Recent addition : Lobo MAX-80

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, steven wrote: It is a TRS80 clone. The Lobo company started off peddling cheap refurb SA400s for use on TRS80. First bare drives, then with case and power supply. Then they decided to make their own TRS80 expansion interface, and eventually entire computer. When they built their expansion interface, they provided for use of 8" drives, and also for "double density". But they failed to realize that the WD 179x FDC that they used in order to have double density was incapable of writing certain address marks that RS had used with the 1771 FDC in the TRS80. Thus, their machine was incapable of writing disks readable by a stock TRS80 running TRS-DOS. That is why the Percom Doubler had a spare socket to plug in the 1771 to have BOTH FDCs present. So, they had to come up with their own system software. They bought out VTOS, which was Randy Cook's TRSDOS 3.0 and 4.0. Randy Cook had written TRS-DOS, but never finished getting it working; Radio Shack kicked him out and finished it as TRS-DOS 2.3. Then Randy wrote TRS-DOS 3.0 (never finished) and tried to market it as VTOS 3.0; he never finished it, and his publisher refused to pay him. Then Randy wrote VTOS 4.0 , published by Adventure International Scott Adams; he never finished it, and Adams refused to pay him. Lobo hired almost every TRS80 assembly language programmer, such as Roy Soltoff, and put them to work to finish the OS and write a manual. They got rid of Randy, because he could never finish ANY project. When done, they had Lobo-DOS 5.0. They started up a separate company ("Logical Systems, Inc.") to market it, and it became "LDOS 5.0". Later, after RS made the same mistake (model III), RS bought rights to sell LDOS, and it became TRS-DOS 6.0. And Randy Cook finally began to get royalties! NO F WAY. IT is a TRS80 clone But, ... if you write a file system handler (most of the disk portion of an OS), the single density Osborne has the same number of bytes per sector as Model 1 TRS-DOS, so sectors are easy to read. (We used to repair damaged Osborne diskettes using Superzap). And the Lobo HARDWARE, if you write the code, is certainly capable of reading the DD Osborne. Run LDOS on it. -- Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com