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- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!rock!concert!ais.com!bruce
- From: bruce@ais.com (Bruce C. Wright)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec.micro
- Subject: Re: Rainbow 100+
- Message-ID: <1992Dec11.113407.5893@ais.com>
- Date: 11 Dec 92 11:34:07 GMT
- References: <1992Dec6.181856.15863@cs.wright.edu> <1992Dec7.222607.3388@newstand.syr.edu> <1992Dec8.210008.5888@ais.com> <1992Dec10.003626.599@news.columbia.edu>
- Organization: Applied Information Systems, Chapel Hill, NC
- Lines: 54
-
- In article <1992Dec10.003626.599@news.columbia.edu>, lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner) writes:
- > In article <1992Dec8.210008.5888@ais.com> bruce@ais.com (Bruce C. Wright) writes:
- >>In article <1992Dec7.222607.3388@newstand.syr.edu>, amichiel@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Allen J Michielsen) writes:
- >>>
- >>> If there is the DEC DOS 2.11 version available, usually for free, and the
- >>> system isn't compatible, why would anybody buy a dos 3.1 or code blue.
- >>
- >>Several reasons:
- >>
- >> 1) DOS 3.1 can handle larger hard disk drive partitions. DEC DOS 2.11
- >> couldn't handle partitions larger than 8MB as I recall; DOS 3.1
- >> can handle up to 32MB. This makes dealing with reasonable-sized
- >> hard disks more tolerable.
- >
- > DECmate MS-DOS 2.11 can handle up to about 11 MB bootable partitions and
- > 32 MB non-bootable partitions. I suspect that Rainbow MS-DOS does about
- > as well, but few Rainbows have enough disk present to test this out.
-
- I'm _quite_ sure that DEC MS-DOS 2.11 for the Rainbow did not support 32MB
- partitions, but I don't remember exactly where the cutoff was. I _think_
- it was 8MB -- I distinctly remember that when we had 20MB drives on the
- Rainbow running DOS 2.11, we had to break them up into several partitions;
- 3 as I recall. The DECmate MS-DOS apparently was less crippled.
-
- > It is noteworthy that there at least two MS-DOS 3.10 versions, only one from
- > Suitable Solutions. The other is from DEC itself.
-
- The DEC version of MS-DOS 3.1 was an internal project that was never
- officially available outside of DEC. There was never an end-user version
- of it marketed and there is no documentation available. The Suitable
- Solutions MS-DOS 3.1 was derived from the DEC version (DEC licensed the
- rights to the code to Suitable Solutions under some undisclosed licensing
- arrangement), and was so far as I know the only version of DOS 3.1 that
- was actually _sold_ to end-users.
-
- >>You can use most drives with an ST506 interface on the Rainbow. So you
- >>can use an ST-225 as a 5 or 10MB drive, though I'd rather use it as a
- >>20MB drive :-). The Rainbow does support that, although you do have to
- >>get one of the PD disk formatting programs for it like WUTIL (the standard
- >>DEC disk formatting program didn't support anything but DEC drives, and
- >>the ST-225 doesn't have the same geometry as any DEC drive).
- >
- > Wrong; the ST-225 *is* the RD-31. It is standard on DECmate III+ and often
- > found in DM II.
-
- I do not believe that the Rainbow ever officially supported that drive;
- certainly the standard DEC hard disk drive formmater did not know about
- it. I didn't necessarily mean that the drive wasn't used in _some_ DEC
- machines, but it wasn't supported on the Rainbow and the Rainbow software
- knew _nothing_ about it. You need third-party software in order to use it.
- I think the point was that by the time the ST-225 was out, DEC had already
- effectively given up on the Rainbow.
-
- Bruce C. Wright
-