Yes, I still have one, a super non-powerfull P100 with a whole 128Mb of memory, running Fedora Core 3 (I think, been a while since I had that going). It’s been gathering dust for a while, suppose I better blow some compressed air through it a few hours before turning it on.
Many of you are probably asking why. Its a long story.
The short version is I was having a cleanup, and in the old manuals bookcase have found some old backup diskettes in a ‘book folder’ from many years ago. Backups of my old COBOL compiler, ADA prolog, and M4 (I think). I thought I had lost M4, maybe that is a backup of it, maybe not, have to try and see.
Whats that got to do with the old P100 ?.
Well the backups are on high density 5.25inch floppy diskettes thats why. The old P100 is the only machine I have with a working 5.25 inch floppy drive (well it was working when I retired it), let that be a lesson to you all, never throw anything away, you will need it one day; and the funny look the gut in the PC shop gave me all those years ago when I demanded non-standard a 5.25inch drive in my then new PC just in case I wanted to restore any of my old backups from my 286 and 486 machines.
Hopefully after a good dose of compressed air and a little rest period after that it will start up (carefully not saying fire up just in case the dust build up is real bad) and I can see whats on those old floppies. I think the old COBOL compiler actually needed the master floppy in the drive to run so thats probably a write-off.
Of course if it doesn’t start up I’ll have to pull out the floppy and install it in another of my more recent servers; one of the cd drivers on my dev machine is dead so I could put it in there, but I wonder if Fedora 12 still has drivers for the old 5.25inch floppy drives.
So thats my next weekend activities planned, doing some archive retrievals.
Oh bugger, I’m working unhealthy hours next weekend; the weekend after then.
Oh bugger, Fedora Core 13 will be released by then and I wanted to start upgrading all my servers to that on that second weekend.
I guess as the old P100 will have to be in a different room to my work area I will be doing a lot of running about, but how to fit it all in ?.
Thinking… if I download the FC13 DVD and build a local repository first, then preupgrade the repository machine, then pull down all the updates and merge them in the local repository… I should be able to let preupgrade run pretty much hands off to upgrade my dev server; I could try restoring the files off the floppies while the dev server is upgrading.
And hopefully get all the files retrieved from the archives (wonder if I left a copy of the archiving program on the floppies; another worry) while thats happening.
Of course then I have to start building a new kickstart script for my web server using FC13 and thats a good few days work to test kickstarting into a VM before playing with the real server.
So much to do, so little spare time.
Probably be a month before I know whats on those backup floppy diskettes. Not much of a cleanup then, I can’t bin them until I have examined them so I’ll give up on cleaning for another month. And yes that is perfectly logical for a single male who lives on his own (and still has a P100 in storage). Actually, as I need the P100 again maybe I would need some of the other stuff at some time anyway; pherhaps I should put of cleaning out the junk for another few years to be on the safe side.
I will certainly be keeping the P100 for a while, who knows what else may turn up I need it for.
Did I mention I still have a working Toshiba 8086 laptop (ok, battery died a long time ago, but it still works on mains), with a good old CGA orange screen, no hard drive just dual low density 3.5inch drives, running DOS of course. laptops built in the old days last a lot longer than the ones built these days; but thats a different post one day, maybe. This one is about the benefits of never throwing things out :-).
