Dick - I'd like a copy. -- Tony At 01:23 PM 9/26/2001 -0600, you wrote:

Have you figured out a good way to share the printed manual with those who might want it? I didn't have very good results with a scanner/OCR combo, though you may find it's easy enough to scan the thing and let folks download the scanned image. Let me know how you're handling this, plz. regards, Dick

On Wed, Sep 26, 2001 at 01:23:45PM -0600, Richard Erlacher wrote: I'm sure we would all enjoy hearing the history of this software (APEX, PAL65, XPL0, FOCAL, etc.) and of the people and computers involved. -- Derek

At 12:55 AM 27/09/2001 -0600, Richard Erlacher wrote: It's up now and the history can be found at http://6502group.org/HIST6502.HTM Some things in the history aren't quite right - a black PDP-10? Perhaps it was the special Stealth version :-) Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au | "If God had wanted soccer played in the | air, the sky would be painted green"

One other thing that was apparently incorrectly recorded in that history, is that the tape decks for which Wayne Wall wrote drivers to be used with his Digital Group system were not "phi-Decks" but rather were Lexitron digital cassette drives that we all got from California Digital back in '77-'78 and for which Wayne wrote some really cool driver code that used software timing and a couple of parallel port bits to drive the data and control lines. These held, on a C-60 audio cassette, about what an SSDD 5-1/4" floppy of the time held i.e. 256KB. He adapted Peter Boyle's FFS ( a single-drive Floppy DOS and precursor to APEX) into TFS, a tape file system. The tape file system was pretty amazing, though, like anything based on tape, it was dreadfully painful waiting through the tape latencies. Chuck Robertson, who was then a student at C.U. Boulder, and now is a senior VP at Mentor Graphics, modified the TFS code to support TWO of these digital cassette drives. I had built a box with a small motherboard and two drives in it and was happy to see the two-drive software up and running, but the one and only copy of it that existed because of everyone's limited resources, was destroyed in Wayne's office when Chuck was having Wayne check the executable code out. Nothing further was ever done with the Lexitron drives, AFAIK. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Huw Davies" <Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2001 1:43 AM Subject: Re: Ancient 6502 FOCAL source code

I don't remember any talk about Larry Fish and a Commodore of any sort. Nobody wanted to spend the money that was required for a PET, considering what it was. Larry's first 6502, IIRC, was JOLT, similar in some ways to a KIM-1, and most of his work prior to the Apple][ was on his Digital Group setup. Wayne Wall, Peter Boyle, and Larry Fish, among others, including Bob Ulshafer, Jack Cox, and Richard Ottosen, (who were more into the hardware than the others) all had Digital Group hardware. The reason the Digital Group didn't go further in the group than it did is because (a) they didn't get around to a working FDC, (b) though they took orders in '79 for a 32K SRAM card, based on the TMS4044, the boards weren't delivered until '81, by which time most of the group members had made other arrangements, and (c) the Apple became less costly, allowing more of the group members to standardize on that. Unfortunately, once all the "movers" had Apple]['s, nothing new was produced by the group on a cooperative basis. Everyone moved off in his own direction again, and, unfortunately, that's the way it's stayed since then. I quite going to meetings in '81, and have attended perhaps a dozen meetings since then, though I've kept in close touch with the "group-gropers" by phone and individual contacts. One of the newer (in 1978) group members, Tommy Billings, designed a board set that, if properly configured, could emulate the Digital Group memory map, and that's what I used. It became popular bcause the required enclosure was smaller than the larger-than-S-100 Digital Group box. I do believe I'm the only one who built additional boards, e.g FDC, HDC, etc for the Tommy-Billings board set, and I had my own sets of boards, identical to Tommy's, but made up with gold card-edge connectors and dry-film solder mask. My version of the backplane/extender card was made up in such a way that two or more could be plugged together, though I never used them that way, and my wire-wrap card was completely filled with plated-through holes in a colander ground-plane on the wiring side and a power (Vcc) plane on the component side. Tommy and I were the ones doing system hardware development back then, while Wayne Wall, Larry Fish, Peter Boyle, and Loren Blaney were the main movers and shakers in the software area. Unfortunately, once the latter group got their Apple]['s nothing new came out of the group, since one could buy for the Apple][ what otherwise would have had to be built for the DG and our homebrew systems. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Cameron Kaiser" <spectre(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2001 7:20 AM Subject: Re: Ancient 6502 FOCAL source code still http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Brauer ----

Richard Erlacher skrev: Why, what's PAL65? -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.

There's a little information that might help shed light on this matter in the "history" written by Larry Fish on www.6502group.org if you care to read it. I've been uninvolved in the activities of this venerable group for over a decade, thouth I've maintained contact with certain individuals and thereby kept aware of the activities. Their website, so far, does not contain any links to any of this old software, and, at the moment nobody knows where it's stored. Nobody seems to care enough to find out about it, so I've been going around p*ssing people off by asking what happened to the files that Larry Fish provided for the purpose of putting it on the site. He has, of course, cleared it off his own site, since it is of limited interest by now. It's possible that through the lack of interest of some, and the lack of consideration of some others, this fairly significant work product of the '70's may be lost to the general public. There are, IIRC, a very few copies of of the pre-APEX software still in existence on microfiche, though I don't personally own them, and there are a few copies on listings, of which I had all, have most, though not all are in useable condition. The output of this very active group in the '70's, which was when I was actively involved, seemed to stop abruptly in about1981, by which time the key players, i.e. Wall, Fish, Boyle, and Blaney, all had Apple]['s. So long as there was one or more of these fellows using their old Digital Group boxes, they were busy making tools to support that architecture and that took up a large share of their time. By the time they had their Apple]['s, they no longer generated code that wouldn't run on the Apple][, so that meant everything had to be Apple][-compatible, and the rise of APEX made the boundary between the Apple][ and the Digital Group systems disappear. Once they were able to share their work product reliably (as reliably as Apple][ diskettes would allow) they were able to interact in smaller groups and the need for discussions and projects in the context of the larger group were no longer beneficial, though they were entertaining. This meant that they were all able to do their work without the general involvement of the group at large, so that's when new software stopped flowing from the fountain. AFAIK, there was nothing ever done in the 6502group that involved the various products from Commodore, Synertek, or Rockwell, with the exception of the few things done early-on to support one or two group members' KIMs, and that stopped once the interest in FDD's began to increase. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Iggy Drougge" <optimus(a)canit.se> To: "Richard Erlacher" <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2001 7:00 AM Subject: Re: Ancient 6502 FOCAL source code