29 Aug
2012
29 Aug
'12
8:40 a.m.
On 08/28/2012 03:22 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
On 25 August 2012 15:29, Jules
Richardson<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, quite a few - plus various self-contained machines which used the BBC
board as an I/O processor. Most of them vanished to landfill years ago, it
seems, and are quite rare these days (mainly because they didn't have any
particular following back in the day, so nobody kept hold of them).
I've still got examples of all their boards, and a Graduate, and I think I
kept a 725 - but I got shot of my disc packs[1] and C-series machine.
[1] as well as the usual brown-cased one, I had a prototype one in the same
cream/grey as the 700-series, Unicorn and Graduate cases. I have no idea
why Torch went with "1970's brown" for the production ones!
On 08/23/2012 04:02 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
That's a really interesting question, actually, I would say.
[Does a bit of Googling]
There were, it seems, various Torch Z80 addons for the BBC Micro. Does a non-CP/M box count? The Tatung Einstein?
It runs soemthing called
XtalDOS which is very CP/M-like (I think most of the calls are the same).
I think that was true of Torch CP/N too, wasn't it? Which makes me wonder
how common "almost CP/M" variants were... There was also a standalone 2nd processor, no disk
drives:
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/8bit_Upgrades/Torch_Z802ndproc.html
They did four that I know of:
Communicator (as referenced in the link)
Tosca - as Communicator, but also with a local Z80 SIO
Neptune - 8MHz m68k + Z80, 1MB max RAM
Atlas - 10MHz m68k + Z80, 4MB max RAM
Communicator and Tosca would run CPN, Neptune and Atlas would run CPN and
Unix (System III).
They seem to exist variously in the wild as standalone boards, sold in
cased add-ons for BBC machines (e.g. Unicorn range), and as part of
all-in-one Torch systems (700-series, C-series etc.)
?
the TORCH CPN operating
system, (a 16K ROM containing a CP/M compatible "look alike")
?
I can't recall now if CPN existed solely on the BBC side of things, or if
part of it was in the ROM on the copro ('CCCPN' on the Neptune boards and
'CCCP' on everything else).
Another CP/M compatible OS I was aware of was Pro-DOS
for the MGT SAM Coup?:
http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk/whatisprodos.html
Neat. For a long time I wanted a SAM Coup?, but then of course bigger and
better things came along. Quite an amazing machine for the time, though.
As for the Tatung, I've found very little info on
XTal DOS, apart from
something calling it " a compatible but beefed-up version of CP/M
called Xtal DOS."
Yes, no experience there myself... I think I've only ever used an Einstein
for about 5 minutes :)
cheers
Jules