How to read Osborne 1 Floppies?

[Fred Cisin]

On Thu, 27 May 2021, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> Viruses?  On CP/M-80 disks?  When Don and I were exchanging samples, I
> was unaware of such stuff.
> Someone want to enlighten me on Z80/8080 viruses on CP/M floppies?
> (FWIW, I do differentiate "virus" from "malware")

There were also some MS-DOS disks, and MS-DSOS files.
There could even have been some viral MS-DOS boot sector images that 
wrote to first sector of some non-MS-DOS disks.
And, there were probably also some false hits.


> Since I'm in Oregon, I'd be happy to extract the files from your images,
> if you can get them to image form.

And, now you have a perfect solution!
Chuck can do it, better than anybody else.

As I said, Teledisk and Imagedisk won't do the file transfers, but CAN be 
an intermediate step, in this case making it possible to get images of the 
disks to Chuck for him to do the transfers.

> My recollection was that back in
> 1986, when I wrote 22Disk, O1 floppies were among the first samples I
> received (after A1 format, anyway.

In 1981, when the Osborne 1 came out, I got some sample disks from it. 
So, other than TRS80s, which I had, those were also the first samples that 
I worked with.  I manually, a sector at a time, copied some files from 
those Osborne 1 disks using Superzap on TRS80.  THAT was the preliminary 
success that convinced me that it could be done, and gave the the impetus 
and confidence to write XenoCopy, in the next few years, after the 5150 
came out.  (5150 came out August 11, 1981, but it took me 5 months to get 
one)   BUT, the 5150 couldn't do FM Single Density, so the PC-DOS version 
of XenoCopy didn't get an Osborne format until the MFM Double Density 
upgrade for the Osborne 1 came out.


--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com