Commodore SuperPET history and HOSTCM

On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:05 AM, "Robert Ferguson" <rob at bitscience.ca> wrote: Over the last year or so, I've been researching the history of the Commodore SuperPET. I've just pushed a couple of things that I've been working on out to my website, and I thought people here might find them interesting. First is a narrative about how the SuperPET came to be, and how work on academic software at the University of Waterloo culminated in a collaboration with Commodore. Much of the information stems from new research which I conducted in the UW Archives this past summer. It also traces the origin and fate of the MICROWAT, a precursor hardware design that had a great deal of influence on the SuperPET. The whole thing can be found here: How the SuperPET came to be Second, I've written a timeline that documents significant events in the birth, life and decline of the SuperPET. That's here: The Commodore SuperPET: a timeline Third, one of the more interesting -- and mostly undocumented -- features of the SuperPET was its built-in ability to be a client to a remote fileserver; this relied on an RPC-like facility called HOSTCM that used the serial line as a transport. I have reverse engineered the protocol, and written a program that acts as a HOSTCM fileserver for the SuperPET. It runs on a variety of modern machines, including Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Linux. Among other things, this means that you can use a SuperPET without an attached diskette drive, and that you can move disk images, files and programs between the SuperPET and modern machines without specialized hardware. You can find the program here: HOSTCM and the protocol documentation here: The HOSTCM protocol Finally, I've written a couple of utilities that are useful for manipulating archived Commodore disk images for use with my HOSTCM implementation. That can be found here: Utilities for HOSTCM Oh, and there are some good pictures, too. If anyone has comments or questions, please let me know. Cheers, Rob Ferguson