OKI if800 CP/M

[Fred Cisin]

>> Ah, so it has, under both the BMC and the OKI names.  I was going to
>> try it with imgdisk and 22disk eventually, but I was in a KF
>> experimentation phase.
On Tue, 15 Mar 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> A plain old PC with legacy FDC will work just fine.
> A little mouse tickling my memory indicates that the IF800 was one of the 
> systems used by Gene Roddenberry.  I don't recall if it was BMC or OKI, 
> however.

It might be necessary to go slightly below INT13h.  I remember something 
weird about it, but can't remember what.  Maybe it had invalid head 
numbers on the second side?


In addition to the CP/M, the Oki if800 also existed with a version of 
Microsoft Stand-Alone BASIC; similar, but not a match for the NEC 8001.
Don't know how wide spread that was, the disks that I worked on were some 
that Lee Felsenstein brought back from Soviet Union.
I also once assisted Don Maslin with an NEC 9801 disk with the Stand-Alone 
BASIC format instead of either CP/M nor MS-DOS.
For those not familiar, it has a directory in the middle of the disk.  The 
directory consists of two parts, a linked list of clusters and a table of 
directory entries.  Each directory had filename (some were 6.2 instead of 
8.3), file size, and starting cluster number.  Radio Shack Coco is one 
such, and the MS-DOS directory was inspired by it.  Supposedly, Tim 
Paterson's company (Seattle Computer Products) shared a booth with 
Microsoft at NCC or the West Coast Computer Faire, and he liked the ideas 
behind the Stand-Alone BASIC directory structure.