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Blast from the past?

May
10
3
Not a support question but I thought some of you old-timers would appreciate this. Remember brand cards? Here's a really old one, from ~1991. Found it among old papers I was sorting.

Tom

IMG_1321.jpeg
 
I recently came across some of those too. When I moved a couple years ago, I had a collection of 5.25" and 3.5" floppies that I got rid of. There were some very old copies of 4DOS in there.
 
Ohmigosh, it's Tom Rawson! I used to send you irritating bug reports!

My wife was going through old stuff in our basement once and came across one of those 4DOS registration cards. What is this, anyway? she asked. And: Throw it away?

No way
, says I. That's a historical document.

I shoulda framed it, because of course now I have no idea where else in the basement it ended up. : )

— Mike
 
@samintz yes, and notice that the brand card indicates the disk size. I was using those new-fangled 3.5" disks.

@mikea yup it's me. I don't remember any irritating bug reports so you're good there :). Mine was also in the basement.
 
3.5" disks. When they went from 360K (or whatever it was) to 1+ MB (or whatever), it was as if the sun rose in the sky for the first time. : ) Then there were the 8" hard-sector disks we used in typesetting machines. Argh, what a painful memory. One unfortunate crimp and bye-bye, disk.

I still have my original disks for 4DOS, I think. Maybe I'll try feeding them into the disk slot of my ancient Kaypro 4 to see what happens. : )
 
3.5" disks were typically 1.44 MB. 5.25" were 360 KB but there was a high density kind that went up to 1.2 MB. (Even further in the past, at one point my dad had some 8" disks around also but those were well before PCs. What sticks in my memory (sorry) better are the old IBM 1130 1 MB disk cartridges, I think they were 14", encased in hard plastic.)

Don't know if anyone tried to run 4DOS on a Kaypro4. But if it runs DOS ...
 
What sticks in my memory (sorry) better are the old IBM 1130 1 MB disk cartridges, I think they were 14", encased in hard plastic.)
NCR had something like that back in the mid seventies only they were in stacks of 4 or 5. Company folklore had it that they were so heavy and spun so fast that their mechanical failures had cost lives!
 
The Kaypro ran CP/M and I'm thinking it wouldn't have had a clue what to do with a DOS program. If that line lasted into the DOS era and ever ran under DOS, I didn't know about it.
 
I first got 4DOS around 1993/94, and I don't remember having one of those brand cards, perhaps they weren't used in the UK? I do still have these on a bookshelf though:

books.jpg


They have a copyright date of 1990, and were printed in the UK. My serial number is on a label stuck on the inside cover, and it looks like there was a tear out registration card at the front of the manual too.

Happy days...
 
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My copy still has its registration card. It's over-stamped with the message "Upgrade - please do not return this registration card to Atlantic Coast". That name rings a faint bell; it must be who I bought it from.

I was running it on a second-hand Compaq, which I'd upgraded to 5 MB!
 
The image on the front of the manual looks like a wedge of cheese taken out on the moon. What was its significance?
 
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