You can add a 100 Mbit/s network card (or better) to your retro rigs and then connect them to an (offline) NAS where you can store all of your data. Alternatively, you can set up a network share on a WinXP system and use that for file storage.

Phil has a video where he shows how to access a NAS from Win98SE. You can also set up mTCP in pure DOS 6.22 so that you can copy files there using the FTP protocol.

The ftp protocol is a stalwart, it really has stood the test of time. I use CF card a lot, that's reasonable portable/quick mass storage. TBH I've never really tried a USB2.0 PCI card on win95OSR2, so that's likely on my bucket list and I have such a card coming (vt6212L based), so I'm about to find out how useless/useful that route is. Optical media is still a thing that binds, but if your needs have moved beyond those sizes... removeable 5.25" HDD caddy system? (remember those? =) What else could you do.... IDE2SD, SCSI2SD, there are options out there. I'm hoping the USB card proves to be an option ; I can pull out the NIC and the low height USB cards lets GPU breath...

+1 for NIC and FTP protocol when it comes to transferring files between modern and older computers reliably.

Never bothered using USB much in old computers, with slow transfer speeds and being a mixed bag in DOS.

i know what you mean - if you have a system without usb it is laborious enough transferring things, never mind that hdd size is likely to be small

networks may be best but it is still a good idea to have as large an hd (or sd to ide) capacity as practical and at least one usb 2 if possible. windows 98 makes all this a bit easier too while still offering DOS. Infact anything P2 or above will run a partition with windows 2000, that has most of the tools and drivers you may want, leaving the rest for DOS and 9x fun

however - as counter point, i also dont try to do things on older systems that are best done on newer ones. this way their utility can be said to have increased (due to the above) rather than to be decreasing, at least in comparison with systems of the time

I have occasionally found it useful to boot a Knoppix version 4 to 5 live CD or Puppy linux on 98 era hardware to get something done that 98 didn't support.

On the contrary, they are becoming more useful with each passing year as new software is written for them and new and unique expansion cards and accessories are invented.

A few years ago I stopped using DVDs and moved all my files to a linux server with a bunch of hard drives in it. Instead of something sensible, I used an old EATX Opteron board because I think it's cool. I mitigated the power usage with undervolting and spinning down idle drives.
I don't remember if I've connected to it from Win98SE, but I think it should work if I got the settings right on the server.

I use an Athlon64 "in betweener" system as my all-purpose utility box. I find that generation to be a flexible bridge between old and new. It can run a wide range of OSes including modern x64 linux, has PCIExpress and PCI, 4GB RAM, GT520 video card (low power and can hardware decode H.264 if I want to watch a video), has USB2, can boot from USB (useful for diagnostics), has GbE, front swappable bays for working with IDE and SATA hard drives, DVD-RW and an LS120 drive.
I tend to use that machine to write files from the LAN to LS-120 and use those disks with whatever Win98 or older system I might be messing with. I guess it adds a step but there's some systems I'd rather not clutter with ethernet, and using floppies is part of the experience to me. The higher speed and capacity of LS-120 keeps it from being painful. But if I did it long enough, maybe I'd get tired of it.

I use CF cards on any systems with Windows 95 or earlier, which makes for easy file transfers with modern systems.

For Windows 98 and XP, I mostly rely on USB thumb drives.

I also use SATA drivers in those systems. If I really needed to I can always plug the SATA drive into an external drive adapter on my main PC, and then copy over files that way as well.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-09, 22:28:

I use CF cards on any systems with Windows 95 or earlier, which makes for easy file transfers with modern systems.

For Windows 98 and XP, I mostly rely on USB thumb drives.

I also use SATA drivers in those systems. If I really needed to I can always plug the SATA drive into an external drive adapter on my main PC, and then copy over files that way as well.

I've got very similar approaches: CF card or SD/MMC to SD adapter for DOS and (rarely) Win98SE; the latter is reserved for specialized benchmark and diagnostic only.

For daily operations on Win98SE I use a specific Kingston 512MB flash drive with native Win9x driver dug up via Internet Archive. For larger file transfers (very rare) I'd use PATA (either 40-pin 3.5" or 44-pin 2.5") to USB 2.0 adaptors. Yes, I've tried nusb36.exe but it seems not very compatible with my systems and external drives.

Anything with WinXP or newer certainly has native USB external drive support.

Network access to a more reliable and robust filesystem is the optimal solution for accessing large amounts of data on Windows 98. It was never meant to be a workstation class operating system to begin with; that has always been NT.

If disk and file size is your only caveat, then this is very manageable. The issue I have with Windows 98, as a power user, is memory management. I seem to have pushed the system to its limits, and there is no fix in sight. This is a pity, because it affects Cygwin so strongly to become unusable.

Windows 9x: There is not enough memory available to run this program (when there is plenty of memory)

Hmm... Can't complain, myself.

I have about 6 machines running MSDOS of some sort, spanning one end of the MSDOS PC timeline, to the other end.

They all have Iomega ZIP drive (4 are internal IDE, one is parallel port), and 10BASE-T network card (those 8 bit ones were not easy to score).
3 of them have IDE CD-ROM drive, the rest have access to a parallel port CD-ROM (and it reads CD-R's no problem!).

A "tweener" PC running Win 7, also having it's own IDE Zip drive, is used to serve files to all of the old PC's. Mostly use the ZIP drive and sneakernetting, it is the most convenient way of getting files from one machine to the other. I use the wired network too sometimes, but mostly for doing development; not bulk file transfers. Although it could bulk file transfer no problem, it's just simpler to not have to mess with the network setup and use the Zip drives.

What a guy is trying to say here, is that I haven't had much trouble copying files to these machines using Zip drives and 10BASE-T.

By the way, systems of the XP era, overspec 9x machines, everything over a ghz and with 2GB of RAM, might be able to dual boot Raspberry Pi OS for PC to get modern conveniences and protections while grabbing stuff off the web.

I might end up doing the megafloppy thing, I have a bunch of shark drives to deploy... also got LS120s but no media and one is in use to get a floppy on an AM2+ board to copy stuff for old boxen. Also realised this year that I do own an internal zip drive but no clue as to functionality, I thought I may have had one or two pieces of new wrapped media for either zip or LS booting around at one point but they are not making an appearance.

edit: whoops, using booting in this context is confusing, an alternative to the colloquial "kicking around" or "hanging around"

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-10-10, 13:24:

By the way, systems of the XP era, overspec 9x machines, everything over a ghz and with 2GB of RAM, might be able to dual boot Raspberry Pi OS for PC to get modern conveniences and protections while grabbing stuff off the web.

thats a good way to keep older stuff into the modern era, some light 32bit linux may be good too

there is a point where it must be more difficult though i'm not sure - what is the oldest hardware an OS that is able to at least show the modern web* will run on?

* no expectation of playing youtube or anything of course

I think I could still happily use XP as my daily driver today if it wasn't for the fact everywhere uses Office 365 now and that version won't work on XP (even though I could do my job on Office 2000's level of features) and would need an up to date browser for the internet.

dosbox replaces need for true dos rigs I suppose, Win9x is still required for gaming if no one has created a compatibility patch yet.

As for using my retro fleet. just about all my rigs have a gotek, optical drive, large HDD and most importantly network. Once the network is working on a PC I rarely use anything else for file transfers. I also typically keep at least the OS installation files and drivers on a 2nd partition.

It's possible to use modern browsers on Windows XP, even those which are wholly unsupported, through X11 forwarding.

See here:

Modern Chromium browser running on Windows XP using X11 forwarding

This would work just as well on Windows 98, but the same flaw with its memory manager I mentioned above causes it to break after some time, so it's unreliable at best.

I would like to see native support for modern browsers on XP without the added remote dependency, but I haven't been able to find any that work reliably on the web.

For me the entire point of using old systems is to run old software, so their utility never decreases. If anything, it's getting better because newer hardware options let's me have the best of both worlds. Flash storage gives me more flexibility and quality of life features. I'm really excited about all of the new sound hardware coming out. I can now have the premium DOS gaming experience that I didn't have as a kid.

I wouldn't use a retro build for my daily driver. Even if space is an issue, there are better options for stuff like browsing the Internet and productivity.

chinny22 wrote on 2023-10-11, 02:59:

I think I could still happily use XP as my daily driver today if it wasn't for the fact everywhere uses Office 365 now and that version won't work on XP (even though I could do my job on Office 2000's level of features) a

very true, in most offices i've been in the last 20 years the majority of people are still using the features of office 97 and office 2000 within the office 2013/16 or o365 they actually haver installed (or not installed)

occasionally someone will be using later excel functions and sure people use some features from later PowerPoints but the mainstay use is about where it was years ago

some offices really do invest and get people working with o365 in more modern ways, but thats the minority still

visiting an office is a nostalgia rush! 😀

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-10-11, 03:25:

It's possible to use modern browsers on Windows XP, even those which are wholly unsupported, through X11 forwarding.

See here:

Modern Chromium browser running on Windows XP using X11 forwarding

thats interesting as a means of getting at the web, it's like having an old car towed by a new one !

gerry wrote on 2023-10-11, 10:23:

very true, in most offices i've been in the last 20 years the majority of people are still using the features of office 97 and o […]
Show full quote

chinny22 wrote on 2023-10-11, 02:59:

I think I could still happily use XP as my daily driver today if it wasn't for the fact everywhere uses Office 365 now and that version won't work on XP (even though I could do my job on Office 2000's level of features) a

very true, in most offices i've been in the last 20 years the majority of people are still using the features of office 97 and office 2000 within the office 2013/16 or o365 they actually haver installed (or not installed)

occasionally someone will be using later excel functions and sure people use some features from later PowerPoints but the mainstay use is about where it was years ago

some offices really do invest and get people working with o365 in more modern ways, but thats the minority still

visiting an office is a nostalgia rush! 😀

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-10-11, 03:25:

It's possible to use modern browsers on Windows XP, even those which are wholly unsupported, through X11 forwarding.

See here:

Modern Chromium browser running on Windows XP using X11 forwarding

thats interesting as a means of getting at the web, it's like having an old car towed by a new one !

When i was at a doctor a month ago i saw this actively used machine...

(have a look at the drawing ... 😁 )
I wanted to ask him if i can have it for my collection when it will be replaced, but i didnt want him to think i think his machine is ancient 😁

I do most data transfer over network. Got an older Cisco-Linksys router with an USB port exclusively for my retro network. Separated the last 6 ports on my switch into a retro VLAN and that's about it. I also prefer using mobil racks so it's not too difficult to move the hard drives between PCs.