Hey, all. So, a friend of my mom's today gave me an old Tandy 1400LT laptop. It has no power cable, but supposedly I can rebuild the battery out of C-cells. I did a few Google searches but found very little information on this particular model of computer. Do any of you know anything about it/have personal experience with this model? Also, does anyone know where I can pick up either an MS-DOS 6.22 floppy (this laptop boots from floppy and didn't come with one) or a cheap USB floppy drive so I can make my own? Thanks.

As always, I recommend you ask around on The Vintage Computer Forums: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/forum.php

I'd be willing to write you an IBM DOS 5.02 boot disk if you can't find anyone else to get you one.

Thanks. I'm gonna see if one of my mom's old laptops has a floppy drive, though. If it does, I just have to find a floppy and write my own disk. I'll let you know.

PS: I've found out that this laptop originally came with PC-DOS 3.3. Anybody know what the last version of MS-DOS, PC-DOS, whatever was that could run off a floppy without being installed?

DOS= Disc operating system, bigger and harder discs were a requirement on UNIX.
That means ou can boot every DOS including FreeDOS and DR-DOS from Floppy.
You can work with floppy images using rawwritewin or dd.
Try fitting GEM or NC as UI on your boot floppy.

The laptop has a monochrome screen. I don't even know if a UI would work on it. And the image would have to fit on a single floppy. Side note: I know what DOS stands for, thanks. And MS-DOS 6.22 requires installation. It CAN'T be run from floppy. So no, NOT every DOS can be run from floppy.

*ahem*

from the MS-DOS prompt. Makes a bootable floppy disk

Can't fit any of those on a single floppy, man. Therefore, they're useless to me.

Oh I see, you're talking about making a full set of installation disks and not a plain old boot disk. Gotcha.

Yeah. I need the entire, running system on a single floppy. This laptop has two floppy drives. One for the system and one for applications. It has no hard drive at all, though if there's space inside I may see if I can shoehorn in one of my grandfather's old 200 MB drives. But for now, I need a system that fits in 1.44 MB or less.

I did a little research online and it looks like the system comes from the factory with 720KB drives, so that might be even more of a pain. I'm pretty sure some, if not all USB floppy drives cannot write to 720KB disks but don't quote me on that.

Some hard drives from this era were also a special variation on IDE that's totally incompatible with modern IDE drives, not sure if this laptop is old enough to use this old "XT IDE" standard.

What little info I've been able to find indicates that the system is capable of reading the 1.44 MB disks, but you're right that it originally came with 720KB ones.

I've never worked with one of these, but is it possible to swap the drive with a 1.44 meg or are these locked to 720k drives?

If you really want to find more information on this check the Vintage Computer Forums,
http://vintage-computer.com/vcforum/forum.php

As I said in my last post:

Ahh, I never caught that, I was thinking it may be like a Mac Plus where you can stick a 1.44 MB drive into the system but that only adds the ability to read a 1.44 MB disk formatted as 800k...which I have yet to figure out how to do .