 So just a short video today the other day I got this Toshiba T1000 laptop up and running and I mentioned that I was using a zip drive as a replacement hard disk for this Class of ancient machine with no internal storage And I thought it might be amusing to actually demonstrate doing this and show you how it works So for background this is a Toshiba T1000. It's a 1980 something very early laptop It's one of the first true portable DOS laptops That is it runs off battery power all the others tended to run off mains It's got 512 kilobytes of RAM a floppy disk drive DOS in ROM, which is what it's running from now and no hard drive What you're intended to do with it is to buy the RAM expansion which fits in here and Partition the RAM into working RAM and some storage But I don't have that so I'm stuck with Using the floppy disk drive, which is kind of painful But I have a zip drive. In fact, I have several zip drives this Is a zip drive? This was I omega's attempt to quote disrupt unquote the floppy disk market with a cheap and cheerful removable storage device Which takes these discs? Each disk stores 96 megabytes It's decently fast. It was decently cheap and They made lots of these and they were pretty popular for a while but unfortunately Two things killed them off one of which was cheap flash storage and the other was that I omega's attempt to make them cheap and cheerful Actually made them cheap and nasty Zip drives are notoriously flaky. I actually own five two of which have died I Also have this USB zip drive Which I plug into my real computer and used to put things on discs and this one also Started to make really nasty crunchy noises and I think it's dying too Your fine zip drives cheaply in any place that sells computer junk Finding one that works is slightly harder Anyway, let us fire this thing up and see how it works So the first thing you need is some power and I shall attempt to get the wire Into its little duct One of the zip drives. I actually managed to explode by connecting the wrong power supply to it So now I am more careful. There we go and green light is on into getting it works zip drives are scuzzy internally You can plug them in either via a scuzzy connection a parallel connection Which is what this is all for the later ones USB, but this is a parallel one so here and This plugs in here and they will work on even Unidirectional parallel ports, which is what makes them so great for these old XT machines Because they all had parallel ports and they'll all work with a zip drive so Now we have it What we need next is the driver? iOmega did make drivers for DOS and you got one with each drive But the driver was both pretty big like a hundred kilobytes Which is like intolerable on a machine this spec and also didn't run on anything lower than a 286 luckily a Replacement driver is available. It's called palm zip It is commercial software by trying to pronounce his name correctly Klaus Pekal And it costs the princely slum of eight euros and it is strongly worth having if you're into these machines. I have a copy on floppy disk here but Because this machine runs off ROM I can't actually install the driver. There is nowhere to put it. So what we need is another disk, which is blank and we're going to Install DOS onto it put the driver on the floppy disk and then boot the machine from the floppy disk now. I have previously Formatted it Me just adjust the contrast to make sure this shows up on the camera. There we go one empty disk Drive C here is the ROM So what we do now is we run the sys command to make the disk bootable takes a few moments and That has copied the DOS kernel onto the disk Unfortunately, there's a bug in this version of sys which is it doesn't actually copy the command shell So let's do that manually Okay, that is done. So we now have a bootable disk that will boot ROM now We want to get the driver onto it Now there is a slight problem here in that this machine only has one floppy disk drive and we have two disks That is the driver there palm zip dot sys and it is all of two and a half kilobytes Luckily DOS will quite happily pretend that it's got more than one disk You Simply say copy from drive a to drive b it's been configured to know there is no physical drive B, so what it will do is It will simply prompt me to swap disks. So this should do it Done now. We don't need this anymore to drive a let's change disks. There it is Now we need to set up the config sys And we're going to use the venerable edlin for this because this is the only editor this machine has a config sys Edlin is a very very early line editor There's no text display. You do everything on the command line. You see the star prompt there So we can use p to list the current file, which is course empty item insert text device equals sys Check mode which checks to see if the zip drive is installed before doing anything with the driver F to tell it is a fixed disk Bufflers 30 files equals 30 always worth having and Control Z to finish So now I can print the file Which does nothing because the cursor is on line 4 change to line 1 Print there it is you need to save and exit and we also need a Or to accept that to insert set path see the reason for that is All the utility files are on drive C So we need to add it to the path. So when we type a command it will find it and We also sell it That command comm is on drive C So that if DOS needs to reload the command shell it loads the ROM version rather than the floppy disk version but we still have to have a command shell on the floppy disk because The environment variable here is set by the command shell. So it has to load it before it can set it. It's stupid Later versions of DOS allowed you to set variables in the confixes Okay, we should be done. So we would pause boot from floppy palms it loads Clouse pickle. I did mispronounce his name And we're ready to go drive C is the ROM Drive D uses it drive Oops, we've got to actually insert the disk and there we go. It just works Performance is not brilliant But it's an XT class machine. So it's never gonna be brilliant is much faster than the floppy disk drive the The disk here is actually 96 megabytes But DOS 2 on this machine can only cope with drives of up to 32 megabytes. In fact, it's partitioned into three So we actually get drive D, drive E and drive F. On drive D I've put some utilities Cubasic the all-important gorilla dot bass and I attempted to install Windows But I can't make it work. The Toshiba's a bit weird Drive E is of course for games and I have turbo racer let's fire this up and As you can see It's all a bit muddy so It's a very crude racing game It runs admirably quickly on this slow machine You have to try and dodge Oncoming traffic And this is ludicrously hard Yeah, got no reaction time anyway Let's deal with that We've got the famous Alicat, which takes a few moments to load It's even got music Unfortunately, this one turns into complete hash on this LCD Yeah, I can barely see what I'm doing. I believe you're supposed to jump onto these barrels But how much you jump seems to depend enormously on how fast you're going So it's really difficult to judge anyway enough of that You can't actually exit this as far as I know so it's just reboot This is not really a gaming machine. It's a business machine. The text display is pretty decent You can get a choice of two forms Thick and thin I've got Arctic Adventure, which runs reasonably well, but it takes a while to load and it's pretty hard So I'm not going to try it here. We've got the Monkey Island demo, which surprisingly runs just fine Though this black on white screen makes all the graphics look really weird the CGA emulation turned everything into hash and It takes like 10 minutes to get through the unskippable intro sequence So not demonstrating that one Tomb of the Pyramids works reasonably well The best one of the lot is probably this which is of course dangerous Dave This is a bigger game. It's all of like 90k. So it takes a little while to load and yeah, this works again The graphics has hash but it's quite playable. It runs at full speed The weirdest thing about this game It's not just not the sound it's Dave's jumping physics, which are extremely strange Yeah, this works fine. You need to wait for Dave to reach the end Quit the Long thin aspect ratio, which is 80 characters across for 25 down and the characters are all square Does make a lot of the games quite difficult to play. I have to say it's much better at Graphical stuff. Yeah, I'm sorry add text-based stuff and graphics but I Don't use this for real work. So I don't have any Programming tools installed on it other than quick basic which is currently loading very very slowly. I believe this is the Cubasic from DOS 5 and It's kind of big for this low-grade machine. So Let's load a file, of course, we're going to be loading gorilla So you see just loading the file takes a while. This is it parsing it at about 30 lines of code a second It's not that big a file either. There we go so this is the Program itself and yeah, now just Let's keep scrolling even though I've let go the down key The text editor cannot quite keep up with what I'm doing this program is just Too big for this little machine, but it does run pretty well The actual runtime performance is pretty decent Yeah, let's watch the intro First we have to wait for the gorillas to be drawn Yes, well, you've probably seen gorillas This is the basic game that was shipped with Cubasic in DOS to demonstrate Cubasic Once they decided that the donkey dot bass was possibly a little bit, you know, not that impressive 40 is that gonna work? You can just see the banana flying here The SLCD is not great for animation and the performance isn't up to much Am I gonna hit it? I might No, it's a miss. Yeah. Anyway enough of this Now you probably can't hear it on the camera, but the spinning zip drive makes a Winning grating noise that's pretty similar to the old-school Winchester hard drives before they invented fluid bearings and It niggles away at the corner of your perception all the while you're using it and It's it's not even it it sort of oscillates up and down a little and It really iris really really irritating So yeah, that's not great Turning the thing off or ejecting the disc is so much nicer. Just Actually a nice Satisfying solenoid-based thing Palm zipped candles replacing the disc just fine. It's just sort of works so yeah There you have it As it drive on an old XT class machine. I've used this drive on several of my old machines though given that this is starting to break down and I've got four of these and two of them are dead. So I've got this one and a spare and that's it and Notorious unreliability I Have discovered somebody who's built a very simple circuit that allows you to bit bang a SD card using the parallel port So I might investigate that in the future It's a shame to lose the the mechanical Aspect which is very satisfying to use apart from the grating noise and Palm zip dot sis is amazingly small and fast the SD card driver is more complex but Yeah, the reliability is not great in these anyway if you have any XT class machines with no storage and You want a quick and dirty way to get more storage on them for demos You could do worse and try and find a one of the rare workings it drives and Give this a go get a copy of palms it very easy very simple It will work up until it breaks down Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video such as it is. Please let me know what you think in the comments