15 Oct
2008
15 Oct
'08
1:54 a.m.
Jeff Erwin said the following on 10/14/2008 1:56 PM:
The Starplex was the NS answer to the MDS, but was
much more 'late 70's' in
its design. The prom programmer was built into the system, as was the
screen and floppy drives. All very modular. I learned asm80 writing the
editor and assembler for that beast.
snip
Version 4 was radically different from the 3.X and
prior versions. The
earlier versions used the $X controls, version 4 used the controls that were
then used in the PLM86 compiler. Also, the DATA statement was eliminated
and other language constructs were changed. PLM80 V3 code would not compile
without mods. I remember it being released at about the same time the 8086
and PLM86 was was released and the effort was to make PLM80 and PLM86
somewhat similar. The PLM80 3.x docs are pretty much worthless if you are
using the 4.0 compiler. 4.0 was also one executable, a big change from the
PLM81 and PLM82 2-pass method the earlier versions used.
I'm confused. I have V4 of the "resident" compiler, that is, the one
that runs on an MDS Series II or MDS-800. Those machines had either an
8080 or an 8085 cpu. I'm putting in a very small screen shot below of
the files. Hopefully this is ok for the list. It shows that there are
6 overlay files to this compiler. It is not one monolithic executable.
Are you sure you aren't talking about the PL/M-86 compiler that runs on
an MDS Series III? That one is 8086-based.
If, indeed, you have an 8080-based compiler for PL/M-80 that is one
large file, I would like to see that. It is new to me.
snip
I'd love to get a copy of whatever you have relative to 4.0. Emailing the
PDF is probably easiest, I am more than happy to pay any costs associated.
I did a quick look for my plm docs and didn't find them. I'll look more
tonight. I know they are in my "collection", just have to find them.
snip
Yes indeed! The rumble of the 7Mb hard drive
(14" across if I remember
right) as it spun up. My favorite, of course, is the famous "Error 7, User
PC = xxxx" which covered almost every error you could make...
Mine has the "newer" technology hard drive. It is an 8"
winchester
drive with 20Mb, partitioned into four sections. I think ISIS-II was
limited in drive size, so they split up the 20M into 4, :F0:, :F1:,
:F2:, and :F3:. And that drive really dims the lights when it fires up!
Don't remember Error 7, but Error 24 covered almost any error related to
disk I/O and caused a full reboot. That's the one that plagued the
floppy disk based systems when the disk was wearing out.
Let me know more about your PL/M-80 compiler, if you can.
Dave