18 Apr
2007
18 Apr
'07
9:43 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 18 Apr 2007 at 12:28, Jules Richardson wrote:
Interesting; did CP/M ship with a range of UART and FDC drivers then, so you
just tell it what particular ICs you're using and at what port addresses, and
away it goes? Or was it more complex than that, and realistically you'd have
to write your own comms / FDC driver which exposed some defined interface to
CP/M itself?
I doubt there's any shortage of CP/M capable
hardware owned by people on the
list - there's just a shortage of CP/M "hardcore" knowledge, because the
systems don't get used often enough for people to remember the real nuts and
bolts.
...and how many of us could assemble a CP/M capable machine from
what's in our junkbox? Really, for a functional system, you'd need a
x80-capable processor, some RAM, a UART (if it's not already on the
processor chip) and an FDC (a WD1770/1772 will do just fine)--and a
bit of PROM to get it booted. What there's not a lot of knowledge for are the
CP/M "add-ons" such
as Display Manager and Access Manager and the networking (was it
CP/Net or something like that?).
Hmm, one of my Research Machines (RML) systems has the networking add-ons; I
think they called their implementation Z-net. Clients have enough ROM-resident
code to invoke some form of network boot from the server - what I'm not sure
is whether the OS image transfer is part of core "network aware CP/M" or
whether that's a Research Machines extension (with the core stuff only really
providing network-aware file services).
The manuals are rather buried at the moment, but I seem to recall that they
weren't exactly big on details anyway (RML were great at producing hardware
documentation, but not so hot at writing down how the software side worked)
cheers
Jules