[cctalk] Re: Experience using an Altair 8800 ("Personal computer" from 70s)
On Thu, 23 May 2024, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: I couldn't wait to show it to a female working in my section. She dropped by my apartment, took one look at the thing sitting on my kitchen table and burst out laughing. "That's not a computer; it's a toy!" was her withering reaction. I don't know if my male ego ever recovered from that. And I *hated* the DRAM boards. Be very thankful that it was before you had more invested in the relationship. I almost failed to heed the warning (although FAR less personally humiliating), when a new interest thought that "Hitchhiker's guide To The Galaxy" was "stupid". -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: NTSC TV demodulator
On Sun, 19 May 2024, Will Cooke via cctalk wrote: I have a couple of 70s/80s "home" computers (e.g. Radio Shack Color Computer) that are intended to connect to a TV set. They don't have easily available composite video, even internally, only modulated RF output. Currently I have an old CRT TV that I use with them, but for various reasons that isn't practical long-term. Does anyone know of a small TV tuner that tunes old analog TV channels (US NTSC) and outputs composite or VGA or HDMI signals? I've looked around a bit but haven't found anything. It's relatively easy to build one, but I would prefer a pre-built solution. And I'm sure others have run into this same problem. VCR, Digital converter box, Closed caption decoder even some TVs have a composite out, all of which had RF input All of those are now old. Not all of those have composite output out, but such do exist for each of those. You should know that your specific example, Radio Shack Color Computer, can produce composite internally with trivial modifications. A large number of such machines internally share a common RF module; if you identify the input to their RF modulator, often clipping onto that may be all you need. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Better demagnetize all of your cables!
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast stormy sunny weather
[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #3
On Fri, 10 May 2024, Charles via cctalk wrote: Regarding protections, it didn't have many. I remember spending a day tracking down a fatal bug with a logic analyzer (emulators were still a dream in this small company)... another programmer had used an array subscript out of range and the compiler didn't catch it for some reason. So in this array defined [0..20], when the typo caused a write to FOO[60] instead of FOO[20], bad things happened. Ah, the good old days ;) At Goddard Space Flight Center, my position was negligible (gopher and APL and FORTRAN programming for a British pysicist studying the Van Allen belts). I was told that some of the many locally applied patches were done by writes to array elements with negative subscripts. We may have been the first one to get some IBM 360 operating systems. I remember one time, shortly after "upgrading", we rolled back to the previous one, until the next one arrived. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: CORRECTIONS Re: DOS p-System Pascal:
Microsoft had to pay $120 million, and Stac had to pay $13.6 million. But Microsoft also settled some claims out of court with a $39.9 million dollar investment in Stac, and paid $43 million in royalties. Yes, billg had a bad day. comparable to my losing $100 On Fri, 10 May 2024, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: I was going to say, if it was only $100K then old Billy Boy would've laughed all the way out of court and on the way home. Yes, as soon as I sent that, I knew that I had screwed up. I remember the Stac lawsuit. It was just another company actually doing innovation whose technology Microschlock tried to appropriate in its typically and despicably underhanded ways. Stac was one of the few (only?) companies to come out pretty well after "partnering" with MS. Too much proprietary information shared too early in the negotiations. The award was based on "$5.50 per copy", . . . When Seattle Computer Products, who had a royalty-free license to sell MS-DOS, was on the rocks, and MICROS~1 was terrified of somebody like AT getting that, they did the right thing, and simply BOUGHT the company. As always seems to happen in these kinda cases (just like Word and Mac), it was never adequately spelled out whether "The operating system" meant version 0.9, or all versions including current, and what products, such as Windoze could be construed to be derivative products. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: CORRECTIONS Re: DOS p-System Pascal:
Please note, that I am NOT saying that there was nothing wrong in the compression. Merely that the disasters that prompted the public outcry were due to SMARTDRV's problems, not the problems with the compression. My numbers were all wrong on the Microsoft V Stac lawsuit. Micorsoft and Stac had looked at each others code as part of alicensing negotiation, that fell through. Microsoft had to pay $120 million, and Stac had to pay $13.6 million. But Microsoft also settled some claims out of court with a $39.9 million dollar investment in Stac, and paid $43 million in royalties. Yes, billg had a bad day. comparable to my losing $100 IBM's PC-DOS 6.10 had a similar bundle list to MS-DOS 6.00, but each product from a different vendor than Microsoft's On Fri, 10 May 2024, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: . . .
[cctalk] Re: DOS p-System Pascal: (Was: Saga of CP/M)
very slow and buggy. I heard a story that to speed up disc access, MS put FAT-manipulation code in the actual compiler and that occasionally destroyed the FAT. Sorry Stuff, ain't so. If you had FAT corruption issues, perhaps you had SMARTDRV enabled with write cacheing (which did occasionally mess up the FAT). On Fri, 10 May 2024, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: I developed quite a bit and for many years with Microsoft C v6.0 under DOS and it was not bad. The compiler was decently fast and once 486s and then Pentiums became available compile time wasn't really an issue. It was actually the least shitty Microsoft product I've ever used, next to MS-DOS 6.22. It was actually pretty good. A good example of why I generally hate MS software. But the solution was easy: just turn off write-caching. I also liked their C V6. and MASM 5.00 and beyond were the first MASM to have documentation that was not CRIMINALLY bad. SMARTDRV caused a lot of disk corruption. Which was erroneously blamed on the compression. When Infoworld did a test routine that did a bunch of miscellaneous stuff and rebooted in a loop (thereby corrupting disk because SMARTDRV write cache had not been written out!) and blamed the compression, billg tried to explain that their test routine was faulty, not the compression, but wasn't about to admit that SMARTDRV was at fault. Infoworld reported that conversation as an attempt to intimidate! MS-DOS 6.2x "fixed the problems with compression"! The way that it did so was to change SMARTDRV to NOT default to write-cacheing on, IFF the user turned SMARTDRV write-cacheing back on, then SMARTDRV was changed to NOT re-arrange the sequence of writes (had been for efficiency, but risky), and NOT display the DOS prompt until the write cache(s) were written. (thus not implicitly telling the user that it was now OK to turn off the computer (which had a shutdown sequence of turn off the power)) Those changes to SMARTDRV "fixed compression". MS-DOS 6.2x also did a LOT of other fixes; it may have been the only Microsoft product where the primary goal of the updaate was to improve reliability! MS-DOS 6.20 SMARTDRV and other fixes MS-DOS 6.21 6.20 without compression; Microsoft had lost lawsuit with STAC ($100K judgment from Microsoft to STAC, and $30K judgement from STAC to Microsoft. billg said, "I'm having a bad day.") MS-DOS 6.22 6.20 with a new non-infringing compression -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: DOS p-System Pascal: (Was: Saga of CP/M)
On Fri, 10 May 2024, Stuff Received via cctalk wrote: I recall that MS sold a Pascal compiler, possibly from someone else. It was very slow and buggy. I heard a story that to speed up disc access, MS put FAT-manipulation code in the actual compiler and that occasionally destroyed the FAT. Sorry Stuff, ain't so. Bob Wallace wrote the Microsoft Pascal compiler, while he was at Microsoft. He was their tenth employee. He told me that their runtime library (which he didn't write) is buggy and slow. So slow that it made benchmarks with their Fortran compiler (which also used the buggy and slow runtime library), perform SLOWER than interpreted BASIC. But, it certainly did NOT do anything to the disk; certainly no messing with the FAT. If you had FAT corruption issues, perhaps you had SMARTDRV enabled with write cacheing (which did occasionally mess up the FAT). -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #3
... I've written code in Pascal, as well as Modula-2. Never liked it--seemed to be a bit awkward for the low-level stuff that I was doing. On Thu, 9 May 2024, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: Not surprising, since that's not what it is all about. Both, like their predecessor ALGOL-60 as well as successors like Ada, are strongly typed languages where doing unsafe stuff is made very hard. Contrast that with C, which sets out to make it easy to do unsafe things and partly for that reason has a feeble type system. So doing low level stuff like device drivers is difficult, unless you create extensions to break out of the type system. An example of how to do that is the Burroughs extension of ALGOL called ESPOL, which is what they used to write the OS. Actually, Burroughs did a number of extended versions for different purposes; there's also DCALGOL (Data comm ALGOL) intended for writing communications software. Why that's separate from ESPOL I don't really know; I only ever got to do regular ALGOL programming on Burroughs mainframes. One reason for that: those systems depend on the compilers for their security; if ordinary users got access to ESPOL they could write dangerous code, but in ALGOL they cannot. One of the things that _I_ love about C is that it is easy to get it out of the way when you want to do something lower level. Rather than feeble type system, it could have had a requirement to explicitly "cast" anything being used as a "wrong" type. One of Alan Holub's books about C is titled "Enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot" Each language has its own specialty. And you need to find the one that fits you best. It used to be (and likely still is), that every computer science grad student created a new language. A requirement (usually UNSPOKEN) was that the compiler be able to compile itself. That the language compiler is written (actually normally RE-written) in that language and compiled by that compiler. That certainly seems to bias things towards languages that are well suited for writing compilers! If you were to create a language that was specializzed for something completely different, and poorly suited for writing compilers, then it would not be respected. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #3
Turbo-Pascal was quite popular. At the annnouncement of it (West Coast
Computer Faire), Phillipe Kahn (Borland) was so inundated with "yeah,
but what about C?" questions, that by the end of the first day, "Turbo
C is coming soon"
On Thu, 9 May 2024, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote:
I learned on Turbo C. It was a fantastic little IDE.
I have heard that Pascal was originally developed for TEACHING programming.
Turbo Pascal makes that easier.
In my C programming classes, for every homework assignment, I required
that the students submit the output (screen print), a source file, and a
screen print of the portion of the directory, to show that they had
created a source file and an executable file. And that the executable
file was created AFTER the source file was created; a surprising number
were NOT.
We had available Turbo C and Quick C, as well as Microsoft C compiler,
DeSmet ("Personal C"), and GCC compilers. and occasionally a few others.
I required that each student had to do one program in an IDE, and one with
a command line compiler. After they had shown that they COULD do both,
then they could use whatever they wanted for subsequent assignments.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #6
OK This seems to be the one that the list choked on (possibly due to special quote characters? On Thu, May 9, 2024, 2:07 AM david barto via cctalk wrote: At Ken Bowles retirement from UCSD (Ken was the lead of the UCSD Pascal Project) he related a story that IBM came to UCSD after being "rejected" by DR to see if the Regents of the University would license UCSD Pascal (the OS and the language) to IBM for release on the new hardware IBM was developing. The UC Regents said "no" He was quite sad that history took the very different course. well, it wasn't quite a "rejected by DR". But, the culture clash certainly did strengthen IBM's desire for CP/M alternatives. And, they DID cut a deal with Softech/UCSD-Regents to have UCSD P-system as one of the original operating systems for the 5150. The "very different course" of the market going with CP/M and MS-DOS, rather than P-System, was due to many factors. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #5
UCSD P-system could only allocate contiguous disk space. So a disk that had become "checkerboarded" by writing and deletng files had to be defragmented, using a spplied utility called "Crunch". Was that adequately protected against catastrophes caused by interruption? Softech and UCSD Regents filed trademark registration for "XenoFile", and listed it as a product, but as near as I can tell, NEVER sent out any copies. (February 1987, I went to the Patent and Trademark Office outside of Washington, Dc, and researched some trademarks, in preparation for my trademark registration) They also announced a "universal disk format" for ALL machines, but never had a clue about how to do anything compatible with FM, MFM, and GCR.
[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #4
At NCC - Anaheim, I bought John Draper lunch (I never exercised with him) for a quick consultation about P-system directory structure. I added some P-system formats into XenoCopy a week later.
[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #3
Turbo-Pascal was quite popular. At the annnouncement of it (West Coast Computer Faire), Phillipe Kahn (Borland) was so inundated with "yeah, but what about C?" questions, that by the end of the first day, "Turbo C is coming soon"
[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #2
The SAGE II that had native Pascal (68000) was not a popular machine. Waterloo Pascal on the SuperPetPascal never really made it on the microcomputer platform did it? Bob Wallace (Microsoft's tenth employee) wrote the Micorsoft MS-DOS Pascal compiler. He told me not to use the runtime library, which was also then included with Microsoft Fortran, etc. Later, he left Microsoft when an appointment became necessary to talk to billg, and formed "Quicksoft", selling PC-Write (a significant player in "shareware")
[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #1
Did not make it to the list, so I am breaking it up and re-sending it in pieces Without doing the research before asking, there was the UCSD p-System Pascal for IBM PC which came out very early in the history of the IBM PC. It was not very popular. In the original 5150 launch (August 1981), the operating systems announced were availability of PC-DOS and/or UCSD P-System, and CP/M-86 was "coming soon".
[cctalk] Re: FWIW CD & DVD demagnitizitation [was: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks]
On Thu, 9 May 2024, Mike Stein via cctalk wrote: How much extra to turn my deadly lead pipes into gold while you're here? Alchemist servicess are kinda expensive. Could you get away with just gold plating them?
[cctalk] Re: FWIW CD & DVD demagnitizitation [was: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks]
German snake oil wizards to the rescue! The "Atomstromfilter" (nuclear power filter) joke product has been making the rounds in Germany for at _least_ 20+y now: https://traumshop.net/produkt/atomstromfilter/ It claims to filter power generated by nuclear power plants out of your power flow at the wall socket ;-) On Thu, 9 May 2024, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: That's a wonderful joke site. They don't make it really obvious, but products like a "dark LED" and "frozen hot water" are a hint. . . . actually, . . . want clear, instead of cloudy ice cubes? If you fill your ice cube trays with hot water, instead of cold, it will take longer to freeze, but the air in the fresh tap water will dissipate, and give you clearer ice cubes. It is a well-known caterer's trick.
[cctalk] Re: FWIW CD & DVD demagnitizitation [was: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks]
More here: https://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/equipment/0114/audiophile_ac_outlets.htm If I knew that this stuff wasn't real, I'd figure that it was an April Fool's prank. On Wed, 8 May 2024, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: Why stop there? A truly dedicated audiophile would run new pure silver electrical wire through the walls directly to the breaker box. Then you gotta upgrade to the breaker box that was disinfected from transient spirits through an exorcism, and then special 24K solid gold-contact breakers in inert nylon housings. But, how much good will that do, if you don't also upgrade the drop from the pole? . . . and, do you know whether the electrons that you are receiving are from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, or fossil? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred
[cctalk] Re: FWIW CD & DVD demagnitizitation [was: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks]
also, what some hinted at is the issue is even a very slight amount of magnitsm, spinning very fast, could affect the signal in the playback head How many Gauss would you get from vinyl, spinning at 33.3, 45, or 78 RPM? 'course, if the "demagnetizing" also included a wipe with a lint free cloth, . . . How many Gauss would you get from CD/DVD spinning at [whatever the fastest drives now spin at]? are there "homeopathic" (less than one atom per square centimeter?) levels of iron on the media? . . . but, using the device to demagnetize the cables, especially the silver power cable, would be a different story, . . . Y'all have quite adequately answered my original ignorant question. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Saga of CP/M
Tim Paterson's article "Inside Look At MS-DOS" is a good read. On Tue, 7 May 2024, Ali wrote: A good history and overview of DR including interviews from some of the main players by the "Computer Chronicles": https://youtu.be/bLVbSjDq0DE It's good. When that episode was first broadcast by KCSM, it had good closed captions. My VHS copy is long lost. The Youtube auto-generated captions are much better than they once were, but still not quite there. Nevertheless, now good enough to follow along. "das" is DOS b das BDOS VRI DRI Kary Gary, see PM CP/M Bill gob out Bill Godbout PC does PC-DOS kudos QDOS I be M IBM killed L Kildall Carrie Gary Chip A Cheifet etc. The price differential was NOT that much of a surprise, andwas not entiirely IBM's decision. AND, not mentioned, MS-DOS was out for 6 months before CP/M-86 finally became available! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Saga of CP/M
Tim Paterson's article "Inside Look At MS-DOS" is a good read. The original intent of QDOS was as a quick and dirty temporary substitute to use while waiting for CP/M-86. Tim assumed that CP/M-86 would be as upwards compatible as possible with CP/M. But, there were a substantial number of things that needed to be done differently, including, as you mentioned, memory management, Interrupt Vector Table, etc. But, Paterson deliberately matched the API so that programs developed with QDOS would need as little as possible patching to run under CP/M-86. I believe that he did NOT copy any code from CP/M. Under modern "look and feel" interpretation of copyright, it would be infringing, just like Adam Osborne's "Paperback Software" spreadsheet was deliberately an exact match for Lotus 123 menus and commands. At the time that Paterson wrote QDOS, it was perfectly legal to make a program that mimiced another program, so long as the code wasn't copied. Hence, the various puckman clones, and compatible BIOS's. I barely met Gary, and never got a chance to get to know him. My chat with him about standardizing disk formats was as a stranger. I had a friend who knew him, who told me about Gary's depression and drinking. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com On Tue, 7 May 2024, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote: Hey Grumpy Fred, thanks for sharing your story and honored to be around those who met with Gary. I recall some versions of the story was that he decided to go flying that day since he was quarreling with his wife (or that he decided to personally do that errands, just to "get out of the house" sort of thing). That could be a culture thing - what I mean is, that he didn't think it critical for IBM to make their decision THAT day. And that's the other rumors to the story: that IBM did try to follow up in days or weeks that follow. We'll probably never know the exact truth of things - except that I do think everyone generally agrees that at least Bill Gates did TRY to give CP/M a chance, which is somewhat admirable (in acknowledging that "if you want the best, this is the guy you need to talk to"). The autobiography of Paul Allen, he claims he strongly nudged Gates into looking into QDOS. And for me, I'm convinced Tim do sufficient independent work to make QDOS.But I'm baffled - CP/M was always "just" a 64K OS. Meaning QDOS/PC/MS-DOS, to its credit, tackled the banking challenge - that is, from a software developers perspective, you could allocate 250,000 bytes (if the system had RAM) and the OS managed the up-to-10 segments for you rather seamlessly. I never actually actively used CP/M myself, but my understanding is in all the systems you find it on - like even the OSBORNE-1, they are 64K systems.(the later concurrent and DR-DOS obviously tackled that - by 1990 I was fully onboard with DR-DOS, it really was better for a few years there than MS-DOS) -SteveL (v*) On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 8:30 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: PL/M (think "PL/1") was a high level programming language for microprocessors. CP/M was also briefly called "Control Program and Monitor" It was written by Gary Kildall. (May 19, 1942 - july 11, 1994) Gary taught at Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey. He took a break in 1972, to complete his PhD at University of Washington. He wrote 8008 and 8080 instruction set simulators for Intel, and they loaned him hardware. In 1973? he wrote CP/M. He offered it to Intel, but they didn't want it, although they marketed the PL/M. He and his wife started "Intergalactic Digital Research" in Pacific Grove. Later renamed "Digital Research, Inc." CP/M rapidly became a defacto standard as operating system for 8080 and later Z80 computers. In the late 1970s, when CP/M computers were available with 5.25" drives, and there were hundreds, soon thousands of different formats, I chatted with Gary, and pleaded with him ot create a "standard" format for 5.25". His response was a very polite, "The standard format for CP/M is 8 inch single sided single density." I pointed out that formats were proliferating excessively. His response was a very polite, "I understand. Sorry, but the standard format for CP/M is 8 inch single sided single density." In 1980? IBM was developing a personal computer. (y'all have heard of it) One of the IBM people had a Microsoft Softcard (Z80 plus CP/M) in his Apple. IBM went to Microsoft, to negotiate BASIC for the new machine, and CP/M. Bill Gates explained and sent them to Digital Research. When the IBM representatives arrived, Gary was flying his plane up to Oakland to visit Bill Godbout. He hadn't seen a need to be present, and assumed that Dorothy would take care of the [presumably completely routine] paperwork. While visiting Bill godbout, and delivering some software wa
[cctalk] Re: FWIW CD & DVD demagnitizitation [was: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks]
How difficult is it to measure and compare "With/Without" signals? Even if the signals are not identical when "grabbed twice", it should be possible to statistically evaluate and compare how clean the signals are. . . . and therefore, to what extent the "improvement" is a placebo effect. And/or, select a large sample of listeners, and have them rate the signals multiple times, without knowing which signal they are listening to. That would call for having many multiple players, since the device purports to "repair" the player. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com On Tue, 7 May 2024, CAREY SCHUG via cctalk wrote: my ears would never be good enough to notice any difference For what it's worth: First, in general, there are so many apparent reviews of so many products, it is hard to believe they are all scams. How can there be enough fools to buy enough of those products to have that many different ones? I mean, it takes a lot of work to develop a product, if you only sell 5, it is not worth it. if you take money and don't send anything,t hat would show up in a google search. also, what some hinted at is the issue is even a very slight amount of magnitsm, spinning very fast, could affect the signal in the playback head Do CDs and DVDs have parity and or checksums? If you grab a CD twice, will both results be identical bit for bit? https://www.gcaudio.com/tips-tricks/cd-dvd-demagnetization/ https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/if-you-have-a-cd-player-you-need-to-do-this-periodically At first, this SEEMS even more ludicrous, demagnetizing vinyl LPs, but the pickup heads are analogue magnetic, so maybe more reasonable . https://www.canadianhifi.com/shop/analog/accessories/furutech-demag-a-lp-cd-cable-demagnetizer/ If my email for him still works, I have asked a relative that use to make a then over $1000 (1970s?) crossover for subwoofers (50hz?) for the audiophile market. Just the crossover (signal separator), not the amp needed after that. --Carey On Monday (05/06/2024 at 06:58PM -0700), Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: Ignorant question: Q: When looking for current availability of bulk tape/disk demagnetizers, on eBay, I ran into a lot of CD/DVD demagnetizers What kind of a problem do they have with magnetism?
[cctalk] Re: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks
Ignorant question: Q: When looking for current availability of bulk tape/disk demagnetizers, on eBay, I ran into a lot of CD/DVD demagnetizers What kind of a problem do they have with magnetism? Or is this like the DVD REWINDERS? On Mon, 6 May 2024, Will Cooke via cctalk wrote: A must-have accessory to go with your oxygen-free cables. https://www.tnt-audio.com/accessories/vs_demagnetizer_e.html OK But, neither this one for $80.99 https://www.ebay.com/itm/265168453635 nor even this one for $3600 https://www.ebay.com/itm/134706639303 include a basic feature for rewinding rental DVDs before returning them. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks
Ignorant question: Q: When looking for current availability of bulk tape/disk demagnetizers, on eBay, I ran into a lot of CD/DVD demagnetizers What kind of a problem do they have with magnetism? Or is this like the DVD REWINDERS?
[cctalk] Re: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks
Radio Shack used to sell a "Bulk Tape Eraser". I gave mine to the college. Those are on eBay, and even Amazon. About 25 years ago, Radio Shack/Tandy changed the label and box, and called it "Bulk Disk Eraser". The college bought one, and discarded mine. But, as everyone knows, the one SURE way to totaally erase a disk is to store the only copy of something irreplaceable on it. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Altair 8800 50th birthday...
Yes, in those days, magazines were printed, and mailed out, or shipped to newstands before their nominal date, in order to be delivered by their nominal date. The intent was that people would have it by January 1st, so it would arrive in late December. So, the January 1975 one would have been written, copyrighted, and printed in November or December 1974. On Mon, 6 May 2024, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote: Perhaps After doing the layout work in the November it was perhaps copyrighted Immediately during layout But it did not ship Until January Think! back in those days things did not instantly happen and we're instantly shipped Ed# Sent from AOL on Android On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 7:09 AM, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: On Fri, May 3, 2024, 1:28 AM Smith, Wayne via cctalk wrote: I looked up the Jan. 1975 issue of Popular Electronics in the Copyright Office's Periodicals Digest. It was published on Nov. 19, 1974 if you are looking for an actual anniversary date. The January issue was certainly not available in November of 1974. When did it actually get sent out and start showing up in people's mailboxes? Sellam
[cctalk] Saga of CP/M
PL/M (think "PL/1") was a high level programming language for microprocessors.
CP/M was also briefly called "Control Program and Monitor"
It was written by Gary Kildall. (May 19, 1942 - july 11, 1994)
Gary taught at Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey.
He took a break in 1972, to complete his PhD at University of Washington.
He wrote 8008 and 8080 instruction set simulators for Intel, and they loaned
him hardware.
In 1973? he wrote CP/M.
He offered it to Intel, but they didn't want it, although they marketed the
PL/M.
He and his wife started "Intergalactic Digital Research" in Pacific Grove.
Later renamed "Digital Research, Inc."
CP/M rapidly became a defacto standard as operating system for 8080 and later
Z80 computers.
In the late 1970s, when CP/M computers were available with 5.25" drives, and
there were hundreds, soon thousands of different formats, I chatted with Gary,
and pleaded with him ot create a "standard" format for 5.25".
His response was a very polite, "The standard format for CP/M is 8 inch single
sided single density."
I pointed out that formats were proliferating excessively.
His response was a very polite, "I understand. Sorry, but the standard format
for CP/M is 8 inch single sided single density."
In 1980? IBM was developing a personal computer. (y'all have heard of it) One
of the IBM people had a Microsoft Softcard (Z80 plus CP/M) in his Apple. IBM
went to Microsoft, to negotiate BASIC for the new machine, and CP/M.
Bill Gates explained and sent them to Digital Research.
When the IBM representatives arrived, Gary was flying his plane up to Oakland
to visit Bill Godbout. He hadn't seen a need to be present, and assumed that
Dorothy would take care of the [presumably completely routine] paperwork. While
visiting Bill godbout, and delivering some software was important, it WAS
something that a low level courier could have done.
There was a little bit of a culture clash.
The IBM people were all in identical blue suits.
The DR people were in sandals, barefoot, shorts, t-shirts, braless women, with
bicycles, surfboard, plants and even cats in the office,
The IBM people demanded a signed non=disclosure ageement before talking.
Dorothy Kildall refused.
When Dorothy got Gary on the phone, it is unreliably reported that he said,
"well, let them sit on the couch and wait their turn like the rest of the
customers."
It is also been said that DR people upstairs saw the IBM people marching up,
and thought that it was a drug raid. I have stood in that bay window
overlooking the front door, and can believe that.
IBM chose to not do business with DR and went back to Microsoft.
When billg was unable to convince them that Microsoft was not in the operating
system business, Microsoft went into the operating system business. They
bought an unlimited license to QDOS (Tim Paterson's work at Seattle Computer
Products). They also hired Tim Paterson.
DR was working on CP/M-86, but it was a ways off.
Paterson had written QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") as a placeholder
to be able to continue development while waiting for CP/M-86
We've mentioned before, that Tim Paterson got the idea for the directory
structure from Microsoft Standalone BASIC. As Chuck pointed out, that was not
a new invention, merely a choice of which way to do it.
billg knew how to deal with officious managers. It is unreliably said that he
told the Microsoft people, "Everybody who does not own a suit, stay home
tomorrow!"
IBM insisted that Micorsoft beef up security. window shades, locks on doors
that normally weren't, locks on file cabinets, etc.
It is unreliably said that to throw off anyboy who heard about it, that
Microsoft referred to the IBm project as "Project Commodore"
dr continued to sell CP/M.
When the 5150/:PC was ready, IBM announced it with PC-DOS, which was a renaming
of MS-DOS,renaming 86-DOS, renaming QDOS.
If I recall correctly theprice was $40 (or maybe $60?)
DR pointed out that NS-DOS was extremely similar to CP/M.
https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~johnsojr/2012-13/fall/cs370/resources/An%20Inside%20Look%20at%20MS-DOS.pdf
IBM didn't consider it a problem, andsimply offered to ALSO sell CP/M-86,
particularly since they were already also marketing UCSD P-System.
CP/M-86 was not available yet, so everybody buying a disk based PC bought
PC-DOS.
But, most of us assumed thata CP/M-86 would become the standard once it came
out, and PC-DOS was similar and let us use the machines while waiting.
CP/M-86 took a long time to come out (6 months is a LONG time in such things).
When it did, the price was $240.
There are disagreemnets about whether DR or IBM had set the price point.
Most decided to keep using Pc-DOs until CP/M-86 had caught on.
But with the price differential, and the lead, PC-DOS remained the standard.
dr continued, came out with MP/M-86, and eventually came out with "Concurrent
DOS", and "DR-DOS", which was based on MS-DOS.
[cctalk] Re: BASIC
Where would you fit the Tandy Model 100 in here? On Fri, 3 May 2024, Gavin Scott via cctalk wrote: The Model 100 had a great keyboard, a text editor, and a built-in modem, and was apparently very popular among journalists who used it to write and submit stories from the field. So maybe it saw less use of the built-in BASIC than other machines of the day. Many people used the BASIC and loved it. But, there were other built-in "apps", and it was possible to use it without using the BASIC. So, some users used the BASIC, and some did not; those two groups apparently didn't associate much with each other :-) All of the Kyocera based machines (Model 100, NEC8201, and Olivetti M10) had text editor, and telcom. http://oldcomputers.net/kc.html The Model 100 and the Olivetti M10 also had Address and scheduler The model 100 had an optional Multiplan spreadsheet ROM, or you could write yor own ROMS. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: BASIC
Where would you fit the Tandy Model 100 in here? Ultimately it
supported a disk drive, ran basic and also sported an expansion box
that included video support and a floppy.
On Fri, 3 May 2024, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
Ultimately, so did the TRS-80. At least Model I, III and 4.
and ethernet, too. Come to think of it, so does the Color
Computer. Not sure where we are going with this. :-)
The "Coco" ("Color Computer") was similar to Microsoft Standalone BASIC,
particularly in its disk format.
The TRS80 models 1, 3, and 4 had file commands in their BASICs.
They ran under TRS-DOS.
The Saga Of TRSDOS: (long (TLDR?))
TRSDOS was created by Randy Cook as a work for hire.
Although it was marketed as TRSDOS 2.0, Randy Cook never finished it, and
documentation was inadequately sparse.
When Radio Shack came out with their "expansion interface" and disk
drives, they gave out TRSDOS 2.0, which barely worked. Randy Cook
hurriedly came out with 2.1 , and then left Radio Shack. Radio
Shack worked on 2.2
Clifford Ide, under pseudonym "Sam Jones" created an enormous collection
of patches to TRSDOS, and called it APRDOS.
Apparat marketed it, and changed the name to NEWDOS
https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/apparat-newdos80
But, it was a patched version of TRSDOS.
Both Randy Cook and Radio Shack were not amused.
Apparat initially said that everybody who used it also had to buy TRSDOS.
That didn't hold up well.
So, they said that it was changed so much that there was no trace of
TRSDOS in it.
That didn't hold up well.
Randy Cook's lawyer (who was also a programmer, and marketed a serial
communications program) gathered witnesses, and typed BOOT.SYS/RV36 ,
running BOOT.SYS as if it were an executable, using one of the master
passwords. The screen cleared, and displayed a full screen copyright
message including "Copyright Randy Cook".
Apparat settled and agreed to rewrite from scratch to create a
non-infringing version (called "NEWDOS80"). That was actually very
advantageous, as it made it possible to create a substantially improved
product.
Meanwhile, Radio Shack was frantically patching TRSDOS 2.2, and came out
with TRSDOS 2.3
They changed the hidden copyright message from
"Copyright Randy Cook" to
"Copyright Tandy Corp"
In addition to NEWDOS80, there were several other independents, including
DOSPLUS. Most of which added support for double sided drives, and 80
tracks, and numerous other features not present in TRSDOS.
In fact, when Micropolis started selling disk drives to TRS80 users, they
included their own completely unrelated OS!
Meanwhile, Randy Cook, no longer affiliated with Radio Shack, started his
own company (ACS), and worked on further expansion of TRSDOS. He worked
on adding in incredible features unheard of in microcomputer operating
systems. He called it TRS80-DOS-3.0, but that wouldn't hold up for
trademark reasons, so he renamed it VTOS 3.0
http://www.trs-80.org/vtos/
Although it was marketed, Randy Cook never finished it, and documentation
was inadequately sparse (mostly just a list of features)
Scott Adams, (of Adventure Internationsl, NOT Scott Adams of "Dilbert")
cut a deal with Randy Cook to expand it and finish it. That was VTOS 4.0
Although it was marketed, Randy Cook never finished it, and documentation
was inadequately sparse (mostly just a list of features)
Lobo drives was in the lucrative market of marketing disk drives. They
could buy drive, including the Shugart SA400 used by Radio Shack and
re-sell tham at a substantial profit, and still be WAY cheaper than Radio
Shack's prices for the same drive mechanism (~$250 Vs $500, although Radio
Shacks case and power supply had a card extender that made them more
convenient to install).
Lobo decided to develop and market an expansion interface compatible with
TRS80 model 1, with double density, and 8 inch drive support!
But, there was a glitch.
Model 1 TRSDOS, using a Western Digital 1771 chip used some strange
address marks, including different ones for directory sectors than for
data sectors. It is rumored that that was unintentional, and due to
misreading, or misprinting of the 1771 data sheets.
Lobo's expansion interface used a WD 1791 FDC, which could do MFM (double
density). BUT, it COULD NOT write some of the address marks used by
model-1 TRSDOS!
Lobo set up another company, ("LSI" "Logical Systems, Inc"), to create a
new operating system for it. They purchased rights to VTOS 4.0, and hired
all of the best TRS80 assembly language programmers that they could find,
such as Roy Soltoff, Bill Schroeder, and Tim Mann. Without Randy Cook.
Their all-star team actually FINISHED it! And wrote a large binder of
documentation. LSI called their new operating system LDOS 5.0
https://vtda.org/docs/computing/LSI/LSI_LDOS_51_Model_I_III.pdf
Meanwhile, Radio Shack was coming out with their model 3, which had double
density. Their "TRSDOS [for
[cctalk] Re: BASIC
Yes, Microsoft certainly did not invent linked list allocation. But, the Microsoft implementation of the existing idea happened to be what inspired Tim Paterson to do it. On 5/3/24 11:05, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: "Remembering his conversation at NCC with Marc McDonald about File Allocation Tables in his unfinished, large, and never-released 8-bit MIDAS operating system, Paterson decided that the FAT scheme was a better way to handle disk information than the way CP/M did it." On Fri, 3 May 2024, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Link-list file allocation was hardly new back then. CDC had been doing that since the mid-1960s (cf. SCOPE RBR, RBT, FNT FST, etc.). I suspect other mainframe operating systems using that scheme may even pre-date that. One thing that I liked about the CDC approach is that you could use certain pre-defined file names (INPUT OUTPUT, PUNCH) and they would be disposed of appropriately at end-of job. Any other "permanent" files had to be explicitly attached to the job, giving permissions, passwords, cycles, etc. Any temporary files were created just by reference and were deleted at the end-of-job unless explicitly saved as "permanent" files. None of this IBM "DD" stuff. --Chuck
[cctalk] Re: BASIC
On Fri, 3 May 2024, KenUnix via cctalk wrote: Steve, Where would you fit the Tandy Model 100 in here? Ultimately it supported a disk drive, ran basic and also sported an expansion box that included video support and a floppy. -Ken The Model 100 BASIC (puportedly the last product that billg had active coding participation in) was, indeed, closely tied to the Microsoft Standalone BASIC. The external 3.5" "Tandy Portable Disk Drive" was a unique system, that used ordinary 2DD 3.5" floppies, but had a bizarre format, unlike anything else. It is even WAY more different than the 600RPM full-height Sony drives. Although it would be possible, with a system supporting FM/single-density to write code to read those disks, with their half-track FM sectors, you would be far better off to connect that drive to a serial port and use its internal circuitry (there have existed short programs to talk to it). But, the video and floppy external expansion box for the Model 100 uses Microsoft Standalone BASIC MFM format and directory structure on 5.25" floppies. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: BASIC
On Fri, 3 May 2024, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
Microsoft BASIC appears on the 1979 NEC PC-8001, which includes disk drive
support (similar to the later additions to Commodore BASIC also around
1980). But in the NEC PC-8001 manual about BASIC, it refers to a "FAT"
format used on disks. So I suspect Microsoft's early work in adding disk
drive support into BASIC did help them in maintaining that format when
packaging up QDOS later.
Marc McDonald, Microsoft's first SALARIED employee, designed and
implemented 8-bit FAT for the NCR 8200 and Micorsoft Standalone Disk
BASIC-80 in 1977.
Numerous "authoritative" sources, including Microsoft's "MS-DOS
Encyclopedia" (ISBN 1-55615-049-0), as well as Manes' "Gates : How
Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man
in America" (ISBN 0-385-42075-7) explicitly state that it was the
idea/inspiration for Tim Paterson's (author of QDOS, MS-DOS, ...) use of
FAT, while sharing a booth with Microsoft at NCC (trade show) Chicago
1977.
"Remembering his conversation at NCC with Marc McDonald about File
Allocation Tables in his unfinished, large, and never-released 8-bit MIDAS
operating system, Paterson decided that the FAT scheme was a better way to
handle disk information than the way CP/M did it."
The MS-DOS Encyclopedia says that it was an implementation on NCR.
I've never seen the NCR implementation, but the NEC PC8001[A] and
PC8801 were quite common. 20 years ago, Sellam and I helped Don Maslin
decipher such a disk from an NEC9801 8" disk. And Lee brought me an
Okidata standalone BASIC disk from Russia.
The Coco uses the same basic disk directory structure, with a few minor
differences (including calling it a "GAT" ("Granule Allocation Table")
instead of a FAT.
The external 5.25" disk drive for the Radio Shack Model 100 also uses the
same directory structure.
In the various instances of the Standalone BASIC, there are variations in
the details of the size and exact form of the directory entries and the
size and number of FAT entries. They put the directory, both FAT and file
name based entries, on a track near the seek center of the disk.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: What to take to a vintage computer show
On Wed, 1 May 2024, Jim Brain via cctalk wrote: Games are always a good draw, even if that seems like cheating. In the early days of the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, (and I may have the two reversed in the following anecdote), Atari had a nice display of a bouncing checkered beach ball. Amiga had almost nothing. But, the second day, everybody except the booth bimbos at Commodore looked haggard, but their machine was showing a bouncing checkered beach ball. And it was bouncing faster than Atari's! If you really want to be strategic, have a different demo available for each day :-) Sorry that I forgot to mention soldering iron and related tools; I had one living in my car, so didn't think of it as a separate item. My assistant hired a pretty girlfriend as a booth bimbo. She got us invited to all of the parties (and some Comdex parties are incredible) In my company everybody creates their own job title. I am "a programmer". My assistant alternated between "VP" and "Emperor of the dark lords of the universe". Our booth bimbo gave herself the title, "BAIT" -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: What to take to a vintage computer show
Bring lots of business cards. Even if you aren't running a business, it's a lot better than standing there writing your contact information for everybofy that you want to stay in touch with. paper, pens, pencils, post-it notes, stapler, duct tape, voltmeter, batteries, flashlight, cash, blank disks and memory cards, screwdrivers, vise-grips, hammer. Even if none of those fit in with your plans, those items will help enormously to deal with unexpected situations. It isn't so much how well prepared you are, as how well you can adapt when needed. For example, one year at Comdex, we rented an seven foot by seven foot booth. A year later, at the show, the management realized that that little block of space was something that should not have been rented. So, they gave us a ten by ten. How to you make a seven foot wide back sign at least look like it fills a ten foot space? Home Depot for some aluminum angle iron, fabric store for drapes. Another time, when we had a 10 x 10, next to a couple who we knew well, we had to help them. He ended up in the hospital, but his wife was determined to do the show, anyway. So, we combine the two 10x10s into a 10x20, with only a "virtual" wall in between, and stuck the leads table with the imprinter, etc, in the middle. We always had a tiny refrigerator in our booth. Handing Jerry Pournelle a cold beer got us a lot of free ink. Snack foods for hospitality and/or if things are too busy at lunch time to goget anything. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com On Wed, 1 May 2024, Brad H via cctalk wrote: Just reaching out to anyone who has exhibited at a vintage computing festival before. After years of only being able to watch others attend the ones that happen in the US, we are finally getting one in BC here. Super excited. I was invited both to speak and to exhibit, and they even got me two tables which is awesome. Like, how do you prepare for these things? What things that you didn't think of going into your first show do you wish you had? I have a pretty eclectic collection, and some really rare stuff (like my Mark-8s) that I'd love to bring but am hesitant about due to the risks of transportation damage and theft (from the car mostly, not the convention itself). Just trying to decide what to bring and how focused to be in terms of theme. Brad
[cctalk] Re: APL (Was: BASIC
On Wed, 1 May 2024, Mike Katz wrote: I remember replacing the character generator eprom (the type with the window for UV erasing) on an old ATI EGA video board so that I could have the APL character set. sweet At least one of the ATI EGA boards had a daughter board available to be able to use it in Compaq luggables. (Compaq CGA, Compaq EGA, ATI EGA with daughter board) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: BASIC
On Wed, 1 May 2024, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Yet FORTRAN, the granddaddy of them all, continues on... It should be noted that FORTRAN celebrates its 70th anniversary this year: I didn't start until May 29, 1965. I had previously been doing some keypunching, and 084 counting sorter. IBM did the data processing for the CBS "National Drivers Test"; they actually succeeded in using port-a-punch cards sent through the US postal system! My father did the analysis. You can see him behind Walter Cronkite, frantically manually adding numbers where IBM's flawed results didn't add up close enough to 100%. He decided that contracting out programming was too risky. On May 29, he placed a copy of Mc Cracken and Decima Anderson's books on the dining room table. And, we started to learn the basics of programming. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: APL (Was: BASIC
APL was incredible. I was amazed. I was immediately able to do a few simple things that were useful for my boss and myself, and writing simple programs within hours. Its matrix arithmetic was awesome. APL typeball on a selectric terminal at GSFC, . . . Some of the keys were re-labeled, but there was a chart on the wall of which keyboard characters were which APL symbols. On Wed, 1 May 2024, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: It was indeed. It was also one of the first languages implemented on a microprocessor-based personal computer system. (MCM-70). To me, APL is logical--strict right-to-left precedence; simple array and matrix operations. I've long wondered if we introduced students to APL as a first language, what our applications code would look like today. My friend Bruce, called it "That Iverson Language". It's interesting to note that the Iverson book was published in 1962, but an implementation (under 7090 IBSYS) didn't come about until 1965, although preliminary implementation as PAT had been done on a 1620 (!) in 1963. The extended character set was an important obstacle to its acceptance. Besides keyboard (masking tape) and output (APL typeball, special character generator, or having to substitute combinations of character), many people were unwilling to even try something with a different character set. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: APL (Was: BASIC
On Wed, 1 May 2024, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: To be sure, BASIC was hardly unique in terms of the 1960s interactive programming languages. We had JOSS, PILOT, IITRAN and a host of others, based on FORTRAN-ish syntax. not to forget APL, which was a thing apart. What would our world be like if the first home computers were to have had APL, instead of BASIC? APL was incredible. I was amazed. I was immediately able to do a few simple things that were useful for my boss and myself, and writing simple programs within hours. Its matrix arithmetic was awesome. APL typeball on a selectric terminal at GSFC, . . . Some of the keys were re-labeled, but there was a chart on the wall of which keyboard characters were which APL symbols. My cousin (David Ungar) referred to APL as "terse". He said that you could write a word processing program in a single line, but that was well past my abilities. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: BASIC
On Wed, 1 May 2024, Mike Katz wrote: I'm sorry but the original BASIC as run on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System was compiled. I wasn't around Dartmouth, and my first experiences with BASIC were all interpreted. I had run a trivial program in it on a Silent 700 connected through a phone line, long before I got my first personal computer (TRS80). Thank you for the details of the history. When Microsoft introduced "BASCOM" (their BASIC compiler), my first uses of it were primarily to make my source code less easily accessible to would-be infringers. :-) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: BASIC
I remember that one of the changes that "street" BASICs made was to make the keyword "LET" be optional. Thus, instead of writing LET X = 3 you could write X = 3 unfortunately, that further confused the issue of ASSIGNMENT versus EQUALITY, and many beginners tried to write 3 = X while they certainly would not have tried to write LET 3 = X Sorry, but off the top of my head, I can't recall the many other differences. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: BASIC
On Wed, 1 May 2024, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
Nostalgia keeps pressing ahead: It was 60 yrs. ago that BASIC came into
existence. I remember very well writing in Apple Basic and GW Basic later
on. As a non-compiled OS, an interpreted OS, it was just the right tool for
a microcomputer with limited memory. I recall fondly taking code from
popular magazines and getting them to run. It was thrilling indeed!
Happy computing,
Murray
BTW, BASIC ("Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code") was
developed at Dartmouth college by Kurtz and Kemeny. More than 30 years
later was the first time (or so they claimed) that they EVER got around to
trying ANY of the BASICs based on their original language.
They were APALLED!
They came out with "TRUE BASIC", to counter the various "street BASICs.
picky details, . . .
BASIC was a non-compiled interpreted LANGUAGE, not an OS ("Operating
System"), at least in the examples you mention. (also TRS80 and some
models of Commodore)
However, to be fair, there did exist something called "Microsoft
Stand-Alone BASIC", used in the Coco, some models of NEC 8801 (and 9801?)
That was a Microsoft BASIC that had rudimentary disk operations built in,
to serve the needed functions of an OS.
The disk directory structure of Microsoft Stand-Alone BASIC, with
directory entris pointing into a linked list allocation table,was the
inspiration for Tim Paterson to use as the directory structure for
PC-DOS/MS-DOS/86-DOS/QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System" (a
placeholder to use during hardware development while waiting for the
overdue CP/M-86)) .
More details to research, . . .
GWBASIC was a version of BASICA of the 5150/PC, but run from MS-DOS, and
not requiring the ROMS. That was so that OEMs of MS-DOS could supply
BASIC closely matching that of the PC. Some even renamed GWBASIC into
"BASICA", topreserve compatability for batch files that called BASIC.
Q: What did "GWBASIC" stand for?
at the time, some Microsoft people said that it stood for "Gee Whiz
BASIC". But more recently, Microsoft denies any memory of what it was,
and billg speculated that it stood for "Greg Whitten BASIC".
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks
On Tue, 30 Apr 2024, John Herron via cctalk wrote:
Yup, that's all I used to do. Some scotch tape over the floppy disk hole to
make the system see it as DD. If it didn't automatically format as 720, you
could specify size or sector count with format.com in dos.
Somemedia sensors are optical; use opaque taps.
I did hear folks say it wasn't always reliable (similar to 5.25 disks being
formated on a high density drive) but I never saw any problems in my
limited use.
3.5" are 600 VS 750 oersted;
5.25" are 300 vs 600 Oersted;
a low density 5.25 formatted as "high density" won't do well;
a high density 5.25" (1.2M) formatted as low density ("360K") sill self
erase VERY soon, sometimes before you can even get it over to another
machine. We had a college purchasing agent in bed with "Roytype", who
kept giving us "1.2M" floppies ofr out TRS80s; they self erased very soon.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Double Density 3.5" Floppy Disks
A 720K 3.5" is about 600 Oersted; a 1.4M 3.5" is about 720-750 Oersted. You can format a 1.4M as 720K, and often, maybe even usually, get away with it; it will be just like a poor quality 720K. On drives with a media sensor, you can cover the hole during formatting. On Tue, 30 Apr 2024, Anders Nelson via cctalk wrote: Having grown up with 1.44MB 3.5" floppies, I have a question: is it possible to use a 1.44MB disk and just format it as a 720K disk? =] -- Anders Nelson www.andersknelson.com On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 1:00 PM Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: Does anybody have any extra 720K (double sided, double density) 3.5" Floppy Disks that could use a good home? If so, please email me directly at bit...@12bitsbest.com. Thank you, Mike
[cctalk] Re: PCs in home vs businesses (70s/80s)
On Sat, 27 Apr 2024, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: I had checked it on an NEC V20, but not on MANY other CPUs. at least, I think that it was a V20. The code that I had written to try to identify which processor was running thought that it was. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: PCs in home vs businesses (70s/80s)
How many know that AAM is a two byte instruction, with the second byte being 0Ah? Changing the second byte to 8 gave division by 8, etc. On Sat, 27 Apr 2024, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Only for sure on Intel x86 processors. I believe that the NEC V20 assumes that the second byte is 0x0a and ignores the byte completely. I would not be surprised to find that other non-Intel CPUs behave the same way. Thank you I had checked it on an NEC V20, but not on MANY other CPUs. But, there was always the possibility that something like that COULD occur at any time in the future, so I never used that in any released product. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: PCs in home vs businesses (70s/80s)
Did any one need REAL BCD math like the Big Boys had? On Sat, 27 Apr 2024, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote: No, this is a fallacy. Binary arithmetic is as "accurate" as decimal. Handling VERY large numbers in floating point loses some precision, but any computer can do multiple word binary quite well. And, the obvious example is doing division in decimal still can end up with remainders. Back in the day, banks were terribly worried about defalcation by the guys who maintain the daily interest program. The classic story is the guy who adjusts the code to take those fractional cents that get rounded back to the bank and sends 10% to their own account. Now, there are so many really serious ways fraudsters can steal from banks and their customers that nobody is too worried about that sort of inside job. A common beginer mistake was to use floating point for money. i told my students to use a long int, and then print a period before the last two digits. On the PC, I used a little decimal arithmetic in the "Sales Tax Genie" TSR, but mostly, I just used AAM and DAA in binary/decima conversion. How many know that AAM is a two byte instruction, with te second byte beint 0Ah? Changing the second byte to 8 gave division by 8, etc. What is the smallest code to screen display a 16 bit number in hex? anything smaller than?: (I expect some clever alternatives) PUSH CX MOV CX, 0404h ; CH and CL are independent N1: ROL AX, CL PUSH AX AND AL, 0Fh DAA ADD AL, 0F0h ADC AL, 40h MOV AH, 0Eh ;displays char in AL at cursor position INT 10h POP AX DEC CH JNZ N1 PO CX -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: PCs in home vs businesses (70s/80s)
On Sat, 27 Apr 2024, Gary Grebus via cctalk wrote:
By the time frame mentioned in the article (1981) there were many
commercially available applications. There was also hardware (e.g. from DEC,
DG, HP) that was of a scale where it would be dedicated to one application.
At that time I worked for a company that developed a database system. I can
think of a few trips I made to help customers bring up a new data center
dedicated to running our product.
I consider the introduction of the IBM PC/5150 (August 1981) to be
significant.
Although word processing was readily available, and Visicalc ran on the
Apple (later TRS80 versions), "home computers" didn't get any respect, and
were not taken seriously by business.
With the introduction of the 5150, business started taking microcomputers
more seriously.
Before that time, a tiny auto parts store, would be hard sold an
mini-computer, when a micro with word processing, spreadsheet, and dBase2
would do wuite adequately.
In 1979, I was using a TRS80 in my auto repair business.
And also I and a partner had a business ("Elcompco") selling hardware
(RAM, drives, lower-case mod, etc. and reselling software.
When we split the partnership, I became "Berkeley Microcomputer", and
sold the auto repair business to two of my employees.
After writing "XenoCopy" (1984), I renamed my company "XenoSoft".
But, also, starting in 1983, I was also teaching community college
full-time (FORTRAN, BASIC, Microcmputer operatoing system, etc.)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Altair 8800 50th birthday...
On Fri, 26 Apr 2024, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: It really is a momentous event, and should be properly honored and celebrated. Wow, half a century. Thanks for bringing this up. Is this half a century from when they said, "Hey, you know what would be neat to build?" or from when they started designing? or got a preliminary design done? built a prototype? announced it? started taking orders? started filling orders?
[cctalk] OFF TOPIC: Doctor Who (was: Z80 vs other microprocessors of the time.
On Wed, 24 Apr 2024, ben via cctalk wrote: This would be great, but I live on the other side of the pond and BBC anything is hard to find, let alone Micro's. Where is my "Dr. Who". Ben. I was able, quite easily, to order DVDs from Amazon.co.uk. That got me "Shada" (Doctor who written by Douglas Adams), and the 2023 specials, LONG before they were released in USA. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Z80 vs other microprocessors of the time.
Did the Dimension 68000 (a multi-processor machine) have Z80 and 6502? On Tue, 23 Apr 2024, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Couldn't Bill Godbout's CPU-68K board co-exist with other CPU boards? Did he, or anybody else, make an S100 6502 CPU board?
[cctalk] Re: Z80 vs other microprocessors of the time.
On Tue, 23 Apr 2024, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote: I had a "Magic Sac" thing-y that plugged into the ROM port of my Atari 1040. When I put a Mac ROM into its socket, I could run most Mac programs that I had. That was pretty cool The developer of it said that when he met with Apple's lawyers, "Magic Sack" was as close to "Mac" as they would let him be.
[cctalk] Re: Z80 vs other microprocessors of the time.
Did the Dimension 68000 (a multi-processor machine) have Z80 and 6502? On Tue, 23 Apr 2024, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: What about the Tandy 16 and 6000. M68K and Z80. Yes. But the original comment that I was responding to was asking Z80 and 6502. Cromemco also had a 68000 and Z80 machine. a friend of a friend had one, and turned up his nose at the thought of a Tandy machine. BTW, I found out about the Dimension 68000; it was rather expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_68000 68000, Z80, 8086 -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Z80 vs other microprocessors of the time.
Did the Dimension 68000 (a multi-processor machine) have Z80 and 6502? Commodore 128 had Z80 and 6502 On Tue, 23 Apr 2024, Mike Katz wrote: I think Ohio Scientific made a computer called the 3B or something like that that had a 6502, a Z-80 and a 6800 in it. If my memory serves. On 4/23/2024 7:00 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: On Tue, 23 Apr 2024, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote: I shared an office with a lady who got a computer from Ohio Scientific that had both a Z80 and a 6502. It also had two 5/25" floppy drives. She also got a tee-shirt that said "I have two floppies." Except she didn't. aside from her floppies, . . . a significant portion (I remember at one time, somebody at Apple said 20%) of Apple users had the Microsoft SoftCard Z80, or imitations thereof. At least one of the Apple imitations had both 6502 and Z80. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Z80 vs other microprocessors of the time.
On Tue, 23 Apr 2024, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote: I shared an office with a lady who got a computer from Ohio Scientific that had both a Z80 and a 6502. It also had two 5/25" floppy drives. She also got a tee-shirt that said "I have two floppies." Except she didn't. aside from her floppies, . . . a significant portion (I remember at one time, somebody at Apple said 20%) of Apple users had the Microsoft SoftCard Z80, or imitations thereof. At least one of the Apple imitations had both 6502 and Z80. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Z80 vs other microprocessors of the time.
Again, not impossible, but very likely not feasable. On Mon, 22 Apr 2024, Mike Katz wrote: Well not possible with the hardware available at the time. Some stuff is getting faster, . . . Can you estimate how much faster it would need to be? (perhaps then, log(2) of that, times 18 months? :-) 'course, with Moore no longer around, who's gonna enforce his law? :-) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Z80 vs other microprocessors of the time.
On Mon, 22 Apr 2024, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote: Cycle accurate emulation becomes impossible in the following circumstances: * Branch prediction and pipelining can cause out of order execution and the execution path become data dependent. * Cache memory. It can be very difficult to predict a cache flush or cache miss or cache look aside buffer hit * Memory management can inject wait states and cause other cycle counting issues * Peripherals can inject unpredictable wait states * Multi-core processors because you don't necessarily know what core is doing what and possibly one core waiting on another core. * DMA can cause some CPUs to pause because the bus is busy doing DMA transfers (not all processors have this as an issue). * Some CPUs shut down clocks and peripherals if they are not used and they take time to re-start. * Any code that waits for some kind of external input. Ridiculously impractical, but not impossible. All of those things could be calculated, and worked around. Admittedly, we might not have a machine fast enough to do so. Whereas, emulation that doesn't need to do those can be done with systems not extremely faster than the one being emulated. When I was working for a 6800 C compiler company we could simulate all 68000 CPUs before the 68020. The 68020 with it's pipelining and branch prediction made it impossible to do cycle accurate timing. Again, not impossible, but very likely not feasable. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Z80 vs other microprocessors of the time.
On 2024-04-22 1:02 p.m., Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: I'd like to see a Z80 implemented with UV-201 vacuum tubes... :) --Chuck On Mon, 22 Apr 2024, ben via cctalk wrote: Real computers use glow tubes like the NE-2 or the NE-77.:) I thought that real computers use gears
[cctalk] Re: Last Buy notification for Z80 (Z84C00 Product line)
Gee! Have sales gone down? One more reason to use the 8080 subset when writing CP/M programs. Aren't there already some licensed second sources?
[cctalk] Re: Wang programmable calculator [was: Bomar 901b My wife found in my stuff. Is this as scarce at it seems?]
On Tue, 16 Apr 2024, CAREY SCHUG via cctalk wrote: The wang calculator was hardly tiny, at least not the one I used in 1970-71. IIRC the size of a large lunchbox or maybe an attache case. AND...it could connect to four display units, an early timesharing system. I think you could have several programs on the card and choose which program to execute from any of the 4 display units. We had one in the Freshmman physics lab at Northwestern university. I was a graduate student and in charge of a lab section. I picked up one of the card readers in a junk box at a retro computer fair, minus the electronics. I figured I could connect it to some parallel ports to read tab cards in two passes (read half the columns, reverse the card and read the others). Does anybody want a picture of it? On the one that I got achance to play with, the part on top of the table was tiny, and the rest was underneath the table, as Rick mentioned. There were probably other models. It has been said that when Radio Shack's engineers showed the working prototype of the TRS80 to the execs, that the CEO looked under the table to try to "see where the rest of it is". I also got one of the card readers from some junk! (at the Foothill swap) My plan was exactly the same as yours. But, life got in the way, and it never came to be. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Bomar 901b My wife found in my stuff. Is this as scarce at it seems?s,?
Although the HP-35 was the first "pocket calculator" from HP, it was not the first handheld calculator. On Wed, 17 Apr 2024, Adrian Godwin wrote: I think it was the first *scientific* pocket calculator though. I believe that that is correct. and Casio CFX-40/CFX-400 (1984?) was the first scientific calculator watch. Epson RC-20 (1985) was the first wrist computer (Z80 compatible, with a little RAM (2K?), touch screen, and a serial port) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Bomar 901b My wife found in my stuff. Is this as scarce at it seems?s,?
901B is the first pocket calculator I remember - I don't know if there were earlier ones. On Tue, 16 Apr 2024, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote: The first one I remember is the HP Digital Slide Rule, about 1965. Six digits. $600. The HP-35 was marketed with a name of "Electronic Slide Rule" https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/calculators/1/64/264 Similar title, 52 years ago, not 59 years ago. It came out in 1972. I saw one in late 1972. In 1972, however, you could get a Silent 700, and connect to a timesharing machine over telephone. Although the HP-35 was the first "pocket calculator" from HP, it was not the first handheld calculator. In 1970 or 1971, Wang had a tiny desktop calculator that had a card reader! The card reader was an external peripheral, that clam-shell closed on individual port-a-punch cards (perforated normal sized cards using every other column) In fact, by 1972, there was even a handheld calculator made in France; one of my bosses in 1972 had that. It was kept in my desk drawer, and they called me "Head of computing services" in bidding on at least one contract. A completely undeserved title, just because I did a little programming in FORTRAN and APL, and was the keeper of the calculator.
[cctalk] Re: Bomar 901b My wife found in my stuff. Is this as scarce at it seems?s,?
On Mon, 15 Apr 2024, Don R via cctalk wrote: At first I misread the subject as my 901lb wife…. Man I need my eyes checked! ;o) Don Resor Sent from someone's iPhone Or read it on a larger screen. It clearly says "90lb", not "901lb" Bomar may be offended that you think that she gained 811 pounds.
[cctalk] Re: IBM 350 disk and 305 drum [WAS:RE: Re: Drum memory on pdp11's? Wikipedia thinks so....]
On Mon, 15 Apr 2024, Tom Gardner via cctalk wrote: The IBM 350 disk storage (RAMAC) has 5 million 6-bit characters or 3.75 MB; the actual recorded characters were 8-bits in length including a parity bit and a stop bit for each recorded 6-bit character It was announced as part of the IBM 305 RAMAC system which had drum memory which as far as I can tell had 24 tracks of 100 6-bit characters = 14,400 bits or 1.8 kB Source: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/305_ramac/22-6264-1_305_RAMAC_Manual_of_Operation_Apr57.pdf pgs 17 &18 If anyone has a better number please post it Here's what info I have on the RAMAC, from multiple sources, but derived at least partially, if not entirely, from some of Tom Gardner's earlier posts. RAMAC 50 user disks (dummy disks at end to reduce turbulent buffeting) 100 sides, 100 user tracks per side (2 test only tracks on inside and outside) A RAMAC character has 8 bits: 1 start bit, 6 data bits, and 1 parity bit. - clarification by Tom Gardner & Joe Feng 5 sectors per track, 100 characters per sector - Grand total of 50 disks x 2 sides/disk x 100 user track/side x 5 sectors/track x 100 char/sector = 5,000,000 characters Claimed average access time 0.6 seconds, you define "average" movements ;-)) However, the "IBM 650 RAMAC - Manual of Operation - Preliminary Edition" states that the worst case seek, from inner track of top disk to inner track of bottom disk, was 0.8 seconds !! (I *really* want to see that!!) ) 2 heads, one for tracks on top side of each disk, one for bottom side - head assembly moves vertically to selected disk, then goes to selected track - about 200 bits per inch - the magnetic tape density of the period. 2 hp drive motor drives the disks at 1200 RPM, 1/3 hp motor at 3450 RPM drives clutches at 1000 RPM one revolution of fully locked clutch drives arm 6 inches either in/out or up down - 100 inches or 8.3 feet per second - 200 disks per second or 2000 tracks per second Wikipedia: RAMAC mechanism at Computer History Museum The IBM 350 disk storage unit, the first disk drive, was announced by IBM as a component of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system on September 13, 1956.[8][9][10][11] Simultaneously a very similar product, the IBM 355 was announced for the IBM 650 RAMAC computer system. RAMAC stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control." The first engineering prototype 350 disk storage shipped to Zellerbach in June 1956;[12] however, production shipment announced to begin "mid-1957"[13] may not have occurred until as late as January 1958.[14] Its design was motivated by the need for real time accounting in business.[15] The 350 stored 5 million 6-bit characters (3.75 MB).[16] It has fifty 24-inch (610 mm) diameter disks with 100 recording surfaces. Each surface has 100 tracks. The disks spun at 1200 RPM. Data transfer rate was 8,800 characters per second. An access mechanism moved a pair of heads up and down to select a disk pair (one down surface and one up surface) and in and out to select a recording track of a surface pair. Several improved models were added in the 1950s. The IBM RAMAC 305 system with 350 disk storage leased for $3,200 per month. The 350 was officially withdrawn in 1969. U.S. Patent 3,503,060 from the RAMAC program is generally considered to be the fundamental patent for disk drives.[17] This first-ever disk drive was initially cancelled by the IBM Board of Directors because of its threat to the IBM punch card business but the IBM San Jose laboratory continued development until the project was approved by IBM's president.[18] The 350's cabinet was 60 inches (152 cm) long, 68 inches (172 cm) high and 29 inches (74 cm) wide. The RAMAC unit weighs about one ton, has to be moved around with forklifts, and was frequently transported via large cargo airplanes.[19] According to Currie Munce, research vice president for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (which acquired IBM's storage business), the storage capacity of the drive could have been increased beyond five million characters, but IBM's marketing department at that time was against a larger capacity drive, because they didn't know how to sell a product with more storage. None-the-less double capacity versions of the 350 were announced[8] in January 1959 and shipped later the same year. In 1984, the RAMAC 350 Disk File was designated an International Historic Landmark by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers.[20] In 2002, the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center began restoration of an IBM 350 RAMAC in collaboration with Santa Clara University.[21] In 2005, the RAMAC restoration project relocated to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California and is now demonstrated to the public in the museum's Revolution exhibition.[22] My own text, based on newspaper histories: In 1958, Nikita Khruschev visited USA, to try to de-escalet the cold war a little. When he was refused permission to go
[cctalk] Re: Odd IBM mass storage systems (was: Re: Re: IBM 360)
On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 9:45 AM Christian Kennedy via cctalk wrote: While on the topic of odd IBM mass storage systems, does anyone recall an IBM system that used rotating carousels holding sheets of magnetic material? The carousel would rotate to position the selected sheet into the read/write station, where it would be moved up and down relative to the multiple fixed heads, a weird linear riff on a fixed head disk. Nowhere near as cool, . . . About 30 years ago? (When libraries would DEDICATE a PC for each CDROM that they had) Keith Hensen made a device consisting of a carousel holding 240 CD/CD-ROM/DVDs. It had a name something like "Qubik"? It was in a square box with a smoked plexiglass cover, with a drive at each corner. They were stackable. The drives were SCSI, the carousel controls were RS232. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Other input devices.
Did any one ever use a keyboard to magtape as input device? On Sat, 13 Apr 2024, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: My wife did, sort of: for a while she worked with IBM MT/ST word processors. Those were very early word processing systems that used a custom magnetic tape cartridge for storage and a Selectric typewriter for I/O. Rather off-topic, and silly (about MT/ST), . . . I gave away one decades ago. A friend wanted it as an advertising prop because he was writing a word processing program called "FULL/ST".
[cctalk] Re: 5150 mobo?
IIRC, there were two main models of 5150, and a few sub-models. All 5150 were five slot. (5160 (XT) had 8 slots) There was the "16-64KB" that had one row of 4116 soldered in, and three rows of sockets. It could be purchased with those other three rows populated, at a rather high price for 4116s, or could be purchased with those three rows unpopulated. Both Apple2 and TRS80 used 4116s, so the competition had driven the prices way down. Similarly, the Tandon TM100-1 disk drive was available very cheap in the TRS80 after-market. So, the cheapest way into a 5150 was to buy a minimal system, an FDC board, and a CGA video board, and provide your own 4116s, TM100 drives, and a composite monitor. At Merritt College, we had had a PDP11, with an aftermarket drive, being used for not much more than teaching FORTRAN and COBOL. The second time that the machine was down for most of a semester, the college sold it to the Richmond School District (now "West Contra Costa"), and put a few doaen 5150s in its place. While far from comparable, there were never times when there wasn't a computer available for Fortran, COBOL, and then also BASIC. When Richmond installed the machine, something "went wrong", quite likely confusion about delta vs Y three phase power. The official (coverup) story was a "lightning strike" (at that time of year??!?), and PG paid for a replacement machine. S, everybody got what they needed. The 5150s were picky about the RAM. Some types of RAM chips would not work in it, although would work fine in Apple, or "memory tester"s. At one point, the college bought some RAM from Fry's, that did not work. But, at the Fry's store, they retested it and insisted there was nothing wrong. We escalated. Fry himself came up to Oakland to bring RAM chips that worked on our 5150s. Then, there was the "64-256KB" motherboard. It had one row of 4164s soldered in, and three rows of sockets. Populating those with 4164s gave you 256K of RAM. BUT, there was an empty socket on the board, that you could populate; I don't know whether it was a PAL or some 74xx logic, that then let you use two rows of 4164s (one row of which was soldered in) and two rows of 41256, giving 640K! 640K was all of the RAM that could be easily used, other than some upper memory space of the other video or bits in between other stuff. We sometimes referred to the two types of motherboards as "16K" and "256K" to lessen ambiguity. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Turbo Pascal Kermit for CP/M
On Mon, 8 Apr 2024, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: I just can't believe none of he developers noticed or maybe that was the point where they all gave up. :-) Presumably, it worked on the machine that they were using. Not everybody tests everything on all possible configurations. SOME companies don't test anything on any configuration other than what they are using. For example, at Microsoft, if a programmer has a hardware problem, they immediately replace the machine. Good working conditions. BUT, that means that they have substantially less experience than we do with problematic machines. Hence, disasters, such as SMARTDRV originally defaulting to having write cacheing ON, which gives data loss (blamed on other components!) EVERY time there is an unrecovered disk error, OR the user turns off the machine (normal practice for most users in the 1980s) before all the buffers are flushed. Proper testing would have found that before release. Beta testers of Windows 3.11 who reported that problem were told, "You have a HARDWARE problem. That's not our responsibility." Those who suggested that the OS at least had a responsibility of reporting and making graceful exit in such conditions were dropped from the Beta program for all future products. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Turbo Pascal Kermit for CP/M
Does the Turbo Pascal run on those machines with trivial source file?
or subsets of the Kermit code?
On Mon, 8 Apr 2024, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
Haven't tried any other programs yet as I really wanted Kermit but
none of the other CP/M Kermits work on these machines (at least not
so far) but the problem does appear to be that the program is just
to big.
I just can't believe none of he developers noticed or maybe that
was the point where they all gave up. :-)
Well, there is still the issue of whether it is an incompatability of that
version of Turbo Pascal with your machines, . . .
Are you running with 128K?
On machines that support it, 128K does NOT give you a TPA ("Transient
Program Area") larger than 64K, but it does give it almost 64K.
I wonder how large the TPA is on DOS based CP/M emulators, . . . ?
. . . and, of course, is there somewhere, a pre-compiled version of Kermit
for TRS80 CP/M?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Turbo Pascal Kermit for CP/M
On Mon, 8 Apr 2024, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: I'm having bit of fun with my various CP/M systems but I ran into what I see as an interesting problem. I got Turbo Pascal on two systems. A TRS-80 model 4P running Montezuma Micro CP/M and a TRS-80 Model II running Pickles & Trout CP/M. I tried to compile the version of Kermit written for CP/M using Turbo Pascal. On both systems it runs out of memory and crashes in the same place. Surely the developers would have noticed this. Anybody here have any experience with this? Have you tried it with "CP/M PLUS"? (CP/M 3.0, which Radio Shack sold for the model 4) Does the Turbo Pascal run on those machines with trivial source file? or subsets of the Kermit code? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Cleanup time again
On Thu, 4 Apr 2024, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: Well, The SoftCard and the Language Card (why did they call it that?) both go for $100 a piece. The one is a IIe, not a \\e. Was that "IIe", "][e", or "//e"? There are some on eBay now for more than $2000. I wouldn't expect that but I do find it interesting that all the stuff I have is worthless unless someone else is selling it. :-) Speculation: The "Language Card" could be populated with a fancy BASIC (what Kurtz and Kemeny called "street BASIC"), OR COULD BE, at least in theory, populated with other languages, hence the name "Language Card". I am not aware of any successful examples of it ever being populated with anything other than BASIC. The "Soft Card" was Microsoft's first significant venture into hardware. It was incredibly successful, and Microsoft's largest revenue source in 1980. At one point, somebody at Apple said that 20% of AppleII owners had one. "The SoftCard was Paul Allen's idea.[5] Its original purpose was to simplify porting Microsoft's computer-language products to the Apple II.[6] The SoftCard was developed by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP). SCP built prototypes,[7] Don Burtis of Burtronix redesigned the card, and California Computer Systems manufactured it for Microsoft.[8] Unsure whether the card would sell, Microsoft first demonstrated it publicly at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980.[2][" - Wikipedia It had a Z80, and a copy of CP/M. I suspect that the name "Soft Card" might be due to its intent to open the Apple to CP/M SOFTware, particularly software that Micorsoft had originally written in 8080/Z80. There were rumors that an IBM person had one in a personal Apple, and that that caused IBM, when they went to Microsoft for BASIC, to assume that they could get CP/M (CP/M-86) through Microsoft. When Microsoft sent them to DRI for CP/M, IBM and DRI had a "culture clash" and IBM went back to Microsoft (long story, with some disagreements about details) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: oscilloscopes
On Mon, 1 Apr 2024, Just Kant via cctalk wrote: I have more then I need. All the working ones are HP w/color crts, and as far as older, verifiably vintage tools (right down to the 680x0 processor in either) I have to admit I favor them as a brand. Call we an oddball, weird egg, badges I wear with pride. But who could resist the allure of the newer ultra portable, even handheld units (some with bandwidth or sampling rates to 50mhz). I'm a big cheapo. But there's no real reason to agonize over a 65 - 200$ or thereabouts acquisition. It's a bit tiring to wade through the piles of availability. I favor a desktop unit, larger screen (but not always, careful). But most of those need wall current I think? The convenience of a handheld battery powered unit obviously has it's benefits. I will always love and dote upon my color crt based HPs. But the damned things are so heavy, so unwieldy. Judy-Jude knocked my 54111d over, hit the paved floor, shook the house. And still works! Built to withstand an atomic bombardment. I had a Tektronix 512, and an NLS215 (battery powered portable) from a company that switched over to making Kaypros. I gave it away at one of the first VCFs. I guess that the vintage ones are no longer adequate. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred
[cctalk] Re: Amoeba OS
OTOH, spammer mailing lists, and leaked personal and trade secrets seem to last forever. On Thu, 28 Mar 2024, ben via cctalk wrote: You forgot Mickey Mouse. Is the mouse's immortality due to his army of intellectual property lawyers?
[cctalk] Re: Amoeba OS
On Thu, 28 Mar 2024, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: Remember when they said now that we had the web nothing would ever be lost again? :-( sho' nuff, the memory, attribution, and written forms of that concept are lost. "The internet is written in sand." For example, remember Howard Fullmer? One of Morrow's chief engineers, "Parasitic Engineering", and along with Morrow was an early proponent of standardizing S100. I once saw (in MicroTimes? that he had died, but can not find any confimation that disambiguates WHICH Howard Fullmer. OTOH, spammer mailing lists, and leaked personal and trade secrets seem to last forever. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: How to shutdown RT11?
You say that like fsck is reliable now... On Sat, 23 Mar 2024, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk wrote: There's a reason it's only one letter off. I've always wondered, . . . "Feature" or "bug"? Deliberate, or one of possibly many errors in development? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: emulating floppies [was: Paper tape in casettes...]
CORRECTION: GCR was used on Apple2, 400K/800K Mac, Commodore, Sirius/Vector, etc. That should read Victor 9000, NOT Vector [Graphics] Vector Graphics was hard sectored, and not GCR. Northstar is probably the best known of the hard sector formats.
[cctalk] Re: emulating floppies [was: Paper tape in casettes...]
On Tue, 27 Feb 2024, CAREY SCHUG via cctalk wrote: did not know about gcr/mfm on same floppy...if you respond, please mention who does that. gaak, I don't even recognize "gcr" at this point. I remember mfm and something else. mfm was single density, right? was gcr double density? does not seem familiar, but certainly there was a double density encoding scheme that the device attached to the floppy cable would have to recognize. Grossly oversimplified: FM is Frequency Modulation, often called "single density". There are clock pulses, and bit or no bit between the pulses, therefore, strings of off bits look like one frewuency, and strings of on bits look like another (double) frequency. MFM is Modified Frequency modulation. when it came out, it was almost double the capacity of FM, so the marketing people called it "double density". It wasn't until after that naming that FM began to be called "single density" (In a very similar way, if you look at old newspapers, "World War 1" wasn't called that until the existence or spectre of "World War 2") It was obvious that clock pulses weren't really needed between on bits. By leaving those ones out, the average frequency/signal density was much lower, making it possible to increase (typically double) the data transfer rate. and thus almost twice the capacity per track. GCR is Group Coded Record. Some patterns of bits are more "spread out" than others. If you can find those, you could break up your 8 bit data into 2 "nybbles" of 4 bits each, using only the nybbles that were spread out enough to increase the data transfer rate, and squeeze more of those pairs into the space that the 8 bit bytes had taken. If you can find 32 "loose" patterns, then you could record 5 bytes into 8 of those patterns. A little extra firmware to do the conversion, but nothing horrendous. Thus GCR typically would be about one and a half as much data per track as FM, GCR was used on Apple2, 400K/800K Mac, Commodore, Sirius/Vector, etc. 1.4M Mac is ordinary MFM, and can be done with WD style disk controllers. Commodore Amiga was MFM, BUT, did not have the IBM/WD track and sector structures; losing those, and reading a track at a time, and decoding that into sectors in software permitted a little more capacity per track/disk. In addition, on some hard drives, RLL (Run Length limited) is similar to GCR. Changing the motor speed or the data transfer rate for different tracks, makes it easier to use different numbers of sectors, to put less data on the small inner tracks, and more on the longer outer tracks. In order to get closer to a standard linear velocity on the track, instead of a standard angular velocity. There are a few machines, such as Ensoniq, that would put multiple sizes of sectors on a track! You can fit 5 1024 byte sectors on a track, but not enough left for a sixth; however there was enough space for an additional 512 byte sector. There were more recording formats, such as MMFM, having FM sector headers, with MFM sector content, etc. The NEC 765 and its ilk are similar to WD 179x in capability, but with important differences, including, WD has a "track read" command, NEC does not but has a "multiple sector resd", NEC is "flash blinded" by the index pulse, and needs a little more time after index before reading, some NEC controllers can't handle 128 byte MFM sector, many are implemented without support for FM on the FDC board, . . . -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: VCF SoCal
On Wed, 31 Jan 2024, Nigel Johnson Ham via cctalk wrote: I do remember reading that lot of British computers were quite superior to the rest of the world, but sold for inland use only. The reason given was that we couldn't figure out ow to make them leak oil! cheers, Nigel Did Lucas make computers? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: VCF SoCal
First time I am hearing of this. Are details up on the vcf site?-Ali On Thu, 25 Jan 2024, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: Forgive me, I should not have assumed everyone already knew about it. February 17-18 at the Hotel Fera Event Center in Orange, California. https://www.vcfsocal.com/ California VCF's tend to not be announced here! Last august, I missed VCF West, because I didn't hear about it in time. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: The Mac at 40
and we can all stop copy and pastin from wikipedia to act like we know what we're talking about. On Wed, 24 Jan 2024, Tony Jones via cctalk wrote: You keep saying this. Why? It's rather childish. Most of my knowledge comes from personal interest (I wrote a Smalltalk VM in the late 80's), from reading books like Dealers Of Lightning and from various interviews I've watched over the years. Besides, most of us had solidified our wrong perspectives and incorrect beliefs and assumptiond long before Wikipedia came along. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: The Mac at 40
and, of course, with anything that people caan get too close to, you will get "blind men and the elephant" discrepancies between any two accounts of the event. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: The MAC at 40
Well, if you compare a complete Mac, with a complete PC, including comparable hardware and software, they actually came out close to even! BUT, if you compare a complete Mac with an absolutley bare 5150PC, and shop for reasonable prices on RAM, drives, monitor, etc., with shareware software and/or packages for which you might be eligible under sifte licenses, then the PC comes out substantially cheaper. I wanted word processor, spreadsheet, Assembler, anda few compilers; those cost an amazing amount less from third party vendors for what I wanted compared to the "package" that IBM wanted to bundle. And, if you consider a generic XT clone, such as VIPC, etc., then the PC is WAY cheaper. I heard (another unsubstantiated story), that the engineers were tasked to make the Mac a $500 computer; but when done, Apple chose to charge more than that. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com On Wed, 24 Jan 2024, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote: I know a great deal of writings by techno-historians, computer-industry experts and technology enthusiasts concerning the Apple Mac, and now 40 years old, have covered this topic both on and off the net. Unlike originally stated I now feel that the MAC was an important change agent in regards to the all-in-one computer landscape. Why Apple priced it ‘prohibitively’ high, particularly so here in Canada, I’m not sure. Arguments such as an integrated ecosystem to securing a marketing and brand loyalty come to mind. Certainly applies to the world of Apple doesn't it! What I remember most from that time though was their 1984 Super Bowl commercial! It went a long way to putting Apple and the microcomputer industry on the mass-consumer market. Murray
[cctalk] Re: The MAC at 40
On Wed, 24 Jan 2024, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
The Apple Mac, 40 years old, came from Xerox PARC’s GUI and Apple’s LISA.
Not sure that it really changed computing though! Financially it didn't
help Apple until after 1997 and Gate's investment.
Although they still needed help, the Mac kept the Apple3 and Lisa from
destroying the Apple company.
Bill Gates' bailout failed to make him a friend to the Apple fan-boys, who
hated him even more than the rest of us did. I never hated Bill Gates;
when he was still a MILLIONaire, he was kinda cool. We should all,
therefore do what we can to make him into a millionaire.
The Mac changed a few things. Although not necessarily exclusively, was
it the first computer Super Bowl ad?
The first computer ad to be ridiculed outside of computing circles;
Osborne's "the man on the left doesn't stand a chance" was ridiculed in
computer circles ("whose left? ours or theirs?, the guy with the Osborne
arrives without the file folders, uninformed of the news, and starving
because of no sandwich" (although the open space in the front of the
Osborne could hold a small sandwich).
Otrona's Charlie Chaplin look-alike struggling down stairs with a PC on a
card table was unknown outside of computing circles, at least until IBM
claimed trademark of Charlie chaplin's "little tramp" character.
But ridicule, such as Futurama's "Hey! We were watching that!" reached
all aspects of society.
The Mac, although still rather expensive, brought the Lisa's technology
within reach of others than executives showing off to other executives.
The Mac brought the mouse out of being obscure and esoteric, and brought
aspects of the content of The Mother Of All Demos into popularity to the
public.
It made many people, including some of us, realize that your computer
could cost half as much if you were willing to wield a screwdriver, and
install parts.
The Mac provided one of the very few alternatives to PC.
In august 1981. many of us said, "In a few years, all computers will be
IBM PC, or imitations thereof.", the Mac helped give the PC an image of
not being a monopoly. And it became "PC plus imitations thereof, and a
minority of Mac and all others." [Sorry, but few other than us
appreciated CP/M, or even Unix]
Android has brought a third player into the fray.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004(sp?)
Motorola tended to redesign from scratch, whereas Intel would modify their previous design. On Wed, 22 Nov 2023, Paul Koning wrote: Which might explain why the x86 ISA is such a convoluted tangle. Although redesign from scratch will tend to produce a better product, modifying previous design, with kludge on top of kludge, can provide upwards compatability. Segment/Offset is a hassle, but it meant that 8 bit (16 address bits) software can work with it. When the 5150 came out, the CP/M software companies, such as MicroPro (Wordstar) and Sourcim (Supercalc), were able to port their products to it much faster than anybody could port stuff to Macintosh. Though, Apple was smart enough to include a "usable" word processor, so that nobody had to wait for Word, etc., before using the machine. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004(sp?)
On Wed, 22 Nov 2023, ED SHARPE via cctalk wrote: Was there ever a COMPUTER using a 4004 that you cud really do something or did tat finally arrive with the 8008 as in the skelby shelby sp? 8008 i now there was an Intel INTELIC 4 (?sp) could n that use 4004 or one of the later 4000 numbered proc. We have an intelec 8 and 8 inch floppy drives here at smecc musem always wanted a 4!Ed# An absurd argument: It could be argued that the 8085, rather than being designed from scratch was simply a modification of the 8080. Perhaps significant modifications, but nevertheless modifications, not redesign from scratch. If we accept arguments such as that, then we could argue that Pentium is a modified 80486, which is a modified 80386, which is a modified 80286, which is a modified 80186, which is a modified 8086, ... all the way down to the 4004 :-) Most of those modifications were necessary for subsequent software, . . . For example, Win3.00 could run on 8088/8086, but Win3.10 demanded A20, etc. Therefore, it could be argued that Win11 can be run on a "heavily modified modified 4004" Motorola tended to redesign from scratch, whereas Intel would modify their previous design. [I warned you that it was absurd]
[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004
In the headers of the mail that you sent is a line: List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:cctalk-le...@classiccmp.org> If you already tried THAT and it did not work, then that would be important to know. On Wed, 22 Nov 2023, Carl Yoder via cctalk wrote: Please find someone who can take me off the mailing list. Carl Yoder hummer51...@gmail.com On 11/21/2023 12:24 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > ISTR a 4004 on one of the boards of my DTC300 Hytype I daisy wheel > printers. > > (or has unrefreshed wetware dynamic RAM lost its content?) > > > -- > Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com
[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004
On Tue, 21 Nov 2023, Brent Hilpert via cctalk wrote: . . . the same time-frame (measured in months) of the 4004. IIRC, there's some argument there about development vs production vs release vs availability dates. also, "announcement" (cf. vaporware) Hence, it makes sense to acknowledge a "tie" for multiple entries in any "first", that are close, but differ in which aspect of "first" applies. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004
ISTR a 4004 on one of the boards of my DTC300 Hytype I daisy wheel printers. (or has unrefreshed wetware dynamic RAM lost its content?) On Tue, 21 Nov 2023, Peter Wallace wrote: I think thats a 4040 Peter Wallace Sorry about that. Not sure whether to blame that on old-timers memory corruption, or on lysdexia.
[cctalk] Re: Intel 4004
ISTR a 4004 on one of the boards of my DTC300 Hytype I daisy wheel printers. (or has unrefreshed wetware dynamic RAM lost its content?) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: The World Wide Web
On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 5:18 AM Stefan Skoglund via cctalk wrote: The main problem with that lorry hurtling down the freeway is latency. I need to move 1 PB . how long will it take filling and packing enough IBM LTO-9 tapes to send 1 PB ? How long does it takes to fill 1 tape with 18 TB ? On Mon, 2 Oct 2023, KenUnix via cctalk wrote: Back it up to floppy diskettes. HaHa. Sorry I could not resist. Far too unstable and prone to damage and data corruption. Use dead-tree technology of cards or paper tape. If you use cards, put diagonal sharpie marks on the decks, to facilitate visual re-ordering after the crash on the freeway. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"
In the 1990s, I started writing about floppy disks, how FM/MFM worked, IBM/WD track and sector structure, directory structures, DOS Utilities, disk repair, etc. But, got bogged down with too much to do, such as closing my office, etc., . . . On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Ali wrote: Now this would be an interesting book to read depending on the technical background required to understand it. i.e. could a layman such as I understand it or do I need to be an EE w/ CS background? ;) I was trying to write it at our level. Like what I write here. For interested hobbyist with a reasonable background, but without formal engineering and electronics background, and trying not to offend those who do have extensive background. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: We must teach Fred to long for the endless immensity of the written word (in book form, focusing specifically on floppy disk drives). 45 years ago, I started writing about repairing Honda cars. Wasn't getting far until an acquaintance who fancied himself to be a writer got me to agree to do a book with him. He sold the idea to John Muir Publications (publisher of the Volkswagen Idiot book, different John Muir). I wrote it, my co-author edited, the publisher put their own editor on it, who butchered it. But, the publisher also brought in Peter Aschwanden, who is a GREAT automotive illustrator (see the VW idiot book). In 1979, I switched to TRS80, and did it with Electric Pencil, and then Scripsit. I had a DTC300 Hytype-I daisy wheel printer. I printed it 8.5" wide down the middle of 14 7/8 paper, giving lots of room for comments, etc. For the illustrator, I printed it on the left side of the wide paper, leaving a large area for doodles. The publisher's editor butchered it badly enough that my co-author switched to a pseudonym. With the publisher's accounting, never got enough in royalties to fuuly pay all of my expenses. https://www.amazon.com/How-Keep-Your-Honda-Alive/dp/0912528257 In the 1990s, I started writing about floppy disks, how FM/MFM worked, IBM/WD track and sector structure, directory structures, DOS Utilities, disk repair, etc. But, got bogged down with too much to do, such as closing my office, etc., . . . 20 years ago, I started writing an undergraduate textbook on Information Science. How searches and search engines work, and how to search better, how companies cheat the search engines (SEO), relevance ranking, trade-offs between recall and precision (cf. Buckland), the DIK[W[E]] (Data/Information/Knowledge/[Wisdom/[Enlightenment]]) pyramid, etc. I wanted to make a community college class out of it. But, certain administrators (who I failed to ever defenestrate) refused to consider understanding of information to be appropriate for community college (anything beyond their total lack of comprehension was "inappropriate") (Do YOU consider it "computer literate" to create a memo about a room change for a meeting in WordPerfect, print it with a color printer (for the logo and a ruling line), SCAN that printed memo, and send it out as an ATTACHMENT to an email with subject line of "FYI" and text body of "See the attachment"?) I haven't made progress on it lately. So, yes, I have always longed for the endless immensity of the written word, . . . -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"
On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Will Cooke via cctalk wrote: I make an official motion that Fred write his own "Everything I Know About Floppy Disks" page / book /encyclopedia. I suspect that what is inside his head is the greatest collection of knowledge about floppies on the planet. Fred, you will be paid with great admiration and appreciation. Sorry, all I can offer. :-) Anyone with me? 1) Chuck Guzis knows FAR more than I do about floppy disks. Tony Duell (ARD) knows FAR more than I do about disk drives. 2) It is now so far out of date that, Who would want it? (besides a few here) 3) I've already said most of it; just a matter of gathering it. I started writing a book on it 30 years ago; never finished. Now I'm writing an undergraduate textbook on Information Science, which I will also never finish. I find it easier to edit, critique, and contribute to somebody else's than to build from scratch. Some pieces have finally found places in other people's works. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"
On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Can't say, but probably. I've got an 8" disk here written by an Apple II. Encoding is weird--basically the Apple RWTS encoded as 8 bit FM (3740) bytes. Haven't bothered to see from whence it came. On 9/10/23 13:31, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: Sorrento Valley Associates sold an FDC for Apple2. At Comdex, they had it wired to an 8" drive. So, perhaps they supported an FM version of the Apple2 GCR format? On Sun, Sep 10, 2023 at 2:24 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: Have no idea, but was surprise to see RWTS encodings in standard FM. On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: No, that controller (I'm suspecting) allowed native Apple ][ access to IBM 3740 format disks. I have no idea about the format(s) supported with that board. Possibly FM (for 8"SSSD, which is what the Flagstaff Engineering modified 5150 FDC was for) Possibly MFM (for 5150 disks, but could also, with appropriate additional software handle thousands of others) Could it have also had support for pseudo Apple-DOS (and Apple CP/M, P-System, ProDOS), so that machines with that controller, but without also Apple drives, could run Apple software/programs, once copied to an FM pseudo AppleDOS format? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"
On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Can't say, but probably. I've got an 8" disk here written by an Apple II. Encoding is weird--basically the Apple RWTS encoded as 8 bit FM (3740) bytes. Haven't bothered to see from whence it came. Sorrento Valley Associates sold an FDC for Apple2. At Comdex, they had it wired to an 8" drive. So, perhaps they supported an FM version of the Apple2 GCR format? On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Have no idea, but was surprise to see RWTS encodings in standard FM. Some people like to play gaames with PC; but what could top THAT?
[cctalk] Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"
On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Can't say, but probably. I've got an 8" disk here written by an Apple II. Encoding is weird--basically the Apple RWTS encoded as 8 bit FM (3740) bytes. Haven't bothered to see from whence it came. Sorrento Valley Associates sold an FDC for Apple2. At Comdex, they had it wired to an 8" drive. So, perhaps they supported an FM version of the Apple2 GCR format?
[cctalk] Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"
On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Now, let's talk about 2.8" and 3.25" drives; UK readers are certainly familiar with 3.0 inch CF drives used on Amstrads. Amdek? sold a dual 3" drive in USA, marketed as external drives. There were ads for it in one or more of the Coco magazines. And there were ads for it as external drives for Apple2! Q: were those different electronics? OR did they include an FDC for Apple2? 3.25: The three leading contenders for "Shirt pocket disks" were 3", 3.25", and 3.5". There were many others, such as a 3.9" that IBM was rumored to be planning. But, for shirt pocket puspose, 3" seems the most promising. There was extensive argument in the trade journals. George Morrow said, "Why don't we get the clothing industry to make shirt pockets 5.25 inch?" Dysan did not want such an extreme retooling, so they were pushing the 3.25", which was basicaally a smaller 5.25", with a metal hub. They reasoned that whichever size had the most software would end up being the winner. So, Dysan set up an enormous software publishing venture. Before there were any machines using 3.25", you could purchase most of the major software packages on 3.25" disks! I ended up with a few drives and disks from Micropro. But, then HP and Apple both went with 3.5". When IBM went with 3.5" (PS/2, PC-DOS 3.20), the coffin was nailed shut. Seequa Chameleon 325 seems to have been the only machine that made it to market with 3.25" drives. Dysan had invested so much into their software publishing venture to promote 3.25" that, when 3.25" died, they couldn't ever recover. R.I.P. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"
On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: There are 40 track derivatives; used for word processing, particularly on some Brother models. No big deal; when reading those, one simply double-steps a "normal" drive. In any case, as far as I recall, they all used Brother's proprietary GCR encoding. I've processed a couple hundred of those. With the exception, the Epson Geneva PX8 40 track 3.5" was MFM -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"
It's odd that he brings up things such as 100tpi drives (VS 96tpi) and 3" (but not 3.25" on which Dysan bet the company), the very early 40 track 3.5", On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Joshua Rice via cctalk wrote: What confused me, is that i believe the 3.5" Sony Microfloppy originally had 70 tracks. I'm personally completely oblivious to any 40-track 3.5" microfloppy formats. Yes, my sentence is twisted into knots :-) I have a pair of Sony OA-D30V drives, which i believe were the first commercially available 3.5" microfloppy drives, and they have a single head. The format the machine that they're linked up to only uses 70 tracks (though the drives might be capable of a few more?) for a SSDD format of 315KB. Those were fascinating. 600 RPM and full height 40 track 3.5" microfloppy drives therefore seem more of a branching derivative rather than the "predecessor" that the article seems to allude to. Unless, of course, we're talking of an unrelated format that just used the same size disks... I agree that They were indeed, probably a derivative, rather than a predecessor. Although I think that it was an early derivative. "Ordinary" 3.5" is 135 tpi with 80 tracks. Epson, and very few others, briefly tried 67.5 tpi, 40 track. Epson Geneva PX-8, etc. I had a 67.5 tpi drive from another manufacturer, which means that somebody expected it to catch on, or they thought that there would be a market for Epson accessories? The early Sony Microfloppy is definitely not quite the standard "modern" 3.5" floppy disk we're aware of today, but is still largely compatible with modern disks, with slight modification. Namely the drives have no mechanism of opening the shutters, so i've found the easiest method is taping the shutters on the disks open with a bit of sellotape. The apparently earliest 3.5" diskettes did not have a shutter. I have (or had) a few labelled "Shugart". It is possible that those might have been from a large batch of prototoypes for development, rather than commercially available. Then came manual "pinch" shutters. The user slid the shutter open, and it latched. After removing the disk, the user pinches the corner of the disk and a spring closes the shutter. The spot to pinch on the corner of the disk had a tiny arrow pointing to it, and the word "Pinch". Then came modern automatic shutters. The word "Pinch" is gone, but on many of them, the arrow remained! At Comdex, somebody at one of the disk manufacturers told me, "That arrow is a reminder of which direction to insert the disk." I don't think that he believed me when I told him the origin of the arrow. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
[cctalk] Re: 8" DSDD to USB MSD?
On Fri, 8 Sep 2023, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote: I have had better luck with a P-III motherboard that connects to the 34-50 pin adapter in the middle and 8" on the other end. This way you can trick the BIOS of the computer to think the 8" drive is a 1.2Mb 5 1/4". With this set up I have made a bootable DOS 6.22 8" disk, so I know it works. THEN use the USB port to copy files as a separate drive. The USB to floppy devices are pretty good for 3.5" but I would not expect a direct adapter from the 8" to be reliable. A USB to floppy device that supports 5.25" 1.2M "should" work. A USB to floppy device that supports the 3.5" "mode 3"/NEC98 (360RPM 3.5") might be coercible into working. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
