[cctalk] Re: BASIC

On Fri, 3 May 2024, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote: 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 cisin(a)xenosoft.com