17 Jul
2006
17 Jul
'06
8:09 a.m.
On Monday 17 July 2006 02:06 am, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
And DC300XL, and several others. I have a box around here someplace...
That's what I thought but I wasn't sure. The name Tandon came to mind, for
sure.
The tape drive
in mine was pretty cruddy when I got it, but a good
cleaning seems to have helped that a lot.
This one has a tape stuck in it (unlabelled), and the roller in the drive
has turned to goo, which I now have to repair, and clean the goo off the
tape. At least I know that it uses DC600A cartridges. Maybe I'll get lucky, and there'll be
something useful (software) on the
tape.
The unit I had came out of a dental practice, so there wasn't much
interesting there. I don't remember what application software they were
running, but the OS was "mmmost". I remember hearing that those machines
also came with TurboDOS at that time and I think that might have been more
interesting to play with. Got a book on that around somewhere, too. I
never did find any docs on mmmost. I don't remember how at this point, but
I managed to get a few of the ordinary utilities I was using into the box at
that point in time, and some of them gave very bizarre results -- nsweep for
example showing a file multiple times, because it was in the directory
structure under several "users".
One of these days I'd like to get more of a handle on some of those CP/M
variants and how they did what they did.
<...>
The machine
itself doesn't stir any recollections at all, but then it
really has been a heck of a long time since I've seen any of that stuff.
I'm trying to remember when it was that I acquired that machine and I
haven't nailed it down to a year yet. Those drives with all the red
connectors sure do look familiar, though, what make are they?
It's the same Tandon TM 100-2A that IBM shipped in PCs and PC/XTs. At least there's nothing (besides the EPROM, which
is socketed) that is
terribly complex.
Actually, I might pull the rom, and dump it while I'm at work tomorrow...
I'm tempted to power one of the TS-801's up and just see what comes out the
"terminal" port. (perhaps after checking out the power supply first :)
This sort of talk in here has me wondering from time to time how the power
supplies in some of my older gear are likely to be doing....
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin