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Time to expand my 5150 system

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bettablue

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OK, the title is a bit misleading, sorry 'bout that.

What I want to do is add a terminal, with it's own monochrome display, and keyboard to my current IBM 5150 PC system with attached 5161 expansion unit. There is no big reason to do this. It's just something I've been playing with in my mind for some time. By their nature don't have their own processor/memory, and display drivers, will the 5150 with 640 kb of RAM be capable of working with an attached terminal? There are currently 3 open expansion slots available in the expansion chassis, however, there are none available on the 5150 itself... There is already an Intel 8/16 EtherExpress card installed in the expansion unit as well. I have another one which I can install into the terminal if needed.

What else do I need to know before I start buying the parts and peripherals needed to complete a peer-to-peer network? Is there any additional hardware needed to consider for this to work properly?

As always, thanks much.
 
Thomas. What are you expecting that the 'terminal' will be able do? Eg. play games remotely? The abilities guide the solution.
 
Are you talking about a serial dumb terminal? Using terminals with something like Xenix on a 5150 would be pretty cool. There are DOS tools for remote controlling even direct memory writing text-based applications from a terminal, although usually meant for use with a modem. Of course you can always just CTTY COM1: and mess with DOS from there.

I'm not aware that there is any way to control the boot process of a true blue 5150 via a terminal. But on my Columbia Data Product 1600 I can just flip a switch and all BIOS I/O goes to a serial "console" port. :cool:
 
SomeGuy said:
There are DOS tools for remote controlling even direct memory writing text-based applications from a terminal, although usually meant for use with a modem. Of course you can always just CTTY COM1: and mess with DOS from there.
Click to expand...

Ooh, now that's something I'd like to mess around with. Do you know what the software's called?
 
Yes, what I am considering is a dumb terminal. There were a few on E-Bay (of course) that interested me. As for the abilities, all I really want to do is some word processing and spreadsheet work, if the terminal can access the hard discs installed in the expansion unit. As for booting the system, I would never expect a terminal to be able to access the hard discs to boot the entire setup. In fact, I fully expect that I'll still have to boot the 5150+5161 first, and have it running before powering on the terminal. If it works properly, the only thing the terminal would support will be it's own video adapter and keyboard. To answer the question if I had a terminal in mind, no. Not yet at least. I will leave it up you fine folks to recommend the terminal make and model.

I've also thought about using another 5150 across a parallel port connection. I have even thought of using a serial port connection between the two computers, but in the end, I made up my mind and decided to go with a dumb terminal connected via network cable.

Is there anything else I'll need, like a router, or something similar? Or do most terminals have their own LAN adapter? If I need to add one, it will be an Intel EtherExpress 8/16 bit LAN adapter, matching the one currently installed into the host computer (Alice)

Ultimately, I want to see just how far the limits of the IBM 5150 can be pushed. Sort of the Ultimate 5150.

SomeGuy said:
Are you talking about a serial dumb terminal? Using terminals with something like Xenix on a 5150 would be pretty cool. There are DOS tools for remote controlling even direct memory writing text-based applications from a terminal, although usually meant for use with a modem. Of course you can always just CTTY COM1: and mess with DOS from there.

I'm not aware that there is any way to control the boot process of a true blue 5150 via a terminal. But on my Columbia Data Product 1600 I can just flip a switch and all BIOS I/O goes to a serial "console" port. :cool:
Click to expand...
 
You seem to be confused about what a "dumb" terminal can do when attached to a PC type machine.

A PC is generally a single user system. It is assumed that there is one person using the machine at a time, sitting at the hard-wired keyboard and looking at a monitor that is connected to a video card in the machine. You are generally using one program at a time, unless you want to count TSRs or "software switcher" type programs. Software assumes that it will use DOS or BIOS interrupts, or sometimes even just raw memory and port access to work on the machine. The software assumes the standard keyboard and video card setup.

It sounds like you want to attach a "dumb" terminal via a serial port. A dumb terminal sends and receives bytes of data at a pretty low speed; 9600 bits per second usually. When you press a key on the terminal a byte representing the ASCII value of what you pressed is sent on the serial port to the PC, where if something is paying attention the byte can be read and something can be done. To see something on the terminal the program on the PC has to send bytes on the serial port to the terminal. This mode of operation is completely different than pressing a key at the local keyboard which fires an interrupt, does scan code processing, and then eventually gets interpreted. Or different from a program drawing something on the screen using a direct memory write or a BIOS interrupt. Moving the cursor on a native screen using BIOS interrupts compared to sending escape sequences to a terminal is very different.

Now DOS has some limited capability to switch from the standard keyboard and screen over to something connected via a serial port. But the only programs that will run are programs that use DOS interrupt calls to do their input and output. This is pretty limited compared to the vast universe of programs out there like word processors, spread sheets, etc. If you are running one of those programs your dumb terminal is basically like the connected modem or printer that is not being used at the moment.

This is much different compared to your typical Unix system, which evolved from a machine that only had serial ports. Unix generally knows how to handle a system console that is attached via serial, and even better, most terminal windows are actually just abstracted versions of dumb terminals from way back in history. Unix is also multi-user, so the idea of driving two keyboard/display devices at the same time is not foreign like it is on a PC running DOS.

So what exactly are you trying to accomplish?
 
mbbrutman said:
You seem to be confused about what a "dumb" terminal can do when attached to a PC type machine.

So what exactly are you trying to accomplish?
Click to expand...
I'm quite sure the answer to this is going to be something that requires a network connection of some type, i.e., a computer with either a NIC, a modem (serial port), or a parallel port.
 
Digital Reaserch did produce Concurrent DOS - an OS which allows multiple users and runs many DOS applications.

But I don't think this would be much fun to use on a 4.77Mhz 8088 with 640KB of memory, and I'm not sure how good it works with applications that work direct-to-hardware (I'd expect them to crash half the time). I remember Gary Kildall talking about that being a challenge, but not sure if it was addressed in the early version.

Later, when things like protected mode and megabytes of RAM were more common, it was more of a practical concept - people sharing a 386 etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS#Concurrent_PC_DOS

Edit: oh and yeah, a peer to peer network is something completely different, I have done that in my work area - 10Base2 ethernet goes around the entire room - I like Netware Lite for XT's - fast, low memory consumption, and anything that uses IPX will be able to use it.
Edit2: but you already have an Intel EtherExpress installed - so you already have a Peer to Peer network.
 
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I can't remember the name of the remote control program I used back then. But I do recall outputting Power Menu, a program that writes directly to the video memory, on a Control Data dumb terminal.

A couple big names for that sort of thing were Carbon Copy, and PC Anywhere for DOS. Although some may have required their own clients instead of a generic terminal or telecommunications program.

There was an interesting multi-tasking system for DOS called MultiLink that could connect up to 8 terminals to a PC (I think only with their own special I/O card) and would serve up well-behaved DOS programs simultaneously to multiple users. It supported some programs such as Microsoft Word 3.0 for DOS by "patching" them to run nicely under their system.
 
Thanks for all the great info. This kinda changes my plans a bit, so let me run this by you. I see that a dumb terminal won't do what I want. However, there is another option I've been thinking about.

Everyone here knows about Alice, my 5150 + 5161 setup. I also have another 5150 which is configured as a base line PC. There are no upgrades other than it's own CGA video, and only 256 KB of RAM, and a single full height 360 KB floppy drive. In addition to that, I also have an IBM 5160 PC/XT which has the prerequisite 360 KB floppy disc, and single 40 MB full height hard disc.

Ideally, I want one or the other of these computers to access both hard discs installed in the 5161 expansion unit. I'm thinking about using the bare bones 5150. Since I have an Intel EtherExpress which I'll add to the whatever computer I ultimately use, and connect the two via network cable.

Will I need to use mbbrutman's networking info to configure the final setup? Or is there something I can add to the config.sys, and autoexec files on either of the chosen PC's?
 
If I was in the same situation I'd fit an ethernet card, nic, in all the machines and hook them up to a hub or switch. 10/100 switches are a dime a dozen these days. You'll at least need a packet driver set up correctly for what ever nic you fit before you can use anything in th mTCP suite. Using ethernet has the advantage that you can connect to a my modern machine and set it up as an ftp server to access files. Also you'll be able to use the older machines to do irc, telnet etc.

It's mentioned on MBs pages and has been discussed here a number of times.
 
I've been harping on about Netware lite for ages, and I sincerely recommend it again.
For a vintage network, it's gold.

- runs on an 8088
- uses minimal memory
- server isn't dedicated, you can keep using it, even to play games
- can share printers, sync time, all the normal network awesomeness
- software (server, client, drivers etc) is all completely unloadable without a reboot
- uses IPX, so other programs like FastLynx which support it, will run across the network natively

Only hassles:
- newer cards, their driver will need a newer version of LSL and IPXODI (easy to get)
- you'll need to edit NET.CFG and make sure the protocol is set to 802.3 (most newer drivers default to 802.2)
- I have some vauge memory of the pretty user interface needing a V20 - but you can configure it from the command line anyway
 
mTCP will not let you share a drive letter. There are other programs that will, including the Microsoft LANMAN client.

mTCP provides the following:
  • A DHCP client (or set your own static network configuration)
  • FTP client
  • FTP server
  • Telnet client with Xmodem and Ymodem file transfer
  • IRCjr IRC client
  • SNTP client for setting your system clock through the network
  • PING
  • HTGET for pulling files down straight from a web site
  • Netcat for sending and receiving data using sockets

See the mTCP documentation for details.
 
Stone said:
I don't think a dumb terminal would be able to run a DOS program on your 5150.
Click to expand...

It can be done. However, it doesn't accomplish much because the local console becomes disabled.

You can run multiple MS-DOS sessions, and take advantage of an external terminal, using Desqview. But that requires an 80386.
 
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