VOGONS

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

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First post, by RetroPCCupboard

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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 9, by Errius

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Those apparently ran MS-DOS 3.10 and Windows 1.03

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 2 of 9, by PD2JK

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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 9, by RetroPCCupboard

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

Reply 4 of 9, by RetroPCCupboard

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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 9, by Errius

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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 7 of 9, by Errius

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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?

Reply 8 of 9, by sydres

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Logo, brings back memories. We ran logo on commodore 64s' in 5th grade my floppy drive didn't load fast enough so the teacher always yelled at me for not finishing my work. 1991 or 92

Reply 9 of 9, by Jo22

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Errius wrote on 2026-02-24, 13:42:

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

Hi, I guess that it was intended for the later RM machines and might use 386 features for trapping.
If so, it might not work on 80186 based emulators..

This quote hints to this possibility, at least.
"RunPC186 (to allow RM's 386 PCs to run Nimbus software. Most likely this will work on any PC if the BIOS check is removed). "
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/pc/nimbus/

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