Have I mentioned lately I still love DOS? I have a new customer. They are running VM/386 with two Wyse Link MC-5 terminals. The application is a homegrown accounting system running on Clarion Professional Developer. Have I mentioned that I started my business developing software using CPD?

Living in the lightning capital of the world happens to be pretty good for business. That kind of work tends to be seasonal, but it definitely is steady during the rainy season. This particular company took a lightning hit and their main computer took the brunt of it right in the old Digiboard. It took a couple of days to get a replacement card, but at least their old 300 MHz Pentium system is still running and stable.

I went in on a weekend to replace the Digiboard. I obtained the exact same board as a replacement and it happened to be unopened old stock from some place the customer found on the Internet. As it happened, after it showed up, they found a spare board sitting on a shelf. I swapped the board, plugged everything back in and fired it up. And . . . nada! The terminals were dark. I double checked the jumper settings (yes, these boards have jumpers and are made for 8 or 16 bit ISA slots). I swapped in the other new board but there was no love from the dumb terminals.

After a bit of fumbling around with various combinations of cables, adapters, gender changers and an external modem, I was fairly confident the terminals also took a hit, probably through the serial cable when the digiboard blew out. However, I wasn’t 100% confident because of this odd little feature in VM/386.

In VM/386, if you make even the slightest hardware change, you have to run a little utility that creates a file called VMINTS. VMINTS sits in the root of the C drive and does something known only to God and some (presumably) bearded guys at IGC. The only way to update your VMINTS file is to boot from your installation disk (or the copy you were instructed to make as part of the installation) and run a menu option to update it. Guess what? No installation disk or copy was anywhere to be found. Oh, and this was the weekend and the company had no computers with Internet access. It so happens that on this particular weekend, the office where the computers normally reside was ripped apart to allow painters and carpeters to do their thing.

So, no ability to reconfigure VM/386 in any meaningful way and no loopback plugs to properly test the terminals. Time to punt. After I left, I found IGC’s website and discovered they have a disk image available with the utility to build a VMINTS file. Woohoo! I carefully followed their instructions and made a bootdisk. I also spent some time digging around in my garage until I found my loopback plugs for 25 pin serial connections.

As an added bonus, I also found a null modem adapter and a serial diagnostic plug that sits inline with the serial port. I bought this thing years ago and never had the opportunity to use it. The packrat in me has finally been vindicated! The diagnostic plug is pretty nifty. There are 25 numbered LEDs on it. When signal voltage appears on a pin, the appropriate LED lights up.

In a fit of joyful optimism, I grab the serial terminals, my assorted plugs and connectors and the precious bootdisk and head back to see the customer. The first thing I tried was plugging the loopback adaptor into the serial terminal. The terminal was set to FDX but I couldn’t get any characters to echo back on the screen. I inserted the diagnostic plug into the mix and got lights on pins 2, 3 and a few others. Based on my limited knowledge, I expected to see something happen on screen but remained disappointed.

Ok, so my loopback ends up being inconclusive. Clearly, the serial port on the terminal is not completely dead, but I didn’t get the result I wanted. So, moving on the the PC with VM/386, I insert the boot disk only to discover the floppy drive isn’t aligned well with the front cover of the PC case and the diskette eject button is stuck in a position where I can’t properly insert the diskette. I rip the case apart and drop the drive cage so that I can boot from the floppy. The floppy starts to boot and I get the message “Can’t find BOOTLDR.SYS.” Hmm . . . I reboot the system to the C: drive and look at the contents of Drive A:. Yup, there it is. I remake the floppy on another computer (the Internet PC is now back in business). Same error.

Time to retreat and regroup. I make a few excuses and a LOT of apologies and head back to the office. Back on IGC’s website, I see that they have a free upgrade from version 5.01 to 5.02. The customer is running 5.01, so I’ve made a diskette with the upgrade. My next step will be to (hopefully) upgrade them to VM/386 5.02, update the VMINTS file and see if I can get either the terminals or a PC running the VTERM software (another freebie I grabbed from the IGC website) running. If I can’t get either working through the digiboard, I’ll try to run one or both off of the native serial ports in the PC. These serial ports have already been verified as active and working using the aforementioned external modem.

I’ll post a follow up once I get that far.