Nat Semi 32016 Genix backup floppies available

[Jon Elson]

As I may have mentioned a while back, I have dug out my 
backup floppy disks from my National Semiconductor Genix 
system.  In 1984 or so, I built a clone of a Logical 
Microcomputer 32016 system and copied the OS.  I used it for 
a while, but it was maddeningly slow. This system used a 
Multibus backplane and a Konan Taisho disk controller, that 
could handle MFM floppies and hard drives.  This backup is 
from my copy of the system, and so has a few tidbits of 
mildly interesting stuff.  One thing is I was helping Steve 
Ciarcia of Circuit Cellar magazine answer his mail, and as 
this was my only system with 5" floppies, I used it for 
that.  So, this backup probably has some rather amusing 
replies to the totally INSANE questions he got.  One of my 
favorites was "Steve, can you jot down on the back of an 
envelope the schematic for an IBM PC so I can hand wire 
it?"  I also wrote a VERY BAD driver for a Versatec printer. 
It worked, but was insanely inefficient in graphics mode, 
and took a half hour per page to print.  Worked fine in text 
mode, though.

I don't remember what compilers we had on this, obviously C, 
and maybe Pascal and FORTRAN.

Since it worked fine to read and write PC compatible 
floppies, the floppy format should be easy to read.  But, I 
think this "backup" is a block by block dump of the file 
system.  Notes on the floppies show :
cp dc(0,0) on the first,
cp dc(0,800) on the second, etc.

So, if anyone wants to try to recover the files off this, 
I'd be glad to donate the set.  It appears to be 2 boxes of 
floppies, 28 in total.  I have some more floppies that seem 
to be the last half of an earlier backup, with less info on 
how it was written.

Thanks,

Jon