Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2007 00:13:14 -0500 To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>, WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net> From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com> Subject: [WSFA] Re: Geeky humor... Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net> At 1/19/2007 08:42 PM, dicconf wrote: >On Fri, 19 Jan 2007, Mike B. wrote: > > > At 1/19/2007 12:43 PM, dicconf wrote: > > > >> Smart man. Actually, my WP5.11 is on an old DOS machine which is > >> incapable of being connected to the net. > > > > Ummm...does it have a serial port? If so, it can be hooked up to the > > net...I've done it. Don't know if I still have the software to do it > > here anymore...I'd have to look around. > >It might, but it doesn't have a math coprocessor. It's a 386 with a >half-gig drive. 500 megs on MS-DOS? That's a bunch of logical partitions! Last MS-DOS I used wouldn't let you have more than 32 megs in a partition. Most 386 motherboards didn't support drives that big either...there were issues with cylinder/head count, but since a really large drive in those days was 80 megs, it generally wasn't a problem. We were into the 486 days before the various tricks to get around that stuff were common in BIOS software. Before that you had to have loadable driver support to deal with larger drives. Unless my memory has lost parity...it's been 20 years... ;-) Not sure that a math coprocessor should be necessary to do TCP/IP over a SLIP link. The speed limiter on that is going to be the modem. > > Of course, without a browser, you'd be limited to things like FTP, > > Gopher, and telnet, but there's more to the net than just the web. > >Urk. We got burned by Telnet - it's totally insecure. FTP I use >but not Gopher. FTP isn't secure either. Neither is HTTP (standard web stuff), SMTP (e-mail), or much of anything else on the net. SSH can be reasonably secure, as is anything tunneling through it. SFTP, which is NOT FTP but does some of the same things, can also be reasonably secure. I say "can be" not "is", because how secure these are depends a lot on how the systems at each end are run. HTTPS stuff can be reasonable too. I haven't tried Gopher in years...don't know if any servers are still around for it these days. > I do the net stuff on the other computer. I try to >keep my WP computer essentially net-free, except that when I download >some ASCII text and want to convert it, too often something in it >doesn't translate and WP freezes. Sounds like it isn't ASCII text...might be handy to have a way to verify that it is before you move it over (a program to do that would be simple in BASIC...and almost trivial in C, but your system probably came with BASIC). Pure ASCII won't have any bytes that aren't between 0 and 127 decimal (0 and 7F hex). Macs and some Windows software like to call stuff "plain text" that isn't the ASCII from MS-DOS's era, but has various codes in the 128+ range. You may also be having problems with end of file characters...it's been a lot of years since I did much with MS-DOS, and it may vary with the version running, but in the early days I seem to remember that files ended with a Control-Z byte, since the older directory setups didn't include an end of file byte offset for the last sector. Some software expected those even after MS-DOS got rid of the need for them...and you seem to be running pretty ancient stuff. If WP is expecting that, and it isn't there, it may be picking up junk bytes from the last sector of the file and there's no telling what those might be. >The last time it froze part of >the program and I haven't ever figured out how to fix it. :-( I can >still use it, but some of the features are blocked. Reinstall it? Last resort, but it usually works for most software on MS OSs. I'd have to know a lot more about WP than I do to suggest anything less drastic. Maybe one of the other WP people here will have a better suggestion. -- Mike B. -- "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates '81