Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 22:12:50 -0700 There you go, needlessly trashing N*'s again! You must have been bitten by a hard-sectored disk when you were small. NorthStar responded when hobbyists who couldn't afford 8" drives wanted a disk drive for their Imsai's and Altairs. They were VERY popular and well supported. Their boards and systems were well done and reliable. They even provided a hardware floating point board for number crunchers long before other vendors. NorthStar's own DOS and BASIC were probably initially brought up on more Altairs and Imsai's than CP/M was as a first OS. It was a very usable BASIC with BCD arithmetic and cleaner random access file handling than Microsoft BASIC ever had. Sure, CP/M became THE OS of the day, but N* DOS was there first. The Horizon supported CP/M 1.4 and later 2.2 was distributed by NorthStar. And take a look at Walnut Creek's CP/M CD-ROM - just figure out the percentage of the CD-ROM that concerns itself with NorthStar, CP/M or otherwise, and compare it with the support for other computers which supported an OS other than CP/M. It will never have a decent-sized TPA thanks to the Pure nonsense! Even without moving the boot-prom, (an option supported by NorthStar or a simple mod for users of the day which would give you a 62k CP/M system), NorthStar's and Lifeboat's and SAIL Systems's CP/M would give you a 56k or 58k system with the standard boot ROM. I NEVER found a CP/M program I couldn't run in 56k, and I ran ALL the popular CP/M programs - dBASE, WordStar, BDS C, SuperCalc, FORTRAN, various Pascals (including N*'s own version of UCSD Pascal, though not under CP/M), SpellGuard, etc. and it will never read soft sectored diskettes Never had any problems - just perceived that way by folks too rigid to take other than the soft-sectored path! And NorthStar was popular enough that when George Morrow designed his DJ-DMA controller, he supplied a BIOS for it that could read and write both N*'s hard-sectored format as well as other soft-sector formats. That was the main reason I got a Morrow Decision I. It wasn't until late in the CP/M game that utilities began to appear for reading other manufacturer's formats. I added a Morrow Disk Jockey 2 board to add my 8" drives to my Horizon in order to transfer the standard SSSD 8" CP/M formatted disks - the ONLY standard for CP/M. Even soft-sectored 5" formats were specific to their manufacturer. since I am glad he did well, too, despite your advice. (hi, Tom!) You can see from the pictures that he does Bob Stek Saver of Lost Sols