19 September 2022
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It feels like we are in the middle of fall... and that in september. 
Ok, granted: After an summer with many, many too many sunny days and
very hot temperatures the drop to 13 degrees celsius and torrential
rain is something you have to get used to. 

We are still cleaning out the attic and i made a few interesting 
discoveries (besides the box of books i already mentioned): I have
rediscovered an old computer of mine, an Pentium 133 in a midi tower
i must have stored in the attic somewhere in the late 90s / early 
2000s, and i absolutely cannot remember doing so or the reason for
putting it there. So... it was an interesting drive down memory lane
to fire this thing up after cleaning and rediscovering an HD full of
documents, software and games on this Windows 98 system. Its a bit 
like a time capsule. An interesting thing i noticed was that with the
installed software there was no real need to be online that much 
often. For checking out some infos there was Encarta, wanting to look
up a phone number? There was an phonebook software installed (D-INFO)
which also featured reverse search. Need satelite images or wanting
to plan a driving route? No problem, the needed software is also
installed locally (and on 4 additional CD's). We had internet at the
time i owned this computer, but we were not nearly as dependent on it
as we are today. My plan is to move a bit back into this direction 
and i am now collecting the needed tools. I was pleasantly surprised
to find out that you can still get those phonebook CD's so i am 
curious if i could find modern substitutes for the other software 
packages as well. 

But what to do with this system after i gazed a bit into my own past? 
As it is just an unimpressive yellowing box i would have a hard time 
convincing my wife to put it on display somewhere in the house, my 
office is already shrinking (we need room for our first child) so i 
need a practical reason to keep it not only around but also in the 
used parts of the house. So, i finally decided that i will become my 
FreeDOS workstation. 

After my "adventure" helping my coworker migrate his FreeDOS system 
to a new machine i got curious and started playing around with 
FreeDOS, and i really started to like this system. The only thing i
needed was a system to permanently install it on... and what would 
fit better than an old Pentium machine? So i switched the HD out of 
the old computer, put in another old IDE drive i had lying around and
started installing and getting comfortable with DOS again, but this i
will describe in its own article...