eBay Purchase Price: $25 AUD
Country of Origin: Australia
Condition: Very Good
Just recently I picked up a complete copy of pcAnywhere32 7.5 remote access software. The good news is the manuals are in excellent condition, and the original parallel port cable is included which can often go missing. The bad news is that out of the four floppy disks for the software itself, the second disk couldn’t be imaged due to bad sectors. Fortunately I could retrieve this elsewhere.
Symantec’s strategy in the late 1980s and early 1990s had been one of company acquisitions. One such acquisition was announced in August 1990 with the purchase of Peter Norton Computing Inc. who had a stronghold in the DOS disk utilities space. Symantec retained the Norton branding and had done so for a number of years.
Another acquisition was announced in August 1991 for $22 million US, Dynamic Microprocessor Associates (DMA), the developers of pcAnywhere. Originally pcAnywhere was a DOS product initially released in 1986. Symantec placed the product under their Norton umbrella and by early 1993 the first version was available for Windows.
This Version 7.5 released in 1996 was specifically aimed for Windows 95 and NT 3.51. Minimum requirements were a 386 with 4 MB RAM, 16 MB hard disk space and a VGA monitor, though it was recommended to have a 486 with 8 MB RAM. The back of the box states it’s backwards-compatible with previous versions for Windows 3.1 and DOS.
Also included in this version were a number of other enhancements such as speed optimisations, wizards, and if one had Windows 95 would allow infrared file transfers and the ability to drag and drop specific connections to the desktop for quick access.
In the next post, I’ll be giving this a shot using the supplied parallel port cable.
Socket 3 