PHR00JG%TECHNION@TAUNIVM.TAU.AC.IL ("Jacques J. Goldberg") (05/02/91)
Wow !
1-Your Rainbow, as you say yourself, runs MSDOS 2.05 (and there are more recent
versions which you do not need for this purpose) and is perfectly able to read
and write 5.25 in diskettes formatted on your 386 machine provided you format
them SINGLE SIDED, 40 or 80 tracks, on the 386 (specially if 40 tracks).
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2-Even if you insist running the Rainbow under CP/M-86 only, you still can
read and write IBM-PC formatted diskettes, one-sided only of course, using
the MediaMaster commercial program on either the Rainbow or 386, or the
22DISK utility found on SIMTEL-20/MSDOS and replica servers. The latter
however will only work on your 386 and only if your 386 has an 80 tracks
5.25in diskette drive.
3-A third solution is to use Kermit to move files around. At 19200 bauds the
transfer of what you can type in does not add much time to the typing job!
4-The VT102 supersedes VT100 emulation. In fact we use Rainbows here as
VT100, VT102, VT220, without the slightest difficulty. Watch the setup menu!
If you experienced a problem, make sure that the emulation is set TO ANSI, and
if your communication insists on other than NONE parity (some IBM controllers
do), use 7 bits character coding. You have full VT220 compatibility, except,
I think, that you cannot program 80/132 col. mode from the host but must do it
manually.
5-Contrarily to what too many people believe, the Rainbow efficiently runs
almost ANY MSDOS software, except games and closed packages developped for
maximal display speed bypassing DOS calls, and of course any graphics based
application. It may be difficult to reach that configuration today, but I hold
in my lab a Rainbow with 768k memory (not 640...) and a 20 Mb hard disk, and
won't give it out so quickly. The JOVE editor is more than you need for any
editing job, thus I use it on the Rainbow and other PC's. Any serious compiler
works just the same (I use FORTRAN a lot). TeX runs smoothly with an excellent
Previewer. Clearly, Supermarket software fails, but for real scientific work
it ain't a bad machine at all, even in 1991. The problem is, if yours is bare
with 2 diskettes and 256k only, then of course you must forget about TeX and
such things that need more RAM and/or lots of disk space.
Jacques Goldberg, Prof. of Physics, Technion