Peter Graf wrote, on 11/Jan/11 00:10 | Jan11:
Tony Firshman wrote:
I didn't see his his hard disk interface. Phil Borman told me he had
used the Rebel code. Was that right? Qubide also used this under
license. Phii was not aware of any license for his build.
What I can say is, that Jürgen Falkenberg or Ulrich Rosowski must have
modified a hardware circuit from Dirk Steinkopf, the person who also
wrote QL-HD. I don't know wether they also used Dirk's driver or a
different one.
The interface from Dirk Steinkopf was public domain, and I had soldered
it myself instead of buying the Falkenberg interface, which seemed
somewhat big and expensive to me at the time. The disadvatage was, that
an MFM/RLL-Controller was required in addition to the interface.
From my point of view, the structure of Dirk Steinkopf's driver (QL-HD)
is cleaner and more modern than Rebel/Qubide. The lowlevel routines for
init, read and write were nicely separated, and I've been able to
complety bring them to the C language layer within a few days of work.
This will allow me to adapt the driver to SD/MMC cards. In Qubide,
low-level access is scattered all over the code and the same task would
take me years. (I am not an assembler guru...) Also, QL-HD uses a C
language layer, unlike all other QL disk drivers I know. I think the QL
scene made a mistake to forget Dirk's driver for so long. It had nice
features like true subdirectories, background operation, and job
specific working directories. Other drivers implemented that much later
or never.
I am pretty sure Dirk has not used anyone elses's driver code, probably
except looking into the QL ROM how things are done there.
Ah yes - it cannot have been the Falkenberg. That history is all very
interesting, and good for the archive.
The QL sub-directory implementation in most QL systems is better than
nothing but is not good.
What a pity *true* sub-directories were not possible. That is where DOS
and successors really win.
What a struggle it is copying file systems, and one often hits the
length limit.
On my BBS I have many obscure directory names for that very reason.
The real snag with the limit is all appears OK on the local system until
one adds a network path!
Only two others spring to mind - Miracle and Qn0.
I don't know *anything* about the details.
Tony
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