ARPAVAX:C70:info-cpm (09/10/82)
>From UCBARPA:dag Fri Sep 10 00:36:06 1982
Received: from UCBARPA.BERKELEY.ARPA by UCBVAX.BERKELEY.ARPA (3.196 [9/8/82]) id a11659;
9-Sep-82 18:09:07-PDT (Thu)
To: Jeffrey at Office-2, info-cpm at BRL
Cc: jeffrey at Office-2
Via: Ucb-C70; 9 Sep 82 23:07-EDT
Via: Brl; 9 Sep 82 23:15-EDT
Via: Brl-Bmd; 9 Sep 82 23:29-EDT
I think that the idea of building a print spooler is not
necessarily the most expedient thing in the world. If
you've got the money, and the time for a toy project, though,
it might be fun.
Have you tried the public domain UNSPOOL program available somewhere
in MC:CPM;? IT is a rather nice unspooler I have seen working
on other systems. It does, however require something unusual in
the LSTSTAT bios call. I have tried it with my LSTSTAT on the
Morrow system with no luck at all (and the LSTSTAT works.)
Good luck with it. I would play with UNSPOOL first.
David
DAG at UCB-ARPA
PS: has anyone got unspool up with a lststat...could you send
me a copy of your lstat code?burris (10/08/82)
#R:ucb:-192800:ihlpb:2800004: 0:1552 ihlpb!burris Oct 8 1:20:00 1982 I don't believe that you will find a dual-CPU board that allows both processors to run simultaneously. They would have to share the same data and address busses and bus arbitration would be very difficult. This is further complicated if the processors are attempting to share the same memory. In this case, both processors would be slowed to at least 1/2 of it operating speed. This problem becomes easier to solve if each processor has its own private memory and only shares the system busses for I/O. Essentially, the processors would share the busses on a priority basis. One of the processors would always have control while the other would have use of the busses whenever the first did not need it. I would suggest that you write a device spooler for ALL of your I/O devices and convert ALL of your I/O to interupt driven instead the current wait loop type protocol used by CP/M. I have considered doing this on my system so that I can spool files for downloading to UNIX while I still have some processing power. I have yet to begin to implement this but I have a several ideas. On my North Star I have 4K of memory above my disk controller which CP/M doesn't know about. This would be the perfect place for the interupt software to reside. Give it some thought and if you end up implementing this idea let me know how it works out. Unfortunately, this has not been a high priority item and I have devoted no real time to accomplishing this. Perhaps this would be a sellable item! Any comments? Dave Burris ihlpb!burris BTL - Naperville