Another New Member

[Ted]

Hi all,

I just resurrected my PCjr, last used about 10 years ago. I had moved and then never bothered to unpack it. I decided to see if I could get it running again. I had to fiddle with the drives a bit, especially the hard drive. Also, I had to refresh my memory on which PC Enterprises cartridges and sidecars to use as I have several of them. The mouse and printer still needs to hooked up, but other than that, everything seems to work.

I noticed there's been some discussion on posting old jr newsletters. I have The Junior Report from January 1987 to March 1989 (about when it ceased publication) and the jrNewsletter from August 1989 - November/December 1993. Maybe the copyright issue could be resolved somehow.

Ted

[Brutman]

Hi Ted, welcome to our elite club! What possessed you after 10 years?

What kind of hard drive kit do you have? I know that PC Enterprises had a few to choose from.

I don't think that we will have terrible issues getting permission to republish the old newsletters online. I think that most people would be happy to have their work live on and to have people show an interest in it. It's just a matter to tracking people down. (I'd like to do it, but my plate is quite full and I'm happy when I find some time just to tinker.)


Mike

[Ted]

My hard drive is by SPC Diskitjr. It's a 20MB drive, but it's not a self booting setup. It's an external drive that's connected to a sidecar via ribbon cables (a little unsightly but it doesn't bother me).

Ted

[Brutman]

Ah, that is neat. I have seen the SPC advertisements in the old newsletters, but have never seen one or heard of somebody who had one in person. You have a truly unusual machine there.

Can you send me the config.sys, and any device drivers that are needed for it? I'm interested in disassembling the device driver to see how it works. I suspect that it is a conventional block mode device driver, but it might have some Jr specific twists in it.


Mike

[Ted]

Mike,

Please find attached information on the SPC Harddrive. Sorry it took me a while to respond, but I was on vacation. You should find the following files attached:
SPC_Manual.PDF
config.sys
scomp.com
backup.exe
shdfmt.exe
phdisks.all
phdisk.cnf
spd.com
shdio.bin

Those are the setup files that came with the harddrive, except for the config.sys. Let me know if you don't get them as I'm not sure I uploaded them correctly (for example, the phdisk.cnf file didn't look like it went correctly). And I didn't notice a way to tell what was actually sent, so I may have lost track of what I sent and not sent.

Ted

[Brutman]

Hi Ted,

No problem on the lag time .. everybody needs to unwind.

Where did you post the files though? I didn't think that I had attachments turned on in the forum, and I didn't see anything in email.


Mike

[Ted]

Well, the window that opens when you post a reply has two tabs: one is "options," the other is "upload attachment." So I just clicked on "upload attachment", used the browse button the locate the file, and then clicked on "Add the file." I repeated that for all the files. It never gave me any feedback as to what went and what didn't. But since I didn't get an error message, I sort of assumed they went, but I had a feeling that maybe they didn't. Anyway, I will send them to you tomorrow using regular email.

Ted

[Brutman]

Well, that's hoot - we do support attachments! I had never used it myself. A quick test shows that it worked.

Anyway, you can try again to attach them to a reply or send them by email. I'm going to try to a few more tests to see why they didn't stick.


Mike