Thinkpads Forum

Straight from 1987 it's the IBM Personal System/2 "Colegiate Kit" bundle which includes 3.5" boot floppies for running Windows 1.04 off disk, 5.25" system disks for DOS 3.3, one 3.5" system disk for IBM DOS 3.3 and the 3.5" install disks for Windows 1.04. Original box and all documentation included (the DOS anual comes in a nice binder). If anyone is interested, make an offer.

Wow, you have such up-to-date software! I envy you! Since yesterday, I have been working on an old IBM desktop computer with only DOS 3.1! No Windows!

Well, here's a great chance for you to upgrade that dinosaur. If you want, I can even throw in my Bondwell 286 laptop for you to run the software on.

No offer from me, unfortunately. I have all that stuff in the basement. .. JDH

AlphaKilo470 wrote:Well, here's a great chance for you to upgrade that dinosaur. If you want, I can even throw in my Bondwell 286 laptop for you to run the software on.

Thanks for the offer but I don't really need to upgrade that dinosaur in my lab. All I need to do is copy a rare program from its hard drive (30MB!) and transfer it to a newer machine. I tried to do it through a parallel-port external Zip drive but couldn't get the DOS driver for the Zip drive to work. Looks like I will need to XCOPY or PKZIP (assuming it's supported by DOS 3.1) the program onto a bunch of 1.2MB floppy discs.

I beleive somewhere in the Win 3.1 Zip driver package (from Iomega's site) is a file called guest.exe that will enable paralell zip drive until next reboot.

Yeah, I used the guest.exe file but the computer just froze. I had always had luck using that file on other machines, though never tried it on an 80286. Perhaps 640KB of memory is not enough, or DOS 3.1 is too old, or the parallel port is broken. I was going to take the HDD out and install it as a slave drive on another computer, but discovered that this ancient HDD uses two bus cables (a regular IDE cable plus a smaller one), so it probably wouldn't be easy to connect it to a more modern HDD controller.

So, I will go to the university bookstore tomorrow and see if they still sell 1.2MB floppy discs.

LapLink3 will do that through a parallel cable. I used to use that all the time for fast and accurate transfers between DOS and early Windows machines. Handles any reasonable size of file. LapLink and all its supporting files will fit on a 5.25 inch floppy (under 150K) or a 3.5 inch diskette. ... JD Hurst

Hi,

In such cases I have allways used total commander's direct cable connection wich is very similar to laplink but it worked better for me.
Get tc from here: (uncripled shareware)
http://www.ghisler.com/
For the dos machine you need lptdos. You can find it here.
http://www.ghisler.com/tools.htm

This even worked for me on a x86 with dos 2.1

Good luck.

jdhurst and Belacqua, thanks for the tips. I used to use the Direct Link (or whatever it's called) command that came with DOS 6.2 quite often, but have never heard of Laplink or Total Commander. If I can find a parallel cable in my lab, I will try them.

i used to transfer files via parallel port back then and used norton commander 5 suite..i think i still have the NC5 package here with me, send me a private message if you need it..it works like a charm..