[vox-tech] floppy madness

[Jimbo]

ummmm...you can have my wife's olds pc.  Pentium 2 and rock solid.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Jay Salzman" <p@dirac.org>
To: <vox-tech@lists.lugod.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2004 8:43 AM
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] floppy madness


> On Wed 28 Apr 04,  8:23 AM, Ken Bloom <kabloom@ucdavis.edu> said:
> > On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 07:05:52AM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > I made a bootable CD using the "DOS" that comes with Windows 95.  It's
> > > the kind of DOS that says "Starting Windows 95" at boot time.
> > >
> > > I tried to run the executable that should upgrade the BIOS, but got
the
> > > message:
> > >
> > >    A:\> bios_6bx.exe
> > >    This program must be run under Win32.
> > >
> > > Can someone tell me precisely what Windows 95 is?  I was under the
> > > impression that the DOS that comes with Win95 *is* actually win32.
It's
> > > the win32 kernel without graphics support.  At least that was my
> > > understanding.  Can someone explain what the relation is between
Windows
> > > 95 and the "DOS" that comes with it?
> >
> > I know that Windows 95 is an evolution of the DOS product line, but I
> > don't know the exact details of how it works. My totally uneducated
> > guess would be that DOS starts, then at some point it starts Windows.
> >
> > At any rate, the Win32 apis are implemented in kernel32.dll and
> > user32.dll (I think those were the names), but your floppy disk has
> > only three (four?) files on it:
> > msdos.sys
> > io.sys
> > command.com
> > bios_6bx.exe (?)
> > (The first two are the MS-DOS kernel, the third is the shell)
> >
> > This is MS-DOS of olde, without the Win32 APIs.
> >
> > >
> > > It looks like I'll have to use Ryan's idea of finding a Windows hard
> > > drive to swap into this computer.
> >
> > My name isn't Ryan. ;)
>
> Heh.  I was actually thinking about my "Great Spam Adventure" post.  He
> had replied, and I've been meaning to get back to him, but fixing my
> wife's computer takes precedence over that.
>
> In any event, I think I now understand why it wouldn't run.  It wasn't
> the flash utility itself --- the it was a self-extracting zip file,
> which requires the ability to put a window on the screen and draw a
> picture of a file uncompressing.  Jeez.  Talk about non-functionality.
>
> Well, I have my wife's old win95 running on this computer.  I just
> extracted the BIOS flash utility but it won't run.  But now that it's
> extracted, I'll try booting into non-graphicalk win95 and see if it
> works there.
>
> For the record, win95 will work on an SMP machine.  It probably just
> ignores the second CPU.  I've been too busy to investigate that further.
>
> Holy cow.  I feel like I've been walking miles, in a strong wind,
> uphill, in wet mud.  Every little thing I want to try becomes a huge
> task only to find it doesn't work.  This is exhausting!
>
> Pete
>
> -- 
> Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.  -- Albert Einstein
> GPG Instructions: http://www.dirac.org/linux/gpg
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