Well, I count a cassette or TPDD (or the DVI for that matter) as part of the stock 'closed' M100 system, with TELCOM only able to transfer plaintext files in and out; xmodem and DLplus changed that and that's where the trouble started.
Back in the day it was never an issue; everything was ASCII text except for the .BA programs running or stored in the M100 system. When I dug out my M100 many years later, lo and behold there were now lots of binary .CO and .BA files out there, but how to load them into the M100? Xmodem was one obvious answer, but how to load it in the first place? So, many thanks to Ron Wiesen (R.I.P.) and Traveling Software for the self-installing TEENY and DeskLink combo; that opened the door to lots of other stuff including TS-DOS etc. A quite different environment these days thanks to all the innovative folks who've contributed over the last 40 years... m ----- Original Message ----- From: John R. Hogerhuis To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2023 1:20 PM Subject: Re: [M100] - Backpack "you would only have tokenized files on the M100 itself" Or cassette files, tpdd files, xmodem'd BA files tsdos sending to desklink, etc. ;-) But I think I know what you mean. It is mostly a closed system until you start transferring to a foreign host. Then you can stub your toe on this problem. One question is, could it have been solved on the tsdos side? I guess not. IIRC the distinguishing characteristics are at the end of a proper tokenized file versus text file since there are nuls (or not). If you're going to detect it and take steps it has to happen on the host. Which is where I addressed it in LaddieAlpha. Even there, there are multiple ways to do it. I fix the presented extension. Another way would be to hide the bad file or give an error on open or read. -- John.
