Tony Duell's maxed out 5160 and PDP

On Mon, 8 Aug 2011, William Donzelli wrote: YES. ALL of those, with the exception of the 1.2M and the 1.4M, MOST before the 5160 came out, I used on my 5150, which I ordered from IBM in 1981 with 16K of RAM. In a separate order at the same time, I bought an FDC card, a serial card, and a CGA card. My 5150 has been in my shed for ten years since I closed my office. When I put it into storage, If I remember correctly, it had 2 360s (SA455, one of which had write-protect jumpering reversed to write notchless disks), a 96tpi 5.25" (SA465? or Teac 55F), and an external 8", with CGA, AST multifunction, and aftermarket (Maynard?) FDC. XenoCopy was designed for 5150 and 5160. Although, in general, it would work with 5170, etc., in the documentation, I explicitly disclaimed any promise of working on bizarre newer stuff. It was for a specific purpose, and if your new fancy machine couldn't handle it, then do THAT task on a REAL 5150 or 5160. In fact, my publisher (may they ROT IN PIECES) sent out prerelease copies for review that still had in them explicit tests to prevent them from running on anything other than an IBM 5150/5160. BTW, I did the documentation for XenoCopy on a Corona Data Systems/Cordat laser printer controller, whose software REFUSES to work on a 286. Make THAT request of somebody who is more prone to do so. Unreasonable?? Damn straight. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. - George Bernard Shaw I asked Gary Kildall to designate an arbitrary set of parameters as the "standard 5.25" format for CP/M. He responded, the standard format for CP/M is 8" SSSD. I repect[ed] his refusal, but IF he had done so, MS-DOS would not have been the platform for XenoCopy. Ya mean when PCs weren't FUN anymore?? I got out of computers in 1970 during the aerospace collapse, with a self promise to return when individual computers became feasable. I was late getting into MICROcomputers (TRS80 4K level1), and never had much motivation to keep up with the "progress". What has "improved" in the last 10 or 20 years? Sure, they've gotten faster, but MICROS~1 PLANS on Moore's law, and the software takes away any performance gains of the faster hardware. Other than the higher data transfer rates needed for HD (and ED), the 5150 was better for floppy use than anything that came later. The 5150/5160 tech ref had full source code for Int 13h. When the 5170 came out, its techref did not have comments on the code for density/DTR change! As a beginning programmer (which I still am), I had a helluva struggle figuring out how to over-ride 250K/300K/500K DTRs. Staring with 286, having a reasonable number of floppies (more than 2) was becoming increasingly awkward and even sometimes difficult. And many of the HD/floppy controllers that purported to support 4 drives were bordering on unusable. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com