26 Oct
2006
26 Oct
'06
4:55 a.m.
On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 23:49 -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 26 Oct 2006 at 1:36, Warren Wolfe wrote:
(EEK! Looks like I hit a nerve with my first post. Oh, well, start
out with a religious argument, that's MY theory.) Oh, come on... who
goes by looks? If looks is the criterion, nothing beats the sexy
flashing lights of the Imsai 8080...
The Monroe had, far and away, the best BIOS that was ever part of a
commercial computer. It is typical that Monroe downplayed the CP/M
aspect of the machine, in favor of the Monroe O/S, which, as we all
know, conquered the world. Ahem. Anyway, the Monroe would run through
the media, seeing if there was a disk from which it could boot, and when
it found one, it booted, and made the drive in which the boot disk
resided drive A: unless the user switched them. It had 128K of paging
memory, and 128K RAM disk. I could load all of CP/M, a few cherished
public domain utilities, and Turbo Pascal into the RAM disk, and that
baby FLEW! Disk access was highly optimized, too. I had a disk that
loaded the "choice" stuff into RAM disk, and one that loaded the basics
and dBase, if I was working with data. Then, take out the boot disk,
and both disk drives could be used for data with the RAM disk as the
default drive. ZOOM!
I've got an old Monroe (Litton) OC-8820,
possibly
the finest CP/M machine ever made in one package. I
I dunno--I might disagree with that one. :) The 8820 looks big and
boxy. I'll have to post some photos of my 1979 Durango
900--a little bigger
than a DECwriter, with two 980K floppies; or one floppy and a 40MB
hard disk, multipass dot matrix printer with downloadable fonts
(tractor or friction feed), 4 async serial ports, 1 sync port and
optional GPIB--all in the same box. Up to 256KB memory, switchable
in 1K pages. Ran CP/M, MP/M and its own MT OS. Ran the complete set
of MCBA business apps.
Well, don't expect ME to argue with you about your machine. I
learned long ago never to tell a proud parent their baby looks like a
chimp on dope. (Not that there's any comparison to the present
situation...)
Oh, yeah, the GPIB reference reminds me... I've got an HP CP/M
machine, too, that looks like their old brown monitors, with a
standalone dual diskette drive that connects via HPIB. I forget the
model number... Cripes, I've got old computers stashed all over the
place.
Peace,
Warren E. Wolfe
wizard at voyager.net