Subj : A rather general question
To   : Roy Witt
From : Gerald Miller
Date : Mon Jul 05 2004 07:05 pm

Hello Roy,

    Responding to a post in the LAN area:
    On Saturday July 03 2004 at 18:34,
    Roy Witt [1:10/22] wrote to Gerald Miller,
    about: A rather general question

 RW> :o) A few weeks ago, I set an old 486 at the curb as 'free' for the
 RW> taking.

I'd have taken it to use as a dedicated router/firewall...  I've got an
Aptiva 333MHz box with one floppy disk drive, one PCI slot and one ISA slot
(for two NICs) that I will probably use -- don't need a hard drive,
monitor, keyboard or mouse after it is set up; waiting for my son to find
the magazine article and the URL so I can cobble the thing together.

 GM>> It took me almost two years (off and on) to get WfW3.11 on the
 GM>> network [okay, the INet] because the particular NIC that I was
 GM>> trying to use had some flaws in the driver information file and
 GM>> the company was not willing to spend resources to support an OS
 GM>> that is so outdated.  I wound up trashing the NIC in favor of one
 GM>> that has WfW drivers [Netgear].

 RW> At that point, I would have trashed the OS too.

You can believe that I was very tempted to trash WfW311, but I never throw
anything away....  ;-)]   I'm very glad that I persevered -- I just had to
find the right place to ask my questions.

 GM>> Eventually, I want to move my Fidonet software over to the
 GM>> Windows 98SE box because it is my understanding that W98SE is the
 GM>> last version of Windows to have any support for DOS.

 RW> Ummm. No, I have occasion to use DOS and there's a DOS prompt icon on
 RW> my W2K desktop.  (there are things I can do faster by dropping to a
 RW> DOS prompt, rather than look around W2k and wasting my time.

I've been a DOS Fossil for more than sixteen years and my son had to keep
harping at me to try Windows.  Now, I have three Windows system (soon to be
four) and the only time I use DOS is for Fidonet.

 GM>> .....
 GM>> Windows #_should_# communicate with one another......

 RW> I had a similar problem trying to marry that 486 DOS 6.2 machine to a
 RW> W98SE machine. Finally gave up and installed W95 on the DOS machine.
 RW> What a slug.  I then replaced the DOS/W95 machine with a Pentium II
 RW> w/W98SE and I use it now as the internet mailer/reader for Fidonet.
 RW> It's so faithful, it just sits in a corner on an old desk and has
 RW> about a 1/4" of dust all over it.

 RW> I have one folder that gets relavant files put into it, that is
 RW> accessable by all of the machines on the LAN. I call it 'Put Fidonet
 RW> Sh*t Here'...

I have something similar -- JUNK!

 RW> I'm the editor of a local car club newsletter and I have these folders
 RW> under 'My Documents' that keep things straight by using the same file
 RW> naming procedure as you find with fidonews; CCN0407.DOC, which tells
 RW> me it's the july issue for 2004's Camaro Corral Newsletter (reading it
 RW> backwards, of course).  Each file is kept in a folder with the same
 RW> name in the Camaro Corral Newsletter folder.  I go through the same
 RW> procedure every month, trying to figure out what I did last month to
 RW> make it work. I have too many folders and can't remember where
 RW> everything is!

One of the reasons I have Total Commander on all the Windows machines -- it
can find anything (marvelous search engine and a FTP program built in as
well)...

 GM>> I'll need some time to get my ducks in a row (set up the folders,
 GM>> set the folder properties to share, etc., etc.)...

 RW> Hmmm, a job that's never done...good luck.

Give me a couple more days -- I'm almost there.

           Cheers ... Gerald

.... If code was meant to be portable it would have wheels and a handle.
--- GoldED+/DPMI32 v1.1.5-040330 [msg of July 05, 2004]
 * Origin: Some wisdom just doesn't fit into an 80 character line. (1:342/512)

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