24 Oct
2002
24 Oct
'02
9:24 p.m.
On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Tony Duell wrote:
There are certainly some really bizarre ones. The Victor 9000 (aka
Sirius) is MUCH weirder than the Rainbow.
The Rainbow format for CP/M isn't very unusual. 'course there are
thousands (I estimate 2500) mutually incompatible floppy formats.
But the Rainbow MS-DOS format is truly unique. It is the only one that
I've seen that doesn't have the DIRectory on track 0.
IIRC, it was Mark Graybill? (Media Master) who wrote a group of
programs to run on the Rainbow to read and write some PC formats, and some
programs to partially emoulate some of the PC quirks.
The Rainbow was a nice machine, whose biggest problem AND feature was its
uniqueness.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
As usual, my
favorite is the DEC Rainbow. Z-80 for CP/M, 8088 for CP/M
[...]
find one. The unusual floppy format is an issue,
but that's true of many
CP/M systems.
Well, at least it's standard MFM ('double density')
encoding, on a
single-sided 80 cylinder drive. So you do have a hope of being able to
read/write the disks on some other machine. Machines that use GCR
encoding make life a lot harder...