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Help with IBM 5160 XT on Internet Browser

johnnydicamillo

Experienced Member
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I look at fdisk.com and looked at bobcat the internet browser which would be compatible with my IBM 5160 XT, however the files is too large to fit on a 360kb floppy, how would I go about dong this, is there other alternatives. I have tried the minuet web browser however it fails to start up. Any help would be great.


Thank You
 
One way to negate the floppy capacity issue is to load it in as a file (or files) via the serial port from a more modern computer using a comm program such as procomm or telix on the XT? Hyperterminal is a good program to use on the host side. It comes with XP and I think earlier versions of Windows too.

Tez
 
Since you've got a hard drive, try moving the files over using Interlink, or serial port transfer, get an 8-bit NIC, substitute 3½" drives for your 5¼" ones to give you 720K per floppy (without changing the controller), use a ZIP drive, get an XTIDE (you should be able to add files to the CF card from just about any PC with a CF card reader. There are utilities to split a file in pieces so that you can recombine the pieces on your 5160's hard drive.

Lots of options...
 
As Chuck(G) mentioned, there are file utilities that can split the file into pieces. I would suggest Winrar to split the 1.1MB file into 4 parts, copy them one at a time to the XT and re-assemble with the DOS version of Rar.

FWIW, there is a ton of old browsers at http://browsers.evolt.org/ you can look at too. Might find something as small as 360k to play with.
 
I attempted to use bobcat back in the 90's with my XT...even then, it wasn't so usable for browsing web pages. I didn't take long to switch over to a Telnet client and a shell account on Grex, which is a public-access UNIX box in Ann Arbor, MI. They're still up and running, and provide mostly text-based services including e-mail accessible by a number of text-only clients (I prefer pine/alpine). You can of course use the Lynx (related to Bobcat) or Links browsers from the command line, and if you're using a terminal client for the XT that supports X/Y/Zmodem or Kermit, you can transfer files downloaded from the web directly to your XT.

I'd recommend checking out Mike Brutman's mTCP package...good DOS utilities for connecting to TCP/IP services, and they're /intended/ for use on really old PC-compatibles.
 
I attempted to use bobcat back in the 90's with my XT...even then, it wasn't so usable for browsing web pages. I didn't take long to switch over to a Telnet client and a shell account on Grex, which is a public-access UNIX box in Ann Arbor, MI. They're still up and running, and provide mostly text-based services including e-mail accessible by a number of text-only clients (I prefer pine/alpine). You can of course use the Lynx (related to Bobcat) or Links browsers from the command line, and if you're using a terminal client for the XT that supports X/Y/Zmodem or Kermit, you can transfer files downloaded from the web directly to your XT.

I'd recommend checking out Mike Brutman's mTCP package...good DOS utilities for connecting to TCP/IP services, and they're /intended/ for use on really old PC-compatibles.


I agree. While Telnet, FTP, IRC, DHCP, PING, etc. are well within reach on an XT class machine, browsing is just an exercise in frustration. It's not feasible without a lot more horsepower and extended memory. Fetching the content is easy - rendering it in a usable way is not.

Gopher would be interesting, and probably far more doable. Anybody want to bring Gopher back? :)
 
Gopher would be interesting, and probably far more doable. Anybody want to bring Gopher back? :)
Well, there are still a few Gopher sites running out there in Gopherspace! It's still a valid way of presenting textual data, and I believe Firefox will act as a Gopher browser, too.
 
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