HDD reader. Another way is to dump the data in hex to the serial port, and write a serial port reader for your modern machine. That's how I transferred files from my old PDP-11 to the IBM PC in the old daze.
  • assttoasstmgr 4y ago
    Why would you do such a thing when you can use something like Kermit (which has been around for over 40 years)....
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      Mine worked much better than Kermit. It was a 5K program vs 200K for Kermit, if I recall correctly.
      • hasmanean 4y ago
        Spoken like a true programmer.
        • WalterBright 4y ago
          The company I worked for (Data I/O) initially told me not to write the program. I did it anyway as a rogue project. It turned out to be ideal for Data I/O's customers to connect Data I/O's LogicPak to a PC, and the salesmen started making copies on their own to give to their customers. It increased sales, and wasn't a big klunky program with a zillion unneeded features like Kermit. Eventually, Data I/O made it an official part of the LogicPak. It was a VT-100 terminal emulator for the PC, with a side feature of capturing the received data to a file, or writing the contents of a file to the serial port.
• derefr 4y ago
  I'm surprised nobody ever manufactured the floppy-disc equivalent of those audio-to-casette-player adapters. Making one would be a fun project... But the real, practical answer is that there are floppy drive emulators that speak (whatever protocol floppy drives speak) to the host, but which let you plug a USB Mass Storage device into the front: https://www.amazon.com/Gotek-SFR1M44-U100-1-44MB-Floppy-Emulator/dp/B088ZT7J7G/ https://www.amazon.com/Gotek-SFR1M44-U100-1-44MB-Floppy-Emul... Just rip out the machine's floppy drive and put one of those in its place. Button on the front pages through virtual "floppies" stored as files on your USB stick. It's sort of like using a game-console flash cart.
  • EvanAnderson 4y ago
    Re: the floppy equivalent of a “cassette adapter” does exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath They don’t actually emulate a floppy diskette, though. They have a signaling protocol that works through the floppy mechanism but they won’t just work in a floppy drive with the stock BIOS floppy calls. They need a driver to implement the host side of the protocol.
    • derefr 4y ago
      Sure, yeah. A real "cassette adapter" for floppies would need not just a regular one-head magnetic transducer inside the diskette, but some mechanism to determine which track the read-head is trying to read. Maybe another, much more sensitive magnetic transducer, to determine how far away the read-head is from it. Maybe a strain gauge, if the read-head actually makes contact with the medium. Or maybe just a bunch of metallic pads that close different voltages on an ADC ladder circuit — presuming that doesn't disturb the flux pattern being read out by the head. Though I suppose you don't really need to know where the head is. You could just have an array of very small magnetic transducers, with good magnetic isolation between each one, where each one is looping over a different track; and whatever track the read-head angles onto, it just ends up "plugged into" one of the transducers that was already there waiting for it. Kind of like how a "cassette adapter" for 8-track players would have to work, if one of those was ever made. Bonus thought: try to imagine how a "cassette adapter" for VHS would have to work. Tape with conductive wire run through it in on a matching slanted raster, etc. There's a reason they never made them :)
• dtx1 4y ago
  Arent there IDE to Compact Flash Adapters?
  • bombcar 4y ago
    They’re often not happy about being swapped live (because DOS isn’t a huge fan of hard drives disappearing).
    • __del__ 4y ago
      that's where "abort, retry, fail?" really shines
    • jeroenhd 4y ago
      I'm far from an expert in these things, but I've seen SD cards with WiFi servers that allow remote browsing photos on them straight from the camera itself (not using the weird WiFi-over-SD extensions to give cameras themselves WiFi, which the SD standard allows for). Surely someone could take one or those IDE/CF adaptors and add small (100MB) write only and read only partitions controlled by a chip like an ESP32. You'd get two drive letters, one you can use to push data to the WiFi server and one you can use to pull data from there. That way you don't even need to write much of a driver for the DOS system at all because there's no locking and filesystem corruption to deal with. The parts are worth a dollar at most, all you'd need to figure out is the interfacing with the file system. You can even do Linux style device control by exposing fake files to DOS that the system can try to write to for things like configuration. Maybe someone in the legacy gaming space can work out an open source product for this! I think many people would love to transfer stuff through easier means and selling such devices to enterprises stuck with old hardware can be a significant business opportunity.
• autoexec 4y ago
  Got any recommendations for a good IDE HDD reader? I've seen some cheap USB ones on amazon, but all the reviews are full of people who either got non-working hardware or lost data using them. Seems like a fairly simple device, but it's like you either get garbage under $5 or something that sells for hundreds with little in between.
  • zozbot234 4y ago
    IDE/SATA converters are widely available, and you can use them to connect an old drive to any modern system.
• candiodari 4y ago
  Why not just run the old DOS system as a VM and sidestep the entire problem? I doubt performance will be a problem ...
  • Symbiote 4y ago
    It is probably running some specialist scientific equipment or similar.
    • jiggawatts 4y ago
      I've worked on legacy DOS systems, and virtualising them is generally the right approach. You can use just about any modern hardware, and the VM will nicely abstract it away. Plumbing hardware through to the VM can be a challenge, but not impossible to overcome.
      • lokedhs 4y ago
        Sometimes it's for retrocomputing purposes. Using the old hardware is the whole point.
  • grapescheesee 4y ago
    The systems are running RTX setups. Realtime motion planning and commands. I am sure it can be done in VM's (with some heavy engineering time) but its really beyond it's planned or expected life.
• snvzz 4y ago
  >The only way to get anything off off it is with a floppy or an IDE HDD reader. The serial port should generally be faster and more practical.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]