2 Dec
2018
2 Dec
'18
4:38 p.m.
On 3 Dec 2018, at 00:22, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Was any manufacturer? I does seem to me that everyone deliberately made their CP/M format
different despite using the same or similar chipsets. I was surprised to read in the docs
for my Osborne Executive that it COULD read a couple of other formats.
> When they went to 400K 40 cylinder MFM DSDD /
double sided, double density, still 48 tpi (like the PC-DOS 360K), they chose to call that
"QD" / "QUAD DENSITY"!! ?!?? (equating "density" with
capacity) WHOA! Everybody else called THAT DSDD "Double Sided Double Density",
and used "QD" / "Quad Density" to refer to 80 cylinder Double density
96tpi!
On Mon, 3 Dec 2018, Adrian Graham via cctalk wrote:
So I?ve been reading :) I?m sure they weren?t
doing it deliberately, hahaha.
It's hard to say. At NCC, at the Intertec booth, they could not understand WHY
anybody would want to transfer files between disk formats, other than to PIRATE their
"proprietary software"! They even threatened to sue me if I included it in
XenoCopy!
So, they were not heavy into interoperability with other brands. That was the first time that I added a format to
XenoCopy while in a hotel room. (Televideo was the second!). NCC was great. In addition
to those two formats, in exchange for buying him lunch, John Draper told me everything
that I needed to know to add UCSD P-System formats - (I did NOT exercise with him.)
Intertec did not keep their promise - I could have used the free ink.
What machine were you using for hotel room coding?
One more caveat! Radio Shack repurposed pin 32 (SIDE
SELECT) to use as their fourth drive select, and did their drive select with their cable,
rather than the jumpers. So did IBM, although they jumpered both drives as second drive,
rather than ALL jumpered as RS had done. IBM also used them, as well as the TM100-2 (DS),
so there are a LOT of sources for the manuals.
This pair are jumpered as I?d expect, DS0 and 1 with a terminator block. The manual says
they?ll work with multi-hole floppies so I?ll strip them down later and give them a good
clean.
--
adrian/witchy
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest private home computer collection?
t: @binarydinosaurs f: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs
w: www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk