22 Jan
1999
22 Jan
'99
12:07 p.m.
On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Tony Duell wrote:
I set up a multi-user system in my classroom in the Radio Shack
Computer Center in downtown Los Angeles with a 64k CoCo with one floppy
and OS-9 on one end and a 16k CoCo with a Vidtex ROM at the other end
of a kluged null-modem cable between the bit-banger ports. I was being
facetious in my previous comment, honest. The company of course never
supported the configuration. That was before the official RS-232 Pak,
so of course the system couldn't print and due to poor handshaking
between the bit-banger ports, the "terminal" tended to drop characters
if you typed during a floppy access. After a change of managers, I
didn't get a chance to redo the system with better serial connection
and a hard disk, the new guy wasn't as cooperative. He thought it
would trivialize Xenix or something. Bastard. As though I'd risk
trivializing my greatest love at the time -- I knew the difference
between a 6809 and a 68k. By the time OS-9 Level 2 showed up, I was
always up to my ass in alligators anyway with the damned Tandy 1000
and its constant demands for tech support.
Who ever said my Model 4 was 'stock'? It's
not. It was modified a bit by
the previous owner and then some more by me. It's got 4 internal drives
(all half-height, of course), 2 40 track and 2 80 track. It's also got a
realtime clock module under the Z80 and an external Cumana hard disk unit.
Under the Z-80? All of the plans for putting in a Dallas clock chip
that I ever saw stuck it under the BASIC (or boot in the 4P's case)
ROM.
None the less it works :-)
Naturally. The Model 4 was a great design. (The Model 2 was better,
but it didn't need to be backward compatible).
official
products. That's like letting on that OS-9 Level One could
be used by more than one person on the same 64k TRS-80 Color Computer
I see... So I suppose the fact that I hung a terminal off my CoCo 2 and
later my CoCo3 (running OS-9 Level 1 and 2 respectively) was my
imagination, right ;-) I built my own RS232 cartridge for the CoCo. It only
supported 110,300
and 1200 baud (oh, and an external baud rate generator), but it had 3
ports and fitted into a single cartridge. It was also a lot cheaper than
the Tandy one.
I've got a couple of two and three port RS-232 cartridges here for my
CoCo 3 systems and their hard disks. If the cablemodem works as it's
supposed to, in not too many weeks it'll be possible for guests to
telnet into my Linux box and get a serial login to OS-9 Level 2 as well
as Tandy 6000 Xenix (after I figure out why it doesn't want to talk to
the hard disk) an AT&T 7300 and possibly a few other things. Assuming
that La Esposa permits me to use that much electricity at a time. I
may have to rotate things on a schedule or something.
--
Ward Griffiths
"the timid die just like the daring; and if you don't take the plunge then
you'll just take the fall" Michael Longcor