GTHEALL@PENNDRLS.UPENN.EDU (George A. Theall) (12/29/89)
Someone just uploaded to a local bbs today a program called RainDos. It's a rather new product from a company called Sydex, who's somewhat well-known in the PC arena. Quoting from the documentation: "RainDOS is a device driver which supports reading and writing of MS-DOS diskettes from Digital Equipment Corporation's Rainbow tm series computers on PC XT- or AT-compatible machines. Formatting of Rainbow diskettes is not currently supported by RainDOS. To use RainDOS, your computer must be PC AT-, XT- or IBM Personal System/2 compatible. Computers such as the Tandy 2000 or the Zenith Z-150 are not suitable because of their relative incom- patibility. Further, your computer must be equipped with either a 5.25" high-density (1.2 Megabyte) or 5.25" "quad" density drive, such as the Teac 55F." What's amazing is that a company such as Sydex believes there are enough Rainbow users out there who might be interested in their device driver. I wonder if they themselves had a collection. I haven't tried this out, but it seems to compete directly with Robert Morse' RX50DRVR. RainDos is shareware, though, and registration is $10 (or $15 if you read stuff embedded in the SYS file). Does anyone know whether RX50 will work on an XT-class machine? Or how common it is to find XT's with 1.2MB drives in them? If there's enough interest, I'll see that this is passed along to the INFO-DEC-MICRO file archives. George --- BITNET: GTHEALL@PennDRLS Dept. of Economics Internet: GTHEALL@PennDRLS.UPenn.Edu University of Pennsylvania AT+TNet: 215-898-3419 Philadelphia, PA 19104-3987