hp2K and interex

[J. David Bryan]

On Friday, December 5, 2014 at 15:29, Jay West wrote:

> BAS200 - HP 2000F BASIC FOR DOS-M/DOS III
> 
> 2001 X172Keywords: 99.5- 10 BASIC
> 
> So Hp2000/F was ported to DOS-M/DOS III? Wowsers.

"Bowser" would be more accurate.  ;-)

Our small manufacturing company struggled in vain to use this program on 
DOS-III for a year back in 1975.  The problem was that the virtual file 
system that it used was buggy, and periodically certain files (e.g., user 
program source files, our payroll data file, etc.) would be corrupted and 
lost.  After reentering programs from listings for about the fourth time, 
we gave up and bought RTE and RTE BASIC (HP 92101A).

(Rather than use native DOS-III files, this BASIC created a virtual TSB 
file system within a single DOS-III binary data file.  So there was no DOS 
way to copy or back up individual BASIC files -- all you could do was back 
up the entire blob, but then you couldn't tell if a corruption had occurred 
until you attempted to run a BASIC program that used the virtual file in 
question.  The failures appeared at random, and we never isolated or were 
able to reproduce failures on demand, which was very, very aggravating.)

                                      -- Dave