RISC PC compatible harddrives

This unscheduled blast of nostalgia was brought about by the boy of an ex-pat who we met up with recently that had never seen a Zip disc before. So I dug out a floppy disc, to much astonishment. Especially when I demonstrated it using an old Mavica camera and USB floppy reader. This was followed up with a 5.25" disc (that had his sister in fits of giggles over floppy disc and harddisc). He seemed totally flummoxed by a Betamax cassette, and didn’t even seem to recognise a VHS tape either.
So then I bought out my piece de resistance. An LP. Played on a little portable record player that had a valve amplifier inside. He didn’t believe that it was capable of making any sort of sound, and when “Hotel California” started to play, they were both shocked into silence. Possibly the first time they’d ever seen a mechanism of playing music in operation. Spinning disc, needle, vibrations, amplifier, speakers.

I can’t help but thinking they’d been incredibly sheltered to have never seen any of this stuff before.

Maybe if I see them again, I’ll show them the inside of my wind-up clock. Look! No batteries! It’s just a bunch of springs and cogs. You know, like those robots in Sucker Punch! :-)

I’ll show them the inside of my wind-up clock. Look! No batteries! It’s just a bunch of springs and cogs.

That you can, as a child, take totally to bits and then put back together again – and it still works.
Actually it kept better time after I re-assembled it – clearly an indication of a career fixing things.

5 1/4" discs were state of the art, I remember when 3 1/2 came along – they were so cool.
But then there were MO discs, now they were seriously cool.
But accoustic couplers were so nice too ;-) Now anyone remember dealing with those buggers?

Now anyone remember dealing with those buggers?

Turned the screen around to show the wife:
“Oh, I remember those”

we also recall the effect of a sneeze – loud enough and with content in the right frequency range…

Hey do a quick calculation of how long it would take to transfer 100GB of MP3’s on the coupler.

Yup. I remember those. Knew a guy who used a luggable PC and one of those with pay phones. Ekes.

Speaking of luggable, this and a VT52 comms program is what got me started in the BBS scene. Despite being kind of crappy, I have fond memories of it. Even wrote my own terminal in TurboPascal because I wanted better (VT100/ANSI) capabilities. I only bothered with ax modem as the built in was too slow to make serious file transfers viable. Now the message bases, there were a few tweaks designed to work nicely with ARCbbs.

It, and my software, have been lost to time (it wasn’t actually my machine). Shame, if I had it around, I’d fire it up for old time’s sake.

My second laptop was one of these:

More modern, but let’s just say I referred to it as the “craptop”. ;-)

Come on chaps – lets have a bit of moderation in the size of images. Even with a 1920 pixel width display, the rendered page is more than three times the width of the display!

Sorry about that, was a little on the large size!
I just did a copy using sharefs from an ARMiniX to a RISC PC, first using an icube 10BaseT (I assume this is 10Mbit half duplex) and then using the unipod (100Mbit)
At 10Mbit it goes at 0.3MB/sec and at 100Mbit it goes at 0.4MB/sec
The best speed I’ve got is 4.3MB/sec using Lanman98 and copying to and from RAM disc on my ArminiX
On the RISC PC it’s around 0.8MB/sec copying from RAM to Lanman98 and a whopping 1.2MB/sec copying to RAM
It’s 0.7MB/sec copying from Lanman98 to HardDisc on RISC PC (using “100Mbit card”)

Slightly interesting, is it virtually (+5secs more (1min 45secs as against 1min 50)) takes the same time to transfer using LanMan98 → ArminiX → ShareFS → RISC PC as it would just using ShareFS, so LanMAN98 isn’t adding anything significant to the overhead in that test.

Ah! My kids are watching a HD movie off the NAS at the moment…probably not the greatest of times for peak testing, so I may get better speeds on my ARMiniX as my NAS seems to max out at 10MB/sec
No difference still the same speeds, so that’s slightly disappointing, but 4.3MB/sec is good enough for my usage.

But the point is that copying over the network on the RISC PC definately isn’t quick ;-)
One of the things I want to do for my socket software/library is write an FTP server/client for RISC OS, be interesting to see how much quicker/slower it is than the other various options avaliable.

Thanks for all the replies guys…

I’m going to try the copying over the network… I’m sure it will be slow but it seems like the best option.
Can anyone explain to me how to connect my RISC PC to my windows 7 box?
I’ve done a websearch but can only find information regarding windows xp and earlier.
I have Omniclient and have also downloaded SunFish.

Thanks again for your help it’s very much appreciated.
Lee

From what I remember omni requires you to disable encrypted passwords on windows. That information may be outdated, if it isn’t you need to “hack” the registry to disable this on windows 7. Once you’ve done this omni should be able to mount the windows shares.
Others maybe able to advise you more on this.
If you want to use sunfish, the nfs client, you will need to run an NFS server on windows FreeNFS looks like it will do this.

Personally if there is a choice between using omni and sunfish, I’d choose sunfish.

You could also install an ftp server on windows and use ftpc on the RISC PC

We recently had an XP (not windows XP, HP Storage XP) engineer saving the config onto a floppy, but there wasn’t enough space.