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Good DOS terminal emulators for the 5150 that run on a 360KB floppy?

pkhoury

pkhoury

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Like the title says, I'm looking for some terminal emulators that can run on a 360KB floppy. VT100 is a must and VT220 would be nice. I'm trying to find something that will run on a 5150. I'm running the first BIOS version, and will be using this machine as part of my demo at VCF SW, so hard drives aren't an option. I might use Interlink, but I'm trying to find something floppy-wise in case I opt not to have a 486-based ThinkPad in the background for Interserver/Interlink.

I'd love to run Telix, but it appears to need almost 700KB. I did find MS Kermit, though it's not the most intuitive interface. Also checked out winworld, but there wasn't a lot of options there, either. Menu driven is also a big plus.
 
It is possible to squeeze Telemate 2.00 on to a 360k floppy disk. I can't remember off hand if I had to use PKLITE on it, but it fit and ran. Telemate was one of the best terminal programs for BBSing back in the day.

Other popular ones included Qmodem and Procomm.

If you are searching Winworld, use the built in search to list the entire "communications" category.
 
If you have a network card mTCP Telnet has decent PC-ANSI emulation and can still do fun things like upload or download files. And it can render RLE graphics directly; with some minor prep you can give people a taste of what Compuserve was like.

(See http://brutmanlabs.org/RLE/RLE_Graphics.html for details ...)

It works over a serial port if you use SLIP.
 
mbbrutman said:
If you have a network card mTCP Telnet has decent PC-ANSI emulation and can still do fun things like upload or download files. And it can render RLE graphics directly; with some minor prep you can give people a taste of what Compuserve was like.

(See http://brutmanlabs.org/RLE/RLE_Graphics.html for details ...)

It works over a serial port if you use SLIP.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, I don't. I only have 5 slots - 2 are for memory expansion, and I forgot to mention that I'm also capped out at 544KB of RAM, then floppy controller, and 2 slots for both a Hercules and IBM CGA card. I'd also be worried that the TCP stack would take too much precious RAM...
 
pkhoury said:
But will it fit on a 360KB drive?
Click to expand...
Try it out if not have a look at the others on my link.for goodness sake.

That was my first google hit. Of many using a modern web browser.

Their is only soo much we can do. The rest of the effort needs to be done by you to solve your trivial little issue.

There should be something on the SIMTEL archives as well. Over to you......
 
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Caluser2000 said:
Try it out if not have a look at the others on my link.for goodness sake.

That was my first google hit. Of many using a modern web browser.

Their is only soo much we can do. The rest of the effort needs to be done by you to solve your trivial little issue.

There should be something on the SIMTEL archives as well. Over to you......
Click to expand...
I forgot about the simtel archives. You don't need to be snippy. I did specifically state I needed something that could run on a 360KB floppy in my first post. I don't have a hard drive available to install on, either. Just a gotek and a physical Teac.
 
If you think that is being snippy you should see what other members post here. Mine is mild in comparison.. Wihtout prividing any help wehatsoeve like I have.
 
The earlier Procomm, before ProcommPlus, was quite small.
Decades ago I wrote a small Procomm/Telix lookalike as an exercise to get to know the Zortech comms library, no idea what happened to it.
 
pkhoury said:
Unfortunately, I don't. I only have 5 slots - 2 are for memory expansion, and I forgot to mention that I'm also capped out at 544KB of RAM, then floppy controller, and 2 slots for both a Hercules and IBM CGA card. I'd also be worried that the TCP stack would take too much precious RAM...
Click to expand...

Yes, the 5150 is a bit limited. I use a Xircom PE3-10BT for machines that don't have a slot or an open slot. And SLIP through the serial port works too, but you need a WiFi modem running SLIP firmware or a second router machine for that.

For the record, Telnet complete with the TCP/IP code is about 200KB. Unless you have a lot of TSRs loaded a 512K machine has plenty of room.

Somebody else suggested an earlier version of Procomm. I'm pretty partial to Procomm 2.4.3 which was a great version for smaller DOS machines.
 
What memory cards are you using? There are 576K cards out there that were designed to get an early 5150 up to 640K. (Obviously not with the earlier BIOS).
 
jafir said:
What memory cards are you using? There are 576K cards out there that were designed to get an early 5150 up to 640K. (Obviously not with the earlier BIOS).
Click to expand...
I'm using an IBM 64-256KB card, and then an AST MegaPlus. I think I'm technically at 576KB, but the first revision BIOS only sees 544KB, because it ignores the setting of DIP switch 5. The motherboard maxes out at 64KB, and testing all those 4116's was a time consuming pain in the ass (I had a bunch that were bad).
mbbrutman said:
Yes, the 5150 is a bit limited. I use a Xircom PE3-10BT for machines that don't have a slot or an open slot. And SLIP through the serial port works too, but you need a WiFi modem running SLIP firmware or a second router machine for that.
Click to expand...
Yup, very limited. Two memory boards just to get it to the max the first (and second) BIOS revision can see, CGA for video, Hercules if I want to switch (and for my parallel) and then my floppy controller. I've seen those Xircom cards, but I know they're NOT cheap. Surprised someone hasn't made an opensource clone of one.

I forgot about wifi modems... I actually have one of those, though I'd probably have to enable telnet on the Raspberry Pi. I was opting for serial, just because it's more authentic, if you will.
 
I know for sure that Pibterm will fit on a 360K disk and am pretty sure it supports VT100.
 
I would recommend PC-VT for true terminal emulation. It emulates a VT52, VT100, & VT102 as well as Tektronix 4010/4014 (in CGA) and can be run on any PC with as little as 128K installed and only about that much disk space if you remove the documentation text files. The VT emulation is complete enough that you even have almost the same configuration screens found on the original terminals. (Some additional features were added to the config screens for PC specific extensions to the emulation.) While not necessarily what could be called menu driven, it does give a high degree of emulation and can do file transfers with xmodem (built-in) or any external protocol program like DSZ for zmodem.

The last version was 10, and is available from these sites:
ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/simtelnet/msdos/commprog/pc-vt100.zip
https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simtelnet/msdos/commprog/pc-vt100.zip

Note: Earlier versions, like 8.3, had more compatible config screens than version 10 does. But, they also were missing more PC specific features.

You might also have a look at QVT which adds VT220 emulation (but doesn't have Tektronix 4010/4014.) I'm not as familiar with this one, but IIRC it was more menu driven as well. It should be able to run in 512K, I think, maybe even 256K.

You can get it from these places:
ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/simtelnet/msdos/commprog/qvt374.zip
https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simtelnet/msdos/commprog/qvt374.zip
 
My suggestions would be PC-Talk , Bitcomv3.02 or Supercom v1.01. And then there is Smartterm v 2.4, but that one comes on 3 floppies. (installs on only one though)
Images are attached. If you need only the files, let me know
 

Attachments

  • Bitcom302.img.zip
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  • PC-File.img.zip
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  • SmartTerm240.zip
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  • Supercom101.img.zip
    144.2 KB · Views: 1
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