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  1. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    And I now have the last two pieces of the puzzle: 1) a pair of dual-mode mice, to be shared between my DOSbook and my Chromebook, with their PS2 adapter dongles chained to their USB plugs, to make them harder to lose (note: drilling a PS2 adapter dongle so that the chain can be screwed to it is...
  2. hbquikcomjamesl

    1988 Sony kv-p14d trinitron CRT repair

    Congratulations (albeit belated) on that. For six months (more than half a lifetime ago), I worked a temporary assignment in Los Angeles Unified School District computer repair shop. Worst I got was touching 120VAC while working on a PET, but we had one OMR apprentice, who was working on a...
  3. hbquikcomjamesl

    Logitech really screwed up on the final revision of the M110!

    Back on the 19th, I ordered a Logitech M110 (combination USB/PS2) from Amazon, to share between my Chromebook and my DOSbook: as you might imagine, with two notebooks and their power supplies crammed into a single notebook case, space is at a premium. On the 25th, I took delivery on what turned...
  4. hbquikcomjamesl

    MSCDEX-compatible driver for a Dell Latitude C510/C610?

    I am a complete idiot. The reason why the Oak driver hadn't picked up the optical drive was because the Oak driver wasn't present. It hadn't dawned on me that C:\DOS, being a fresh PC-DOS 2000 installation (as opposed to everything else on C:, D:, E:, F:, and G:, which had been copied over from...
  5. hbquikcomjamesl

    MSCDEX-compatible driver for a Dell Latitude C510/C610?

    Found something on the Dell web site. Might be Samsung. I'll know sometime this evening.
  6. hbquikcomjamesl

    Tandon floppy drive no longer wants to read any disks

    Could be radial alignment. Do you have access to (1) a head-positioning utility, (2) an analog alignment disk to fit the drive, (3) an oscilloscope, and (4) the service manual for the drive? Unfortunately, the last time I did a radial alignment on a floppy drive was sometime in 1986. Probably...
  7. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    Well, if I were tasked with writing a definition of "DOSbook," it would be an extension of "DOS box." Just as a DOS box is a desktop or tower system that runs DOS, rather than WinDoze, Mac OS, Linux, XENIX, ChromeOS, other *nix, or OS/2 (or for that matter, TRSDOS, LDOS, OS-9, &c), a DOSbook...
  8. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    The F: and G: volumes have now made it onto the DOSbook, allowing me to work with Ventura Publisher chapters that reference stuff on those volumes. Together, they took only about 3 hours, but then again, unlike E:, they're both mostly empty space, even on my tower (and the DOS partitions on my...
  9. hbquikcomjamesl

    RPG in RPG

    No accident there. RPG's syntax was designed to be intuitive to anybody familiar with plugboard-programmable unit record machines. That's why, from the S/3 on, it was the primary HLL for IBM Midrange systems. IBM Rochester was, back in the 1960s, where IBM built unit record machines, not...
  10. hbquikcomjamesl

    RPG in RPG

    Not very well, actually: ILE ("Integrated Language Environment," which allows for static linkage of multiple modules, not necessarily in the same source language) RPG uses a 100-column line length. The last RPG version that I'm aware of, that used 80-column source lines, was the last OPM...
  11. hbquikcomjamesl

    RPG in RPG

    No; in modern ILE RPG. Ignoring the dubious but inexplicably popular "enhancements" that make RPG look like either PL/I or one of the QBASICs, instead of like RPG.
  12. hbquikcomjamesl

    RPG in RPG

    There's plenty of interactive work done in RPG. RPG has something called "The Cycle": an RPG program is, unless The Cycle is explicitly disabled, enclosed in an implicit do-until loop on a built-in boolean variable ("indicator" in RPG parlance) called LR ("Last Record"). If the program has a...
  13. hbquikcomjamesl

    MSCDEX-compatible driver for a Dell Latitude C510/C610?

    Not being able to use the optical drive module supplied with my new DOSbook is not a big deal, as the floppy drive module and the PCMCIA slots are more generally useful in a DOSbook (and if I really need to read optical media, I can always bring up Interlink Server on my DOS tower, sharing its...
  14. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    My Conturas didn't generally have problems with suspending (probably because they were so old). And (1) I don't really expect to do a lot of suspending with Ventura Publisher active (too much risk of crashing it, and a Ventura crash generally means going into Norton Disk Doctor to clean up a...
  15. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    To answer the question about model designation, here's the label from the bottom: But more to the point, after over nine hours of squeezing the entire contents of the E: volume on my DOS tower through a LapLink cable, Xerox Ventura Publisher runs, and runs nicely! And so does DOSShell, but I...
  16. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    With the aforementioned Compaq Conturas, it was the internal metal hinge (either zinc-alloy or aluminum-alloy, from the looks of it) that was breaking At one point, I fabricated a substitute that was so loose, I had to add a chain to hold the screen at a usable angle. At another point, I was...
  17. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    Not sure, but the hinge issues couldn't possibly be any worse than the hinge issues with 400-series Compaq Conturas. And this is refurbished, with a warranty, so I should think that if the CMOS battery hasn't already been taken care of, it would have self-destructed already.
  18. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    Last night, I was able to replicate the C and D volumes from my tower (allowing for the fact that the tower has a ZIP drive but no PCMCIA slots, while the DOSbook has PCMCIA slots but no ZIP drive) onto my DOSbook, via INTERLNK. Tonight, I'll see if I can get the E volume (where most of my...
  19. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    And with a new set of floppy disks, generated from CD, on pristine media, I was able to do a completely successful PC-DOS 2000 installation. It is now, officially, a DOSbook. Now I just need to copy in the stuff that isn't on the install media.
  20. hbquikcomjamesl

    Finally have something that looks like it will make a viable DOSbook!

    It works. And even better, it sticks. And as for scaling artifacts (which I already get on my built-from-mostly-junk-parts DOS/Linux tower, plugged into an LCD monitor), you don't know from scaling artifacts until you've tried to plug an IBM 3488 or 3489, or any third-party Twinax...
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