DOS Foxpro

[Jim Hawkins]

Anyone happen o know where I can get a copy of the DOS version of Foxpro ?

[The Natural Philosopher]

whatever for,with respect?

plenty of things read the formats IIRC.

[The Natural Philosopher]

And its still for sale if you google it = fleabay etc.

[Jim Hawkins]

A friend has an app I wrote yonks ago - and it needs a fix. Don't worry - for anything new it's VFP9 !

[Jim Hawkins]

Not when I looked - there was only a book listed on 'fleabay'.

[John Rumm]

I have probably got a copy of FoxPro Lan on 3.5" floppy sitting about the place somewhere... What version did you need?

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

Have you checked one of the dodgy P2P torrent databases... ah.... just noticed btjunkie has been shut down...

[Jethro]

But once you have bought the *license*, you're then free to d/l from any torrent site, and legitimately use the software. Obvious risk of malware etc ....

[Jules Richardson]

Generally I've not found that, with the following exceptions:

Parrot and Wabash 5.25" media has often undergone some form on binder failure (regardless of storage conditions) which results in the magnetic coating separating from the disk,

"Punched" 3.5" disks (i.e. fooling a system into thinking a DD disk was a HD one) were never a good idea, and most of those ended up junk shortly after they were written,

The newer a 3.5" disk, the worse it seems to be. I suspect that as floppy disks gave way to other forms of distribution, such as CD, quality control went to hell and manufacturers started cutting corners to maintain profit. Commerically-written disks still seem to suffer from this, although not as much as media bought for home use.

5.25" disks that have been crammed too tightly into boxes (remember the days when people used to shoe-horn 16 or more disks into a box designed for ten?) sometimes seem to suffer data loss as a result (whether due to surface abrasion over time, or imprinting of one from another, I'm not sure)

I've not found that storage conditions make much of a difference though - yes, extremes of temperature and humidity can kill a disk, but generally they'll tolerate a wide range of conditions with no noticable difference in reliability. Dust/dirt *is* a major problem, particularly with 5.25" and 8" media; not so bad with 3.5" disks due to the metal shutter, but even they're not immune. Cleaning the disk itself can sometimes be useful, and cleaning the drive heads often is a must...

cheers

Jules

[Ghostrecon]

i should hope so :-)

[NT]

I had 100s of 3.5" floppies of many makes. Hardly any were ok last time I checked, a few years ago.

NT

[Neil Williams]

I also used to find, in my Atari ST using days, that using HD (1440K) disks in a SD (720K) drive was rather unreliable.

Neil

[Jules Richardson]

Yes, they're different animals... DD/SD disks have a magnetic coercivity of 600 Oersteds, whereas HD is (IIRC) 720 Oersteds; that's why a 'punched' DD disk tends to be a bit flakey when formatted as HD.

However, the coating on a HD disk is also a lot thinner than a DD one, which is why a HD disk used in a drive intended for DD can also be unreliable; the read signal from the HD media just isn't as strong as DD.

Quite how a DD disk in an ED drive could ever work, I'm not sure; I believe that ED was something like 1200 Oe, so double what DD used; a system might be able to format it, but I'd expect it to be riddled with errors when it came to actually using it.

cheers

Jules