Floppy disks are an antiquated technology, but that is how the old Tyco made system was set up.
Mass storage is nice to have because networking such an old system is dangerous and besides this there are many things like drivers for the NVIDIA 6200 that don't fit on a floppy disk. Sure you can burn a driver CD, but reusable usb memory flash drives are more convenient. Even getting good floppy disks these days isn't exactly easy. To have to install everything via floppy would be a pain. The Trenton based SBC being used by the way has Intel nics on board that are hard to support in Windows ME, so there is a driver block to networking the SBC. Ideally, you take Windows and MS Dos completely away and implement Q-Soft on a stripped down Linux and the real time system on Freedos. Open systems are supported and more current, but there is the fact that the ISA shared memory card exists in small quantities and is proprietary. There may only be 1k to 10k of these shared memory cards. Chances are, the drivers require MS-DOS 7. Windows ME was tried because of it's improved mass storage support in hopes that Q-Soft would run better too. No telling if the shared memory card will work with Windows ME though. Sadly, getting drivers for ME is a nightmare. Google exacerbates the problem by sending you to Microsoft where Microsoft gives you a 404 for anything older than Windows 7. Pretty soon, the pages for 7 will disappear too. The stupidity of Microsoft thinking everyone can just upgrade ignores that not all computer based systems that use Windows are cheap. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
