8 Oct
2005
8 Oct
'05
4:22 a.m.
So I was listenting to a radio play (a police investigation/drama) on the CBC
(Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) today in which the plot centred around recovering
data (the offshore bank account #, how cliche) from the dead guy's ancient
Apple II/e.
(The dead guy was apparently like a lot of people on this list: still used an
old machine for his main/daily computing ...just so you all know you're
actually getting portrayal in the popular arts :/ )
Well, that went by me OK, then they threw in the plot twist: the guy wasn't
using the standard OS, he was using an oddball system which was going to make
the data recovery more problematic, that system being CP/M. At this point my
pedantic-critic bells went off. So somebody either confirm my pedanticism or
show me up as the ignorant one: nobody ever bothered to rewrite CP/M (which to
my understanding was all targeted to Intel procs) for the Apple II did they?
... maybe the scriptwriting 'computing consultant' figured it would be a good
inside joke, ... maybe it's somebody on this list!
8 Oct
8 Oct
6:19 a.m.
Brent Hilpert wrote:
<snip>
the dead guy's ancient
Apple II/e.
So somebody either confirm my pedanticism or
show me up as the ignorant one: nobody ever bothered to rewrite CP/M (which to
my understanding was all targeted to Intel procs) for the Apple II did they?
... maybe the scriptwriting 'computing consultant' figured it would be a good
inside joke, ... maybe it's somebody on this list!
There of course the card made for the apple ][ which booted and ran
cpm. I think there was (is)
an equivalent for the 2/e.
actually this version is not that uncommon. main problem was getting
data from other cpm's of the
time (early 80's) to this system. If you ran it w/o 80 column support,
the 40 column video of
the apple 2 was very annoying.
I would assume there would be dbase or some spreadsheet program he could
be using to keep
data. Also the 5 1/4 disks would be much better than the original cpm
8" for a traveler.
Also very possibly, a 2/e would 3 1/2 disks and CP/M data on them.
I think the 3 1/2" disks might be easier to recover data from, since it
might have been hooked
up thru a "real" floppy controller, rather than apples annoying 5 1/4
system.
The format from that controller was bizarre enough I don't know if there
was any way
to read them on the IBM PC's disks. Maybe something like the copy 2
option board
might read the data and store it. does 22/disk read those?
jim
12:30 p.m.
The format from that controller was bizarre enough I
don't know if there
was any way
to read them on the IBM PC's disks. Maybe something like the copy 2
option board
might read the data and store it. does 22/disk read those?
22Disk does not handle them. Internally here, we use an early Microsolutions Match Point
card in an old PC XT with a special version of Uniform to handle Apple II CP/M transfers.
The Match Point also comes with some tools to handle Apple DOS. The MP will not work in
anything much faster than an XT. I believe that there was another product called
"Blue Lightning" or some such to handle those diskettes, but I've never run
into one.
The Apple II recording format is a gutless wonder (like Apple II video), heavily using the
CPU to read and write disks--and very dependent on the 2 microsecond CPU clock. The
diskette controller is really nothing more than a 6309 ROM, a 74LS323 shift register that
forms a state machine, a 74LS259 latch for drive control and a l and a little glue. The
disk controller card also contains a 6309 boot ROM
In the days when an LSI floppy controller OEM-ed out at $40-50, it was an interesting
low-cost solution. The data representation is essentially a sort of group code--and there
were two versions of this code--DOS 3.2 (5/8) and DOS 3.3 (6/8). A 3.2 disk contains 13
256 byte sectors per track; a 3.3, 16.
The big weakness in the Apple II disk was the lack of really good error checking. A
simple one-byte arithmetic checksum was used in lieu of a CRC and I've personally
experienced corrupted data flying by without being diagnosed.
I believe that the Apple /// subsumed much of the Disk II controller into a single LSI IC,
named the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) and that some of that logic was carried into the
early Macs.
If you're looking for a good no-nonsense book on the innards of the IIe, try to find
Jim Sather's book "Understanding the Apple IIe" (Quality Software). Long
OOP, it's one of the better references.
I believe that the Option Board will copy Apple II diskettes, but won't deciper them.
Cheers,
Chuck
12:46 p.m.
On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Chuck Guzis wrote:
22Disk does not handle them. Internally here, we use
an early
Microsolutions Match Point card in an old PC XT with a special version
of Uniform to handle Apple II CP/M transfers. The Match Point also
comes with some tools to handle Apple DOS. The MP will not work in
anything much faster than an XT. I believe that there was another
product called "Blue Lightning" or some such to handle those diskettes,
but I've never run into one.
I had a board called "Blue Lightning", which was a Z80 board for PC.
Did the Quadlink and/or Trackstar 128 cable to Apple drives?
I did the filesystem software for "Apple Turnover" from Vertex.
I handled Apple-DOS, Pro-DOs, Apple][ CP/M, and Apple][ Pascal disks.
There are few, if any WORKING instances of that hardware.
(and it wasn't very happy about TEAC drives!)
If you're looking for a good no-nonsense book on
the innards of the IIe,
try to find Jim Sather's book "Understanding the Apple IIe" (Quality
Software). Long OOP, it's one of the better references.
and "Beneath Apple DOS" has a reasonable beginner's explanation of GCR
1:05 p.m.
On 10/8/2005 at 9:46 AM Fred Cisin wrote:
Did the Quadlink and/or Trackstar 128 cable to Apple
drives?
It's been so very long ago! I'll have to pull out one of my dogeared "PC
Tech Journal" product directories from back then and see what's mentioned. Those
PCTJ product guides are worth their weight in gold when trying to answer "what the
heck is this thing?" sorts of questions.
--Chuck
1:22 p.m.
An odd little story regarding the Match Point comes to mind. We'd tried to get hold
of one in the PC AT era, after Microsolutions had discontinued it. We were repeatedly
told by various people at Microsolutions that there were none left in stock and that they
weren't about to revive production on an item that was touchy about drives and finicky
about CPU speed.
Until we ran into someone who worked for the US Postal Service. He said that the USPS had
a contract with Microsolutions to furnish the cards and it was still in force. He gave us
the name of a contact within MS and a "tell them that Joe sent you" secret
message and we had a nice shrink-wrapped Match Point the next week.
Incidentally, the Backpack drives suffer from the same sort of "we don't want to
tell anyone about them" syndrome. Some years ago, we got a contract to supply a
major medical equipment services company with external drives that would read NEC
9801-type floppies and could be used with the laptop PCs that their field engineers
carried around with them. ISA cards were obviously out of the question and USB hadn't
been invented yet. We looked into the Rancho Technologies parallel-floppy card, but found
their technical support to be somewhere between bewildering and non-existent. So we
sourced a bunch of Backpack drives, replacing the 24 MHz crystal inside with a 20 MHz one
(it was cheaper than replacing the floppy with a 360 RPM model).
Microsolutions was absolutely immovable in their refusal to supply technical information,
so we reverse-engineered the thing and wrote our own driver. It's not a bad little
box--the National 8477 FDC (765 type) is directly programmable, so it can be used to read
and write a variety of formats.
Cheers,
Chuck
9 Oct
9 Oct
2:42 p.m.
On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Chuck Guzis wrote:
The big weakness in the Apple II disk was the lack of
really good error
checking. A simple one-byte arithmetic checksum was used in lieu of a
CRC and I've personally experienced corrupted data flying by without
being diagnosed.
This is over-stated quite grandly. The Apple ][ disk system was
extremely reliable. And it still is. My 20 year old disks still read and
write just fine.
If you're looking for a good no-nonsense book on
the innards of the IIe,
try to find Jim Sather's book "Understanding the Apple IIe" (Quality
Software). Long OOP, it's one of the better references.
It's a very hard book to find, but worth it if you do.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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5:23 p.m.
On 10/9/2005 at 11:42 AM Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
This is over-stated quite grandly. The Apple ][ disk
system was
extremely reliable. And it still is. My 20 year old disks still read and
write just fine.
Overstated or not, an 8 bit simple arithmetic checksum to guard 256 (actually 410) data
bytes is pretty weak.
To be completely fair, my experience was wth some fairly mangled Apple ][ diskettes.
Fortunately, they contained mainly ASCII text, so picking up errors "by eye" was
simple. The number of errors per diskette was very large, but when you're doing
data recovery, you've got what you've got. You read as much of the diskette as
possible and save the good sectors in one pile and try to whittle away the size of the bad
sector pile using various tricks in your toolkit.
On more than one occasion, not a hint of an error flag was raised when a bad sector was
read. I noted that the corrupted data had the same checksum as what the correct data
woiuld have had.
Let's face it, most diskettes, even those 20 years old would fare just fine with a
read-and-compare after write and NO checksum of any kind. It's that small minority
with errors that makes one nervous.
Cheers,
Chuck
10 Oct
10 Oct
4:35 a.m.
On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 10/9/2005 at 11:42 AM Vintage Computer Festival
wrote:
You'd have a point if it didn't work so well ;)
This is over-stated quite grandly. The Apple ][
disk system was
extremely reliable. And it still is. My 20 year old disks still read and
write just fine.
Overstated or not, an 8 bit simple arithmetic checksum to guard 256
(actually 410) data bytes is pretty weak. On more than one occasion, not a hint of an error flag
was raised when a
bad sector was read. I noted that the corrupted data had the same
checksum as what the correct data woiuld have had.
With only an 8-bit checksum it is entirely possible this can happen, but
in all my vast experience working on the Apple ][ I have never (knowingly)
come across this problem. When doing data recovery on Apple ][ disks, you
normally want to disable checksum checking anyway so that you can see what
the DOS is reading and then try to recover.
But as far as the Disk ][ controller and GCR encoding goes, don't equate
simple with shoddy: it is an extremely robust system.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
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8 Oct
8 Oct
12:55 p.m.
On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, jim stephens wrote:
I think the 3 1/2" disks might be easier to
recover data from, since it
might have been hooked
up thru a "real" floppy controller, rather than apples annoying 5 1/4
system.
That would have made sense. Therefore, NO.
The format from that controller was bizarre enough I
don't know if there
was any way
to read them on the IBM PC's disks.
It is, of course, "impossible".
But there are some amazingly ridiculous kludges, involving things such as
switching drive select in mid read! (sorry, no single drive Dells :-)
Maybe something like the copy 2
option board
might read the data and store it. does 22/disk read those?
The option board
hardware can do it, but Central Point actively did NOT
want third party software written for it.
Catweasel also can handle the hardware issue, but what software is
available?
There were half a dozen "flux-transition" boards that interrupted the
cable between FDC and drive.
9 Oct
9 Oct
2:46 p.m.
On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Fred Cisin wrote:
http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
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The format
from that controller was bizarre enough I don't know if there
was any way
to read them on the IBM PC's disks.
It is, of course, "impossible".
But there are some amazingly ridiculous kludges, involving things such as
switching drive select in mid read! (sorry, no single drive Dells :-) 
8 Oct
8 Oct
8:21 a.m.
Brent Hilpert wrote:
So I was listenting to a radio play (a police
investigation/drama) on the CBC
(Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) today in which the plot centred around recovering
data (the offshore bank account #, how cliche) from the dead guy's ancient
Apple II/e.
(The dead guy was apparently like a lot of people on this list: still used an
old machine for his main/daily computing ...just so you all know you're
actually getting portrayal in the popular arts :/ )
Well, that went by me OK, then they threw in the plot twist: the guy wasn't
using the standard OS, he was using an oddball system which was going to make
the data recovery more problematic, that system being CP/M. At this point my
pedantic-critic bells went off. So somebody either confirm my pedanticism or
show me up as the ignorant one: nobody ever bothered to rewrite CP/M (which to
my understanding was all targeted to Intel procs) for the Apple II did they?
... maybe the scriptwriting 'computing consultant' figured it would be a good
inside joke, ... maybe it's somebody on this list!
Actually, the CP/M card with a Zilog Z80 was not an uncommon Apple II
option.
There were a couple of vendors. Some cards had there own memory so you
could get a full CP/M system with the 64k
maximum memory
http://vintageware.orcon.net.nz/apple2/cpm.html shows one version of this.
9 Oct
9 Oct
3:05 a.m.
Actually, the CP/M card with a Zilog Z80 was not an
uncommon Apple II
option.
OK, it was a plausible plot line, and I'm the ignorant one. I never used either
the Apple II or CP/M to any great degree but I forgot that I actually have seen
those Apple II plug-in boards with Z80s on them .. should have recalled and put
2+2 (Z80->CPM) together.
8 Oct
8 Oct
11:45 a.m.
On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Brent Hilpert wrote:
show me up as the ignorant one: nobody ever bothered
to rewrite CP/M (which to
my understanding was all targeted to Intel procs) for the Apple II did they?
Microsoft "SoftCard".
Z80 co-processor card for Apple ][, bundled with CP/M.
At one point, there was a claim that 20% of Apple ]['s had one!
11:53 a.m.
Digital Research had one also, the CP/M Gold Card. 192K of memory, 4Mhz
Z80, etc.
--jc
Fred Cisin wrote:
On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Brent Hilpert wrote:
show me up as the ignorant one: nobody ever
bothered to rewrite CP/M (which to
my understanding was all targeted to Intel procs) for the Apple II did they?
Microsoft "SoftCard".
Z80 co-processor card for Apple ][, bundled with CP/M.
At one point, there was a claim that 20% of Apple ]['s had one!
10 Oct
10 Oct
9:08 a.m.
Am 8 Oct 2005 1:22 meinte Brent Hilpert:
So I was listenting to a radio play (a police
investigation/drama) on the CBC
(Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) today in which the plot centred around recovering
data (the offshore bank account #, how cliche) from the dead guy's ancient
Apple II/e.
(The dead guy was apparently like a lot of people on
this list: still used an
old machine for his main/daily computing ...just so you all know you're
actually getting portrayal in the popular arts :/ )
Well, that went by me OK, then they threw in the plot
twist: the guy wasn't
using the standard OS, he was using an oddball system which was going to make
the data recovery more problematic, that system being CP/M. At this point my
pedantic-critic bells went off. So somebody either confirm my pedanticism or
show me up as the ignorant one: nobody ever bothered to rewrite CP/M (which to
my understanding was all targeted to Intel procs) for the Apple II did they?
There was a little thingy called the Microsoft Soft Card. Basicly
a Z80 that did put the Apple in DMA-Mode and took over the system.
very crude and simple hardware, effective speed was somewhere arround
1.5 MHz, since after each Z80 instruction, the 6502 got one cycle to
refresh its registers. MS did sell the card in a package with CP/M
and Basic or Fortran.
Yeah, those where the good old days when using microsoft products
was cool - or at least o.k. from a geeks view.
The basic I/O was done via a switchback to the 6502.
... maybe the scriptwriting 'computing
consultant' figured it would be a good
inside joke, ... maybe it's somebody on this list!
Nope, it seams like a rare case where script writer did
realy use technology without screwing it up.
Gruss
H.
--
VCF Europa 7.0 am 29/30.April und 01.Mai 2006 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/
11:19 a.m.
On Mon, 10 Oct 2005, Hans Franke wrote:
Can Brent get the name of the play that he heard so we can figure out who
the author is? It sounds like they might even be a collector/historian ;)
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]
... maybe the
scriptwriting 'computing consultant' figured it would be a good
inside joke, ... maybe it's somebody on this list!
Nope, it seams like a rare case where script writer did
realy use technology without screwing it up.
11 Oct
11 Oct
4 p.m.
Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
On Mon, 10 Oct 2005, Hans Franke wrote:
Can Brent get the name of the play that he heard so we can figure out who
the author is? It sounds like they might even be a collector/historian ;)
The series was called "The Old Guy", I didn't catch the title of the
particular episode.
Some of the characters are Charlie (McMann?McCann), Malcolm and Joline.
Also, it was a replay, I recall hearing it first a couple (~ 1 to 3) years ago.
I tried searching the CBC web site for a reference or production credits & c.
but turned up nothing.
.. I thought the web site might be a good backup/reference for the broadcasts,
but apparently it's like the majority of (esp. corporate/commercial) web sites
out there: 95% fluff, useless graphics, filler & advertising, 5% content. Even
the "archives" seem to be a selection of material based on what
somebody-else-thinks-is-important.
<grumble>
... maybe
the scriptwriting 'computing consultant' figured it would be a good
inside joke, ... maybe it's somebody on this list!
Nope, it seams like a rare case where script writer did
realy use technology without screwing it up.
6865
days inactive
6868
days old
17 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
cclist＠sydex.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
Hans.Franke＠siemens.com -
hilpert＠cs.ubc.ca -
jcwren＠jcwren.com -
jwstephens＠msm.umr.edu -
pechter＠gmail.com -
vcf＠siconic.com