On 30 August 2012 22:46, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 29 August 2012 23:37, John Elliott <jce at seasip.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Any more
CP/M-compatible Z80 OSs?
ZCN on the Amstrad NC100 portable. Notable because the NC100 used the Z80
NMI, which you can't normally use on a CP/M system what with it being in
the middle of the default File Control Block at 5Ch. So ZCN has to go
through some elaborate gymnastics involving saving that byte of the FCB and
sticking a RST instruction there instead.
I did not know that! I even have one of those, purchased a year or so
back as part of the research for this article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/10/portable_writing_tool/
If only it took CF or SD cards & I could get stuff on and off it
without fiddling about, I'd use the thing. Ditto my Z88.
I believe both units were made long befroe there _were_ CF or SD cards,
so I don't see how they could have used them :-)
They were, yes, but then again, there are SD and CF interfaces for
earlier devices such as the ZX Spectrum now, so it is doable.
Both have RS232 ports, don't they? Surely you can
get text off them that
way?
As I said - an /easy/ way to move data. As I have said before, to your
bemusement or incredulity, I really detest RS232 and have done for
about 25 years now. All that fscking around with baud rates and
straight-through versus null-modem cables and so on was a massive
nightmare in the 1980s and it is worse now. I have not used a plain
serial device for about 15 years and that is just fine. I *VERY*
occasionally use proprietary modified-serial connectors, such as
Psion's, and it's still a PITA to get it working and talking to a
modern computer.
I know you don't like it, because you choose to live in the past, but
I really like USB for this. Right now, I have 4 computers on or under
this desk, 2 more on the coffee table, another standing by the sofa,
and 4 laptops by the bed, and all talk USB. Only 1 is so old that it
just has USB2 - all the others either have USB2 onboard or a PCI USB2
card fitted. Virtually all of them have Firewire for fast external
storage, too.
I have read of problems with it, but for me, USB has been remarkably
plain sailing since the first machine I saw with it - an IBM desktop
PC in about late 1994/early 1995 which had these two unlabelled ports
on the back fascia, with a strange little trident logo next to it.
Nothing drove these ports - the machine came with Windows for
Workgroups 3.11 - nothing identified them and they were glossed over
in the documentation.
I eventually managed to trace a reference and found they were a
proposed new standard bus from Intel.
I put the beta of Windows 4.0 "Chicago" on the machine and they were
identified, but I had nothing to connect to them.
For the next 4 years, the ports stayed obscure and few devices supported them.
Then the iMac launched in 1998, having no other general-purpose ports
/except/ USB, and suddenly, /everyone/ supported it and it took off
like a rocket.
Me, I have loved it since Win95. I still used parallel-port devices
from the mid-1990s to the end of the century and then
they, happily,
went away too.
It's great. Keyboards, mice, tablets, trackballs, trackpads, printers,
phones, PDAs, card readers, floppy drives, hard drives, optical
drives, scanners, multifunction devices, all-in-one devices, modems,
network adapters, displays, everything has one type of cable and one
type of port and you plug it in and it just works. I love it. This is
how computers /should/ be.
I still love the old stuff and retrocomputing, but I also have work to
do, and life is too short for parity bits and stop bits and guessing
how many data bits and trying to find a baud rate both ends can handle
and software handshaking versus hardware handshaking and what kind of
UART do you have and is your cable wired correctly and which of 42
"standard" connectors are you using.
At least eventually 9600,n,8,1 worked for most things most of the
time. Slowly. If you were lucky. Maybe.
The serial port is /the/ single aspect of 1980s (& pre-1980s)
computing I have been most glad to see go. Never again.
I do remember trying a Z88 once. The keyboard put be
off ever wanting to
use it for anything serious. I stuck with my M100...
It's not great, but it's very quiet but big enough and tactile enough
to touch-type on /in total silence./
The Amstrad NC100 is a proper keyboard; it feels better, but you clack
and rattle away on it. Distracting if you're a journo taking notes.
--
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