With all that tinkering behind me, it was time to get some work done. But I had to surmount yet another obstacle: Where would I get the software for my tasks?
I had brought along about eight boxes of 5.25-inch floppies filled with IBM PC software that I had collected over the decades. In case I needed a program I didn't already have on disk, I set up a Pentium II-era machine running Windows 95 nearby. I had earlier equipped that newer system with a 5.25-inch floppy drive and an ethernet card so that it could serve as a bridge between the old and the new. I could pull software from both the Internet and my file server at home, and then write it to fresh, blank double-density disks for use in the 5150.
The first thing I did was set up my own master boot disk. I used PC DOS 3.3 as the OS because it was of the right vintage and I had it on hand. I placed a few official DOS files that I needed on the disk (such as the FORMAT and MODE commands and ANSI.SYS). Then I quickly located my favorite DOS text editor, SemWare QEdit, and crafted my own AUTOEXEC.BAT file, which tells DOS what tasks to run or what drivers to load when the computer first boots. Oh AUTOEXEC.BAT, how I missed you!
CGA Graphics Are Better Than I Remembered
One of the first disks I ran across was for a shareware image-file viewer called CompuShow (often called CShow for short). I regularly used CShow in the early 1990s to view GIF files that I had downloaded from local BBSs.
Undoubtedly, CShow's best feature was that it supported just about every graphics card and graphical mode then known to PC-kind. It would take an image--whatever the resolution and bit depth--and convert it on the fly to display on your graphics card.
CShow had no trouble running on the 5150, and it handily supported the machine's CGA board in either 320 by 400 resolution with four colors, or 640 by 400 in monochrome. I loaded up a few images that I happened to have nearby on disk.
First I viewed a color GIF headshot of Gillian Anderson in her X-Files days.
For the second image, I decided to display something a little more modern in monochrome.
CShow on the 5150 handled both images well, considering the limitations of the CGA standard. Overall, disk capacity ended up being the limiting factor in viewing images: With only 360KB available, I could fit just a few images on a disk.
Next page: Surfing the Web and checking email
But Can It Surf?
