I'm guessing many on this mailing list are of a certain age like I am, so
you might appreciate this story. I'm a (very old and slow) runner, and hurt
my knee about a month ago, so had a lot of extra time on my hands while I
recovered. (I'm back to 15 miles a week or so, and doing fine, thanks.)
So with the extra time not running I decided to tackle organizing the many
old hard drives I have lying around. I have built a number of computers
over the years, and always built them with removable drives. My oldest
working computer has one parallel ATA Lian Li caddy, and I have a bunch of
drives that fit it. One 80 gb drive has a note that it ran XP but I assumed
it was for my old XP machine that died a while ago, along with my last
working Fractint build environment. My ancient memory is that XP does not
do well booting on the wrong computer, but for no good reason, I tried
booting the drive. Voila! XP came up along with a working Fractint build
environment! From the time stamps, looks like this was last booted about
five years ago! I am not clear if this drive ran XP on the now-dead
computer, or if it worked with the "newer" vintage 2007 computer I tried it
on. I'm guessing the latter, since it booted with no obvious issues.
In any case, I can now build the classic DOS fractint. I don't want to
mislead anyone, I'm not about to suddenly resume developing the classic
Fractint, and I'm not sure I want to get sucked into all the issues
surrounding an old OS like Windows XP. That said, it gives me a certain
nostalgic pleasure to know I can. Jonathan has largely avoided this by
working with the newer Windows SDL environment. I don't even know if he
could compile the DOS fractint if he was so inclined.
Tim
