26 Oct
2006
26 Oct
'06
9:36 a.m.
On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Warren Wolfe wrote:
...
Anyway, the Monroe would run through the media, seeing if there was a
disk from which it could boot, and when it found one, it booted, and
made the drive in which the boot disk resided drive A: unless the user
switched them. It had 128K of paging memory, and 128K RAM disk. I
could load all of CP/M, a few cherished public domain utilities, and
Turbo Pascal into the RAM disk, and that baby FLEW! Disk access was
highly optimized, too. I had a disk that loaded the "choice" stuff into
RAM disk, and one that loaded the basics and dBase, if I was working
with data. Then, take out the boot disk, and both disk drives could be
used for data with the RAM disk as the default drive. ZOOM!
I did something similar with my TRS-80 Model 4 with 128KB, running
Montezuma Micro CP/M. 64KB was available for CP/M, and the other 64KB
could be made into a RAMdisk. I wrote a BIOS patcher which copied the
system tracks from the boot disk to the RAMdisk, then switched the system
drive to the RAMdisk and made both floppys available for data. With
Wordstar's overlays loaded into the RAMdisk, that 4.0MHz system ran rings
around the first 4.77MHz IBM PC.
Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/