15 Mar
2016
15 Mar
'16
6:57 p.m.
> Ah, so it has, under both the BMC and the OKI
names. I was going to
> try it with imgdisk and 22disk eventually, but I was in a KF
> experimentation phase.
On Tue, 15 Mar 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:
A plain old PC with legacy FDC will work just fine.
A little mouse tickling my memory indicates that the IF800 was one of the
systems used by Gene Roddenberry. I don't recall if it was BMC or OKI,
however.
It might be necessary to go slightly below INT13h. I remember something
weird about it, but can't remember what. Maybe it had invalid head
numbers on the second side?
In addition to the CP/M, the Oki if800 also existed with a version of
Microsoft Stand-Alone BASIC; similar, but not a match for the NEC 8001.
Don't know how wide spread that was, the disks that I worked on were some
that Lee Felsenstein brought back from Soviet Union.
I also once assisted Don Maslin with an NEC 9801 disk with the Stand-Alone
BASIC format instead of either CP/M nor MS-DOS.
For those not familiar, it has a directory in the middle of the disk. The
directory consists of two parts, a linked list of clusters and a table of
directory entries. Each directory had filename (some were 6.2 instead of
8.3), file size, and starting cluster number. Radio Shack Coco is one
such, and the MS-DOS directory was inspired by it. Supposedly, Tim
Paterson's company (Seattle Computer Products) shared a booth with
Microsoft at NCC or the West Coast Computer Faire, and he liked the ideas
behind the Stand-Alone BASIC directory structure.