18 Oct
2008
18 Oct
'08
7:23 p.m.
On Sunday 12 October 2008 20:03, feldman.r at comcast.net wrote:
Message: 10
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:04:00 -0400
From: "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: Looking for AT&T 3B1/UNIXPC/PC7300 software
<snip>
I can't recall now which one it was, but I had one of those, found on some
random floppy, and what I found was that it did not deal at all well with
the fact that I had a HD drive in the box. I guess it was looking for
a "360K" in there, or something.
I wouldn't mind getting a hold of those at some point, though I'm really
doing very little with dos these days, and don't anticipate doing much
except perhaps for a machine controller box or two at some point later on.
The one place where I could use such right now is this box of floppies I found
that a kind gentleman in Australia had sent to me. These are in Kaypro SS
format, which was what I could deal with at the time, my only machine when
he sent them being my Osborne Executive. I have some vague recollections of
looking at the contents and finding alternate ROM listings (and maybe BIOS
stuff?) for the Bigboard II. One thing that stands out in my memory was
there being a ROM choice in there that'd set the ROM up for different sweep
speeds, the default being 18.something KHz which my monitors back then sure
didn't seem to care for much.
I suppose I could dig out the one Kaypro machine I have handy, and hope that
there's a boot disk in it, to read them, or maybe dig out my Exec, which
I'm pretty sure has at least some floppies with it though I don't recall if
MM is in there or not, and then feed them over to something else via serial
cable...
Too bad I don't have a linux box handy with a 5.25" drive in it. I've had
idle thoughts of making a "media server" with four floppy drives of various
types in it, perhaps a tape drive or two, etc. Maybe one of these days
I'll get around to it...
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
I remember some of those, too, and in fact had
some in the files section
of my bbs. But I also remember stuff that would deal with "foreign"
formats, in particular there was "Media Master" and "Uniform". The
former was simply a file transfer program, while the latter would
actually "mount" a foreign format disk under an otherwise unused drive
letter, both of which I had occasion to use under CP/M. I'm pretty sure
that at least MM was available under DOS as well, dunno about Uniform.
I have MS-DOS versions of Media Master and Uniform, if anyone is interested
in a copy. As I remember Media Master, it would let you set up a drive as
the foreign type, to read/write/format a disk (except you could not format
a Kaypro and one other type using MM).