On 4 May 2009 at 17:13, Dave Dunfield wrote: Good - someone can add support for the CompatiCard I and IBM PS/2 Diskette Adapter/A... --Chuck

js at cimmeri.com wrote: With 180 KB per disk. :)

Fred Cisin wrote: Hmm, 4 drives at 160K is 640K, and we all know that's more than enough for anybody...

On Mon, 4 May 2009, Dave Dunfield wrote: Thank you! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Steven Hirsch wrote: Steve, dude, you are way over-reacting. No one is being nasty, nor not-playfully-sarcastic. Let me take a quick shot at clarifying this minor set of email-muddled misunderstandings, then I'll shut up about it. Your original post ... " but IMD does not recognize my Compaticard IV (why on earth does it restrict you to drives A-D??). " ... if interpreted as such, does read like a bit of minor complaining... specifically the "why on earth ... ??". Now, because I've emailed/posted with you for a fairly long time now, I have a sense of your style, and know that you were just exclaiming aloud without meaning anything by it. Similarly, Dave's responses: "Why on earth did IBM define the PC with only enough bits in the drive select/motor on register for 4 drives ... A-D are the standard drives suspported by the hardware -- anything else needs "special drivers" and I'm just not going there... But you can get a full refund with the "DELETE" command so all is not lost." and " ... so instead of complaining about it, you can put in however much time you think should have been put into supporting your special hardware yourself!" ... I thought were hilarious, and while I don't know for sure, I took it as he was just trying to be funny while expressing some very mild flabbergastion over your exclamation about limitations of his program. Similarly, my responses: "Yeah, and anyway, 4 drives ought to be more than enough for anybody! lol. " and "why IMD doesn't provide a free interface that allows me to plug in my S-100 disk controller floppy cable to a special adapter that I can insert into the 3.5" floppy drive of my PC.. ...Is it me, or is there just something wrong with that Dave Dunfield guy? Or are ALL Canadians like that?? " ... was meant to continue the very funny (to me, and at least a few others) situation by pretending to demand EVEN MORE of Dave. Ok? Are we all clear now? jS

bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca wrote: To make it simpler for people: http://www.surplussales.com/ComputerAccess/Floppydrive.html

On Tuesday (05/05/2009 at 01:48PM -0400), Steven Hirsch wrote: I see they also have MPI / CDC 5.25" drives p/n 77711501. Does anyone know if those are 100 TPI drives? Chris -- Chris Elmquist

js at cimmeri.com wrote: No. 8-P -- --- Dave Woyciesjes --- ICQ# 905818 --- AIM - woyciesjes --- CompTIA A+ Certified IT Tech - http://certification.comptia.org/ --- HDI Certified Support Center Analyst - http://www.ThinkHDI.com/ "From there to here, From here to there, Funny things are everywhere." --- Dr. Seuss

On 4 May 2009 at 15:17, Fred Cisin wrote: Why doesn't it run on my Sanyo MBC-550 or my Tandy 2000? Those have the original disk controllers in them and they run MS-DOS... --Chuck

On Mon, 4 May 2009, Fred Cisin wrote: I can only conclude that I've caught folks on a bad day, but let me set everyone straight: - I was not complaining about Imagedisk. I think it's a great program. - I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't let me specify a drive higher than D. That's the extent of my concern. I just wanted to take a shot at seeing if it would talk to the Compaticard FDC. It won't. I'm dealing with it. Now that I know it doesn't support anything but the NEC 765, I'll have to build an adapter to connect the 8" drive to the internal floppy controller. Not a big deal, honestly, can we stop with the lecturing and sarcasm, please? If my prior request sounds reasonable, then I have an on-point question: I have read the Imagedisk docs and looked at the on-screen help, but cannot see any obvious way to tell it that an 8" drive is attached. Specifically, the FDC test program has options only for BIOS recognized drives, 1.2M, 1.4M and, I think, one other. What tells it there's an 8" drive out there? Steve --

On 5 May 2009 at 6:48, Dave Dunfield wrote: Well, I think Dave did A-D mostly for notational convenience. In fact, without any specific DOS mapping information, it might be more accurate to say "Port 3Fx, units 0-3", but that would really confuse the users. It's not the CompatiCard per se, (it's pretty neutral in terms of hardware), but adding controllers not on the primary port of 3Fx and DMA 2, IRQ 6. It's a little complicated as you may have to share IRQs and DMAs. FWIW, DOS does not provide a reliable way of figuring out what dirve letters are associated with what controller once you get above B:. Given the number of secondary FDCs out there (or lack of them) I don't blame Dave. Nor do I blame him for not including Backpack drive support. Speaking of adding floppy drives, one can sometimes find controllers that can be modified to handle more than 2 drives (several of ISA SCSI controllers, for example used the National DP8473 FDC (a great FDC, by the way that even formats and writes 128 byte MFM sectors, as well as FM), which allows for driving up to 4 drives--a little jumpering to the floppy header is often all that's required. Some older Pentium-era motherboard "Super I/O" chips can likewise be modified to handle more than two drives. So if you can't find a Compaticard, you're not out of luck. While programs such as ImageDIsk don't require software to access these extra drives, the motherboard BIOS doesn't usually support them. The SMSC ftp (ftp.smsc.com) has loadable DOS drivers for the extra units that provides BIOS support (and thereby DOS support) for the extra units. --Chuck

On Mon, 4 May 2009, Steven Hirsch wrote: because the stock PC hardware supports a max of 4 drives. Any more requires after-market hardware that is not standardized. The Compaticard IS NEC 765 (or indistinguishable copy) 1.2M == 8" drive

I'm not sure what you mean by "mapped as drive D:" - Is this with the DOS driver? Unit 2 (in 0..3) would be C: for ImageDisk (Like Chuck suggested earlier, ImageDisk's A-D represents units 0-3 on the primary floppy controller - NOT any sort of OS mapping). I'd recommend NOT using any extra drivers with ImageDisk (it talks directly to the hardware, and external drivers can interfere with that if they are triggered on an interrupt). I can help figure this out if you want to contact me off-list. Here's some things to try: - Does imagedisk work OK with standard PC drives on A: or B: - If not, then the controller is probably not a standard PC controller. (Does it work at all without special drivers loaded?) - If yes, does it work with the standard drive on C: or D: - If no, then the drive 2-3 selection is probably different from the one implemented in ImageDisk (this is non-standard) - If yes then it may be the 8" drive configuration - perhaps the Compaticard wires it differently that I do (details of my 8" connections are in the help) - Since you now have good media ... can you READ a disk in the 8" drive with ImageDisk? Dave -- dave09 (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

My email client (Pegasus) started eating outgoing mail yesterday, so I'm going to summarize what I said in a message that was obviously posted to the bit bucket. On the subject of floppy controllers, etc... All legacy floppy controllers in 100% "PC compatible" systems are based on the Intel 8272/NEC 765. The systems that use other controller families (e.g. the Sany MBC 550) are not considered to be "PC Compatible". But the 765 is a late 70's era chip essentially designed for use with 8" drive setups. It can poll a bank of drives and alert the system when one has changed state; it can perform overlapped seeks and is "intelligent" in that it pretty much has the IBM 3740 format "built in". Data separator and write precompensation logic, as in other chips of the day were provided by external logic. Compared to it the WD 17/27xx chips are brain-dead (although by that virtue, very flexible). For its time, the 765 is a tour de force. Used on a 5.25" or 3.5" drive system, however, the benefits are pretty useless. Small drives have motors that need to be turned on and off and don't provide a "ready" signal. So the "drive ready" line is tied high (meaning that if the drive being addressed isn't ready, the 765 simply hangs); there's no motor control line on the 765, so that must be provided by an external register. That same register also has the drive select logic, so the unit select pins (as well as the head load signal) on the 765 are NC. The external register that controls the motor signals and the drive select also has 2 bits that allows the controller to tristate the interrupt and DMA request lines, as well as to reset the controller. The PC AT added another register to allow one to change the datarate (for high-density drives) and monitor the "disk changed" signal line that many drives have. It wasn't too long before chip makers started integrating all of the external logic with the 765 core. The WD37C65 was probably the first such chip that contained all of the external logic (data separator, precomp, motor control, drive select and data rate control). Later on, more features were added (1 Mbps data rate for 2.88 MB drives, special circuitry for floppy tape control, data FIFO, additional configuration registers, etc.). Some of the integration wasn't done too well. FM support is one of those areas--the Intel 82077 initially had pretty good FM support, but the 82077AA-1 has it broken. The Compaticard IV was designed around the 82077 chip, but when reports of the new 82077AA-1 not working started to drift in, Micrsolutions changed to the pin-compatible National 84077. Basically, the CC IV is a PC-AT style controller that brings all 4 drives out to connectors and adds some beefier (74LS38 OC buffers) drivers for use with 8" drives. There is also an auxiliary register that provides a couple of bits on the connector for control of such things as Reduced Write Current on 8" drives. And it allows for user- selectable I/O port address, DMA and interrupt as well as an on- board BIOS option ROM. There are other floppy controller cards with selectable I/O port addresses (or at least to a "secondary" address), but all others do not allow changing from DMA 2, IRQ 6. Nor is driver support provided than for the controller functioning as the primary one. Hope this helps, Chuck

On 7 May 2009 at 8:25, Jules Richardson wrote: Given that there were only two real choices for floppy controllers (WD 17/27 series and the NEC 765) at the time of the 5150 launch, IBM didn't do too badly. I suspect they also got a good price break for staying with Intel (the 8272 is just the 765 by a different name). I've built up WD-based controllers for the PC and those chips have their own issues, although not as contorted as putting the 765 to work driving 5.25" floppies in my opinion. It's not a problem with a clear answer. --Chuck

Jules Richardson wrote: $$$$ PROFT for US ... not the buyer. For a alternate world ... Had the PDP 11 been reduced to a simple IC design and operation code set, DEC may have got the PC market. Ben.

Dave McGuire wrote: I was thinking a NEW board set with just 18 bits of dynamic memory but still the split I&D spaces. DEC, Intel and Motorola where the only designs I know of that could access more than 64KB and still be a 8/16 bit CPU at the time. A 16 bit 2901 design may have hit the market too but I can't think of good instruction set for it. Ben.

Allison wrote: I was looking at the 1978 ... 1983 time line... PS. I like the 6809 and OS/9...

Add me as another OS-9 fan. I ran it first on a CoCo2 (64K) and found the I/O system amde it very easy to write device drivers for custom hardware (and guess what I kept on adding to my CoCo...) [...] There are some minor differnces, but both were based on the same Motorola application note for the 6883 (SAM) and use essentially the same chips. The main hardware differenve is the printer port. When the PIA lines needed for the keyboard, cassette, video control, etc had been allocated, there were 3 lines left. The CoCo uses them to make a bit-banged RS232 port (TxD, RxD, CD IIRC). The Dragon uses them to provide the Stb/, Busy nad Ack/ lines for a Centronics port. The Centronics data comes from the 8 lines also used to scan the keyboard. Since the printer only looks at those lines on the falling edge of a strobe (which doesn't happen while the keuyboard is being scanned) and since the keyboard is not read when the machine is sendinf data to the printer there's no problem. One annoying difference is that the BASIC tokens are differnt. So while the CoCO and Dragon can read eaxh other's tapes, and while you cna transfer BASIC programs saved in ASCII with no problems, you can just load a tokenised program saved on one machine into the other. IIRC the disk controller owrked with the Dragon 32 as well, but you needed 64K to run OS-9 The Dragon 64 serial port was a real hardware one, based on a 6551 IRRC. -tony

On Fri, 8 May 2009, Steven Hirsch wrote: That's not screwy, that is standard IBM format for higher density disks (except that IBM didn't have a SSDD variant, only SSSD, DSSS and DSDD). Christian

ImageDisk is NOT a CP/M emulator like 22disk - it knows (or cares) nothing about high level disk formats (file systems). Although it has a F)ormat command, it's is a LOW-LEVEL format only and does not create a recognisable file system. It is mainly for testing and the creation of custom disks. You CAN low-level format mixed density disks with ImageDisk by making use of the track exclusion-map feature and F)ormatting the areas of the disk containing different track types individually - but this is a low-level format only - the OS may not recognize it (although it should be able to reformat it even if the system normally requires already low-level formatted disks). The best way to high-level "format" a disk with ImageDisk however, is to make an image of disk freshly formatted on the actual system, then simply W)rite it to new disks as needed. The Xerox should format the system tracks as part of it's normal format. If for some reason it does not, you could try any of the following: - Format the first 2 tracks in SD with ImageDisk (and the rest DD if necessary) and then format it in the Xerox to get the high level file system. - Make a second copy of your system disk, then format it in the system. - Make a second copy of your system disk and delete all the files (not quite as clean but logically a blank disk). - Use BIN2IMD to convert a binary file prepared with a blank file system image into a .IMD file that you can write - BIN2IMD lets you change track formats on the fly with an option file. Dave -- dave09 (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

On 9 May 2009 at 6:13, Dave Dunfield wrote: Beg pardon, Dave. 22Disk doesn't emulate anything. It converts (and can format), but doesn't emulate. That's 22Nice's job. For that matter, if all one wanted to do was to create an arbitrary blank disk with different formatting on each track, Anadiisk's often- overlooked format feature can do some pretty bizarre stuff. --Chuck

On Sat, 9 May 2009, Chuck Guzis wrote: How?? I have pored over the docs and cannot find a mention of hybrid formats. (I'm a legal owner of 22Disk, BTW - purchased in 1994 from Sydex). --

On 5/8/09 6:14 PM, "Steven Hirsch" <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote: Of the 100 or so Xerox floppies I've archived so far, track 0 varies enough that my guess is it doesn't matter. I've seen a lot of 26x128 as you mention, but every once in awhile it is 26x256, and sometimes the interleave matches the rest of the tracks and sometimes it doesn't. When the disk is DSDD, track 0 side 1 always matches the rest of the tracks at 26x256, even if side 0 is 26x128. When I use IMDV to look at track 0, sometimes it's completely blank and sometimes not. Richard

Steven Hirsch wrote: Then try to figure it out, Steve. You're doing yourself a disservice by throwing in the towel so easily on every little question. Richard wrote: <<Of the 100 or so Xerox floppies I've archived so far, track 0 varies enough that my guess is it doesn't matter. I've seen a lot of 26x128 as you mention, but every once in awhile it is 26x256, and sometimes the interleave matches the rest of the tracks and sometimes it doesn't. When the disk is DSDD, track 0 side 1 always matches the rest of the tracks at 26x256, even if side 0 is 26x128. When I use IMDV to look at track 0, sometimes it's completely blank and sometimes not. Richard >> These are not surprising observations: not all disks are bootable. Not all those disks were necessarily formatted on the Xerox.. some might have be pre-initialized. 26x128 on T0S0 is your format for booting. Format -- not sysgen -- formats. Sysgen -- not format -- puts boot code on that track.

Steven Hirsch wrote: Likewise, I'm starting to get tired of the sense of entitlement and whining behaviors you've had on display lately over when people here don't provide you with what you need, or fast enough. For example, the way you were hollering at everyone the other day because no one had replied to your request for 820 disks or whatever.. was just being a tad too demanding. This group isn't the hired staff of "Best Buy" with you being a customer. And your emails following Dunfield's response (already elaborated upon earlier) were oozing with negativity. You were blaming everyone else for having a bad mood, when it was YOU in the bad mood. Anyway, we're free to state opinions here. If I posted a question here every time I hit the most minor of snags, I would EXPECT some people to get annoyed with me. I've learned the most when people have ignored me for the right amount of time. Of course, you have responded to that thrust with MORE negativity. jS

On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 10:40 -0500, js at cimmeri.com wrote: If you're using an approximately PC-like keyboard (this includes modern Macs) then take a look at the keyboard. Do you see the big "Return" key? It may be marked with a back-to-front-L shaped arrow. Got it? Okay. Now move your pinky about 13mm (half an inch, for you new-world-old-units people). See the bottom left one in that little group of six? It may be marked "Del", or "Delete". That allows you to "delete" messages that you don't want to read. If that doesn't work for you, then you could try just not reading the thread. At the very least, stop replying to so many of the original poster's emails with whining about him whining. Gordon

Gordon JC Pearce wrote: Mine says "Enter" :P We obviously need a ccwhine list... ;)

dwight elvey wrote: True, but that's not all. The reason for FM on T0 is so that any disk of any format that had been properly sysgen'd and contained the proper CBIOS could then be booted from that system. It allowed the flexibility of having a multi-format system. Another reason is so that the disk controller boot rom (or boot code wherever it was) could start booting ANY disk since they all began with FM 26x128. Boot in FM, read the boot loader. THEN, the boot loader which could be more complex and would specifically match that individual floppy (unlike the boot rom), it would continue the boot, handling whatever format the rest of the disk was. jS

On 7 May 2009 at 13:30, bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca wrote: Didn't the Soviets have their own versions of the LSI 11 and even put on in a calculator? I do know that they had "personal computers" built around the architecture. But when the PeeCee came out, they happily went for the x86. --Chuck

On 7 May 2009 at 13:47, Jules Richardson wrote: Thank your lucky stars that IBM decided to use a Moto graphics controller instead of the Intel 8275. Although the 82720/NEC 7220 might have been an improvement over the 6845. --Chuck

On 7 May 2009 at 16:06, bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca wrote: 8275 - think Wyse 50 terminals. Doesn't use a dedicated buffer, but DMA to do buffer refresh. Attributes (e.g. bold, blink, etc.) use a space on the screen, unless "invisible" mode is enabled, in which case each line occupies a variable number of bytes and a maximum of 16 attributes per line. 7-bit character set. I learned to hate the bloody thing. --Chuck

On 7 May 2009 at 12:09, Warren Wolfe wrote: Actually, it wasn't the IBM PC, XT, AT or PS/2 that established the market, but rather the proliferation of cheap far east clones. A Taiwanese "XT" couldn't be touched as far as bang for the buck. I've been trying to establish the truth of what a Taiwanese friend told me at the time--that the Taiwanese government bankrolled a lot of the groundwork and produced documentation and reference designs. But all this is for now is just one person's account. --Chuck

On 7 May 2009 at 18:22, Fred Cisin wrote: That's what I heard. Also English-language manuals. I've got a few no-name manuals for floppy controllers and printer ports that have identical wording (and errors), but are printed in different typefaces. --Chuck

Keep in mind that IBM made a good bundle of money supporting the PC line. And the PS/2 line. -- Will

On 7 May 2009 at 22:23, Warren Wolfe wrote: Had the PC been only a business computer, it would have been like the other "business computers" (not the hobbyist ones) and not made sufficient headway in the market. A lot of the software available for the PC at the beginning was nothing more than code ported from the x80 world--heck, PC-DOS was pretty much that. Until Lotus 1-2-3, that is. Business people bought PCs for 1-2-3 the same way they'd bought Apples for VisiCalc. It might not be an exaggeration that clones were so successful because they could run 1- 2-3 as well as a PC could--and 1-2-3 ran only on PCs. And it ran very well on 5160 clones. I suspect that Intel Aboveboards owe their success to 1-2-3 as much as anything. If we had been left with IBM as the only proponent of the PC, it might well have been just a memory, like the 5100. I'll confess that when the 5150 came out, I thought I was out of my mind buying a 64K 5150, instead of a nice complete well-built system like a NEC APC. But if IBM was difficult to deal with, NEC was impossible and kept technical details to themselves jealously. IBM was miserable at the beginning doing PC sales. We walked into the IBM sales office on Arques in Sunnyvale early in 1983 and put in an order for a dozen 5150s, loaded (not hard to load, considering there were only 5 expansion slots and the only "multifunction" card IBM offered was the MDA). The sales office staff couldn't tell us when to expect delivery--6 months was their best guess. And nobody in that office knew the first thing about options or software for the thing. To get what we needed, we went to Computerland in San Jose. They had our systems in a week and knew their stuff. --Chuck

Chuck Guzis wrote: They didn't call it LOTUS-intel-microsoft (LIM) for nothing :-) -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

On 8 May 2009 at 15:47, Teo Zenios wrote: The curious thing is that IBM was extremely weak when it came to PC software (just look how Lotus' fortunes have slid since they were acquired by IBM). What IBM-developed PC software helped the PC accumulate market share? Topview? OS/2? I imagine that if IBM had acquired Microsoft, we'd all be running some flavor of Unix now. Maybe not a bad thing... --Chuck

Fred Cisin wrote: I got a PDP 8 ... who needs MS's port.... mind you real bug fixes are almost as slow as MS's. Anybody yet get to compile for the SBC6120?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, May 08, 2009 6:20 PM Subject: Re: The IBM (I've Been Mulling) PC Lotus was in a steep decline before IBM purchased them having lost the office desktop wars at the time. A shame realy since I liked Lotus Ami Pro for Windows 3.1 quite a bit (which I think they purchased from somebody else?). I have a boxed Copy of Lotus Suite 3.0 for Win 3.x and someday I might find the OS/2 native version.

2009/5/9 Teo Zenios <teoz at neo.rr.com>: Lotus bought in both Approach and Ami (properly, Am?). Am? came from Samna Development Corporation, creators of Samna Executive, the DOS WP aimed at senior managerial and directorial staff. I only ever met one person who used it - and I supported virtually every DOS WP going in the 1980s. Samna Executive was very odd and /profoundly/ unlike other DOS apps, but it did have a sort of WYSIWYG and a print preview before just about anybody else. Horrible app, though. :?) Am? was the first Windows WP app, long before Word for Windows. Aldus' Flintstone might have been first, but Bill Gates met Paul Brainerd at a trade show and when told of the not-yet-alpha testing WYSIWYG GUI WP, he lied through his teeth and told Brainerd not to bother since MS Word was nearly ready and would beat Aldus onto the market. Brainerd went home and cancelled the product. Gates went home and told his dev team to start writing a Windows WP, PDQ, because someone else was going to beat them to it. Well, Word for Windows 1.0 was rubbish. 2.0 wasn't great but was better. Then it leapt to v6.0 which was actually pretty good and is basically the same app as Word 11, more generally known as Word 2003. But Samna beat them to market, and considering the weird horror that was Samna's DOS apps, Am? was a beauty. Fast, elegant, easy. The only remnant of Samna corp and its name is the .SAM extension of Lotus Word Pro docs, and the chief influence it had on MS Word was that Microsoft copied Am?'s "Full Screen View" - still my preferred way of working in MS Word to this day. Often in white-on-blue mode, for me. And I think I have a copy of the OS/2 version somewhere, but I don't think it was the last version... I'll look. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On Wed, 6 May 2009, Steven Hirsch wrote: Chuck Guzis pointed out that I specified the wrong address. That should be '3F0h' (370h is the secondary address). --

Dave Dunfield wrote: I've seen quite a few BIOSes that *do* make reference "C:" and "D:" though, presumably because they assume the user will be running DOS/Windows and this is somehow helpful to them :( Would asking for feedback on that be helpful? My guess would be that most IMD users are somewhat technical if they know their way around a CLI (DOS) in the first place, and are screwing around with ancient disk formats. Given what the program's used for, and that it runs under a non-mainstream OS, I'm not sure that it'd be harmful to drop reference to DOS's concept of drive assignment. cheers Jules

Rumor has it that Chuck Guzis may have mentioned these words: with non-standard bios's's's's and memory maps. Having used both but owned neither (but I knew where a T2000 sat never used about 9 years ago... the store owner still wanted $795.00 for it) -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Bugs of a feather flock together." sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Russell Nelson zmerch at 30below.com |

js at cimmeri.com wrote: Is there a full moon, or something? Dave wrote and documented something very useful while this group was contemplating their navels. Put this to rest, please.

Dave McGuire wrote: Yes, I was completely joking. Didn't think to put in a ;-) as I figured what I wrote was ridiculous enough to make that obvious. jS

On Mon, 4 May 2009, Al Kossow wrote: $ pom The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (82% of Full) -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Wow - a surprising amount of response for what I thought was a small and simple point (ok - so I wasn't QUITE as subtle as I could have been :-) I recall Chuck G. one time mentioning something along the lines of having had more crap about TeleDisk over the years then he cared for (sorry - don't have the exact quote handy), and I must say I completely understand what he was talking about - I do get a lot of very positive and encouraging correspondance about ImageDisk, but I also get strange and incomprehensible "feedback" ... some people seem angry that my free utility does not do something they want to do (in most cases accompanied by a fundamental lack of understanding about the hardware limitations, real standards, and the "unpleasentness" in attemptng to perform these functions under "modern" operating environments). I've even gotten complaints that ImageDisk has "too much" documentation. You really can't please all of the people all of the time. So please do forgive me if I get my "back up" about comments like "why on earth didn't you support my custom hardware"... I've never owned or even seen a Compaticard of any flavor ... If the four standard drives don't cut it for you, you can use an alternate standard controller (I allow any address)... Or use the system I use which is bring the 'B' interface out to a 36-pin 'D' connector on the back, with cables and adapters to allow you to connect pretty much any drive you like. I've documented this in a fair bit of detail on my pages - it works really well! Or - as noted earlier, you can change the program to "do what you want". Btw - if you really want a "TeleDisk" image, by all means write a converter. I don't promote TeleDisk because NTI and Chuck have openly asked that it be retired --- but I've documented the TeleDisk archive format to the best detail that I have been able to uncover, and I've provided tools to translate TeleDisk to ImageDisk - and tools which manipulate ImageDisk files ... It should not be a terribly difficult job to write a converter to go the other way - the information is available... Indeed it should be quite possible - I've thought about it, but I just don't have time or pressing need (My main interest in in long- term archiving of representative images of original media, with an emphasis on detailing the archive formats so that the ability to extract usable data from those images will not be lost "no matter what"). But why wait for me to do it ... The ImageDisk archive format is openly documented and has been placed in the public domain. Sample code to manipulate those archives has been made available. If you want a Hardware Virtual Drive that works with ImageDisk images - then by all means, build one. It would be an interesting project, and given that similar devices have already been done, definately not impossible. An even simpler approach might be to use IMDU to reformat the image into a raw binary file - I haven't looked at them, but I would guess that at least some of the Hardware Virtual Drives that have already been done can already work with a raw binary image. Or write a tool to reformat the image into whatever archive format is required by the HVD. Everything I've done has been made available - if you want the torch carried faster or further - please pick it up and run! You bet Eh? We've been clubbed over the head with hockey sticks so much that we are all unreasonble hosers... For fun we grab our chainsaws and kill trees... (Ok, I did happen spend a few hours behind a saw this afternoon, but I was for the most part clearing deadwood which as is hinted at by the name ... was already dead). Actually, it's been posted for quite a long time - well over a year. Some of you may recall a while back when I took a fair bit of flak here in this list because I didn't want to post the sources until I felt the system was through the bulk of it's initial development and fairly stable. Various people insisted that the program was "useless" without them, and talked about modifications and enhancements that they wanted to be able to do. Since posting the sources, I've not seen one shred of evidence that anyone has done anything with them. I've not seen any enhanced or modified versions, submissions, bug fixes or any other indications ... I don't know what happened to all the people who so desperately needed them - perhaps their navels are just TOO interesting... (thanks AL). Dave -- dave09 (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

Rumor has it that js at cimmeri.com may have mentioned these words: I'll have you know, that I'm one of those dumb Americans (who still says the Pledge of Allegiance - I must be wacko!)... {/me turns head 180 degrees (somewhat painfully, I guess I could use a bonecruncher session soon) and looks at the skyline of a very old, yet regal Canadian city out my northern window... } It seems I live close enough to Canada that even I might take offence to that statement... :-O [[ Yes, I say 'Eh?' on a regular basis! ]] OK, maybe not quite, but you may not realize that you're talking about an individual who; with a desire to own his own personal computer *designed & built* it, then *wrote* his own operating system for it in assembly language... makes me *wish* I was a Canadian (or American, or any other nationality) like him! ;-) Laterz, "Merch" -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers zmerch at 30below.com Hi! I am a .signature virus. Copy me into your .signature to join in!