Late 80s/Early 90s software from UK school... \ VOGONS

Late 80s/Early 90s software from UK school...

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First post, by RetroPCCupboard

Posted on 2026-02-22, 10:32

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Whilst going through my NAS today, I just found some backups of some floppies that contained software that I "borrowed" from the school RM Nimbus 186 PCs.

LOGO - A kind of software for learning programming. Where you command a "Turtle" to move around the screen and draw shapes.

PAINTSPA - a paint program. Complete with sample images and printer drivers.

Also I found some software from 1995. Something called FWRITE, which I assume is a word processor, and something called PAGEDRAW, which describes itself as a Postscript capable drawing program....

Is there any interest in any of these?

Reply 1 of 7, by Errius

Posted on 2026-02-22, 11:32

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Those apparently ran MS-DOS 3.10 and Windows 1.03

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 2 of 7, by PD2JK

Posted on 2026-02-22, 11:37

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We had LOGO as well in elementary school, on Philips MSX computers. Our government pumped a lot of money in IT school projects.

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Pluto 700 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 3 of 7, by RetroPCCupboard

Posted on 2026-02-22, 11:40

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I think FWRITE (the exe name) may be Flexiwrite. That name sounds familiar.

Reply 4 of 7, by RetroPCCupboard

Posted on 2026-02-22, 11:45

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Errius wrote on 2026-02-22, 11:32:

Those apparently ran MS-DOS 3.10 and Windows 1.03

Not sure what versions, but I believe these machines were not IBM compatible so had custom versions of DOS and Windows. I think the graphics hardware was different and also I think the BIOS added some functionality that IBM PCs dont have.

From what I have seen if you want to run PaintSpa on a IBM compatible PC there's a TSR called RUNPC186 that will add the required interrupt functions that it needs to work without the RM Nimbus video card.

Reply 5 of 7, by Errius

Posted on 2026-02-23, 22:46

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Are there any emulators that emulate this machine?

PCem/86box don't support it. (They don't support any 80186 machines.)

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 6 of 7, by RetroPCCupboard

Posted on 2026-02-24, 13:13

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Errius wrote on 2026-02-23, 22:46:

Are there any emulators that emulate this machine?

PCem/86box don't support it. (They don't support any 80186 machines.)

This one seems to:

https://github.com/mikechambers84/XTulator

Reply 7 of 7, by Errius

Posted on 2026-02-24, 13:42

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Thanks. I still can't get Nimbus software to run on it though. I'm using the hacked RUN186PC.EXE.

Is this too much voodoo?

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