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"David Williams" <dlw(a)trailingedge.com> wrote: Wow, it's pretty rare to find anyone who remembers Apex, since it wasn't ever all that popular. It was distributed by Apparat, and they were more famous for NewDOS/80 for the TRS-80 Model I and Model III. The 16-sector hack should have been quite easy, since the source code of the disk driver was printed in the Apex manual. I don't recall if it was provided on disk. Apex used Apple's RWTS routines sans some of the formatting code, in order to free up the page between $bf00 and $bfff for other uses. If you'd gotten in touch with us, we would have sent you a 16-sector update. Apex was written mainly by members of the "6502 Group", which has met on the Colorado School of Mines campus in Golden every Tuesday* since it formed in 1976. These days the discussion topics rarely involve 6502s, but the name has stuck for historical reasons. At its peak around 1981, a typical meeting had perhaps 80 attendees, but these days it tends to be fewer than a dozen. I no longer live in Colorado, but whenever I go back to visit family and friends I try to attend a meeting. Apex evolved from earlier operating systems called FFS (Floppy File System) and TFS (Tape File System), which were never widely distributed. The command interpreter and most of the utilities were written in a language called XPL0, conceptually similar to the way that parts of CP/M were written in PL/M. The main people behind Apex and XPL0 were Peter Boyle, Wayne Wall, Larry Fish, and Loren Blaney. I'm sure I've omitted other contributors; my apologies to them. The XPL0 language has been ported to other processors including the x86: http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/computers/xpl0/ Apex was ported to the 68K, and ran on some models of Macintoshes. It was used by DFM for telescope controllers: http://www2.csn.net/~dfm42/dfm.html Apparat's EPROM programmer for the Apple ][ was originally supplied with APEX-based software written by Larry Fish (who also designed the hardware), using special routines by Roger Nace to read and write Apple DOS 3.3 disks. Because this was somewhat inconvenient for most of our customers, I wrote entirely new software for it that ran directly under DOS 3.3. Cheers, Eric * Actually we missed a few due to weather and holidays. But almost every Tuesday.