29 Mar
1999
29 Mar
'99
11:25 a.m.
At 08:40 AM 3/29/99 -0500, you wrote:
M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
215 Shady Lea Road,
North Kingstown, RI 02852
"Casta est qui nemo rogavit."
- Ovid
Joe, CP/M-80 is 2.2,
I looked throgh the XEROX manuals last night. There's a separate manual
for 2.2, CPM-80 and CPM 86 and MS-DOS 2. 2.2 is the oldest in this bunch.
and real computers don't need more than 64K...
Yeah I know but 128K is nice to have.
The 820, at least the later ones, used big 984K discs. I hardly ever ran
out of space. There was an 8 meg rigid drive available too, but I neever
filled that up either. WordStar on the 820 just grinds along, and works
very satisfyingly.
I got new manaul and 8" disk with WS 3.3. Also D-Base II and some other
stuff.
At least 3 word processing packages were avialable
plus business graphics, multiplan, quite a few programming languages.
XWP wasn't so great, apparently a primitive WordStar, WordStar was superb
if cryptic, and there was another nice one, a bit glitzy and modern for
my taste, but put WordPerfect to shame, but hey, even a blank screen does
that. Don Maislin may remember the name, he likes that particular
programme. Ran very well on 5-1/4 inch drives.
There was a memory expansion available for the 16/8, but I've never seen it.
The DEM-II is interesting because the card rack is very like the NEC APC-II.
Incidentally, Hyperion's DOS 1.25 runs circles around the Xerox DOS 2.0.
Do you know where I can find a copy of that? Do you still have any of
your XEROXs? I think I have the CPU portion of an 820-II here but no
drives (or the controller/daughter board) and no keyboard. The drives and
keyboard should be a problem but the controller is.
Joe
On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Joe wrote:
> Merle,
>
> At 10:24 PM 3/28/99 -0500, Merle wrote:
> >The 16/8 is an interesting machine. It came in 2 versions, the earliest
> >with 8" Shugart drives, a later with a DEM-II expansion case housing
> >5-1/4 inch drives. The CP/M-86 is not bad, but the MS-DOS is...well
> >MS-DOS.
>
> Not surprising considering it's only ver 2.0 . At least that's what I
> got in this load.
>
> > Incredibly primitive compared to CP/M 2.2.
>
> I don't know that much about CPM but this machine only has CPM-80 and
> CPM-86. How do they compare to CP/M 2.2?
>
> One problem is that
> >many were shipped with 128K memory. With the dinky drives, the machines
> >are disappointing. The old 8" 820-II is a far better and more usable
> >machine.
>
> Better than the 16/8? I thought it was newer. How much memory did the
> 820-II have?
>
> Thanks for the info.
> Joe
>
> >
> >On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, Joe wrote:
> >
> >> Today I went to see a couple of the people that I meet at
yesterday's
> >> hamfest. One of them used to service XEROX computers. He told me
that
he
> >> threw out three rooms full of old XEROX
computers less than a year
ago. :-(
> >> He gave me part of the stuff that he had
left, I have to take a Truck
> >> (note capital) back to get the rest (estimated at two cubic yards but no
> >> complete machines). So far I've found lots of docs and 8" flopppy
disks
> >> for the 820 and 16/8. The 16/8 looks pretty interesting, it ran CPM,
> >> CPM-86 and MS-DOS. Does anyone have one of these? What's your
opinion of
> >> them?
> >>
> >> He has a floppy disk drive control box to manual operate 3.5",
5.25" and
8" drives
during alignment. Anyone have an idea of what one of these is
worth with the alignment disks and manuals?
Alos found a Lisa mouse to go with the Lisa that I got yesterday.
Joe
M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
215 Shady Lea Road,
North Kingstown, RI 02852
"Casta est qui nemo rogavit."
- Ovid