Using MC600 as a laptop ======================= Note: this is an older text written before few weeks. I only now copied it here. I am ill these days so I'm lying in my bed and trying to do something at least remotely usefull. I decided to review some of my DOS-related stuff. Thus I fired up the MC600 (which has a MS-DOS 3.22 in this read-only memory). The machine has an excellent keyboard and well-readable 640x200 passive LCD screen (probably just because of CGA mode limitations: the SIBO-based MC400 has identical screen but with 640x400 resolution - I think that they are identical, just the highest resolution is not used on the DOS box). The software here is limited by several factors: the RAM size (1024 kB), the 80186 processor and the storage size: there is no traditional disk nor floppy. One has to usefour PSION SSD cards or the 1024 kB of internal RAMdisk (C:). I have several such SSDs: tho types of them are available. The flash-based ones must be Type I (te newer Type II can be larger than 1 MB but the machine cannot see them; there are probably no DOS drivers for them). The RAM-based SSDs (batterry-backed up) can be larger than 1 MB (I actually have a 2 MB RAM SSD and it works) but they rare. At the moment I have here 6 MB of total storage, unfortunately divided to 6 logical devices. It means that there is no way to install larger things here (say the TeX). But some stuff can fit here: * Kermit - it's pretty usefull to get data in and out; the DOS version also supports emulation of Tectronics terminals, so if is posible to hook up the MC600 to serial output of SGI workstation and use Gnuplot on SGI to make pictures on the MC600 screen * Volkov Commander - not only it works as a file manager but it also provides time display and (much more importantly!) command line history; at the moment I uase also it's interna; editor, as I;m not able to find working VI clone (the Elvis is too bloated and the XVI is unavailable for download) * Power C compiler (fast and effective - I purchased if few years ago) * Matlab - the old, public domain version (the differences from the current Matlab or the GNU Octave are odd sometimes, for example - matrices are defined as: a=<1,2 ; 2,4> * SC spreadsheet - the old but good one (vi-style controls) * Gnuplot - the easiest way to plot data (as no the SC nor the Matlab have possibility to plot stuff) It looks like I have found a bug in my own software right now - but it is a bin uneasy to hunt the bug in more than 4000 lines of code on such device. I will try to catch it later on my SGI (hopefuly it's not a DOS-specific problem). After all, it seems to be still possible to do some lighter stuff on such computer. Text writing is OK (I miss an access to a dictionary and a calculator while typing). Programming is OK if the code is short (say up few hundreds of code lines) - if the code is long the compiling taks a lot of time and the text editors may became slow, too. For some lightweight computing it is OK: the Matlab even allows to play with matrices and vectors and the SC is nice for small tables. The only real issue is that these two programs don't offer any way for plotting - one has to export data and plot them with use of the Gnuplot. The Gnuplot is even capable of 3D graphs but in that case it is very slow. Not everything is nice: for example the old Matlab only accepts one-line FOR statements. So it is near impossible to use it in a modern way: as a simple but effective programming language for resting of ideas and algorithms. I als have no games here (surely games for old IBM PC exist but there is no free space at the moment). And it is surprising how large number of DOS software is actually 32-bit (or requires at least SVGA resolution...) and thus incompatible with my old machine. The battery life is... excellent. I have had to replace the batteries after a month of (well, not so frequent) use. The work time can be about 40 hours (I never measuret it precisely).