From: Richard Erlacher <edick(a)idcomm.com> stupid, hard-sectoring, Your applying 2001 logic to a design that was complete in 1976. In 1976 do you think you could do better and cheaper? If you say yes remember I have icom fdos and also worked with TRS80 and NONE in 1977 had anything near that for the same or similar bucks. average of wanted Never prevented me from running ANY of them with a 56k tpa. Most ran well in 48k. The only one that wanted a larger TPA then 48k was SMALLC V2 compiler as the optimizer wanted more space. Lessee by 1981 64k of ram was still around $499 for dynamic and static was about $600 so there were people that weren't into the must have a full box to do things. memory No they would later support and implement CPM. They also had in 1978 UCSD Psystem with Pascal for $50 (bargan in my eyes). NSDOS was a far lower cost (both in footprint and $$$) OS than cpm and unlike cp/m came with a decent interpreted disk basic. The closest thing to that cost 150$ for CP/M and $$350 the support in They didn't have to support it and for many that was not a requirement. load TPA was the space BELOW THE BIOS and E7FFh is 59k into a possible 64k! BIOS. compilers were Your saying I didn't run MS basic-80 compiler, smallc, TurboPascal, BDS-C Cbasic, Multiplan, Dbase then? Oh thats right it was not doable. Most of that stuff only wanted 48k though it ran well on my 56k system. but all controller. Prior to about 1982 that was not only not an issue it was irrelevent. Back in that era running softsector was often not much help as everyone ran something different format wise. with was Thats your fault not the system. Like I said I was running 56-58k TPA off an unmodded copy of LIFEBOAT CP/MV1.4. When I moved to using 2.2 I put the bios above the controller for a very nice 59k TPA with hard disk support. I'll agree that putting the FDC at F800 (NS offered roms for that, I have them) would have been more convenient but E800 was not a significant handicap. Actually if you wanted to burn your own roms it was easy to do. The media problem in the early 80s was not so much standard media but the idea there was even such a thing. That would persist until PCs wiped evrything else out now we only had 360k, 1.2m, 720k, 1.44, ZIP disk and Cdrom to confuse the issue. 3740-formatted Well, since I have the NS horizon I built in 1978 I dont need to remember. I know! Yes, 8" SSSD was the standard save for it was expensive, large, noisy, hot and only gave you 256k. I know, I supported it and still do. An SA801 and controller was easily $400 more expensive in late 76! Even if you had softsector 5.25" that didn't mean you did support 8" though many could. In 1977 NS* it allowed people with on 16 or 32k to run Basic and a disk OS which was a mostly useless config for CP/M. Then again in 1977(late) 32k of ram was around $800(kit, 900-1000 assembled and tested). I still have a Intergrand dual 8" full height box. it's loud, noisy and nearly as big as the S100 crate above it. I also have a HZ-207 box with two 1/2 height 8" 2sided DC motor drives and it's still big and weighs a ton. Here we go again. if opinion doesnt work then attack the spelling. Sorry, just like your editor doesnt support clipping off unwanted text mine does not support a decent spell checker (if there were one for PCs). Good support is: few of the historical systems are as to easy to find docs, software and working hardware for. Also if the hardware doesnt work it's easy to repair with common ttl. It's one of the few configs that exists 20 years later as can be made to work easily. Allison