glennw (08/20/82)
>From uucps Thu Aug 19 03:22:34 1982 >From uucps Thu Aug 19 03:13:48 1982 remote from mhuxa >From uucp Thu Aug 19 03:02:30 1982 remote from mhuxt >From uucp Thu Aug 19 02:54:40 1982 remote from eagle >From floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!vicki Thu Aug 19 02:44:10 1982 remote from harpo Date: Wed Aug 18 23:30:26 1982 To: philabs!cmcl2!floyd!harpo!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxa!mhuxh!glennw From: INFO-PC <INFO-PC at USC-ISIB> Subject: Info-PC Digest V1 #4 To: Info-PC: ; Info-PC Digest Sunday, 8 August 1982 Volume 1 : Issue 4 Today's Topics: Amdek 300 PCFTP and VT52.BAS (2 msgs) Tall Tree Review Format of .EXE Files (2 msgs) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 6 Aug 1982 0900-PDT From: Randy Cole <COLE at USC-ISIB> Subject: Amdek 300 To: Info-PC I bought my Amdek 300 12" green phosphor monitor for $137 plus tax from Bison Products, Inc., P.O. Box 9078-184, Van Nuys, CA 91409. Their store is at 16709 Roscoe Blvd., Sepulveda, CA 91343. See the August issue of BYTE, page 187, for their ad. I also bought a AST combo (64K memory, expandable to 256K, plus IBM-compatible RS-232 and printer ports) for $335 plus tax from Bison. I am very pleased with it and the $335 seems to be about the lowest price around for a combo card. The same card is selling for $135 to $220 more elsewhere. Randy Cole (Cole@ISIB) ------------------------------ Date: 7 August 1982 1707-edt From: Brian N. Hess <Hess.Unicorn at MIT-MULTICS> Subject: PCFTP and VT52.BAS To: info-pc at ISIB The VT52.BAS program can't be used to download files at 1200 baud. This is not a fault of the author's; it's just that if you are running the IBM RS232 interrupt handlers and then you turn the disk drive on, some of the incoming characters are lost. So if you want to download, use 300 baud instead -- it works O.K. Also, there seems to be something which it is not emulating correctly. Of course, it's only Multics Emacs with it's timed-to-the microsecond, optimized-to-the-character cursor and text movement sequences that shows it up, but... Will fix or report it when I track it down. On to looking at Multics Emacs CTL's... Brian P.S. Of course, ESC A, ESC B, ESC C, and ESC D don't work. ------------------------------ Date: 8 Aug 1982 2016-PDT From: Dick Gillmann <GILLMANN at USC-ECL> Subject: Re: PCFTP and VT52.BAS To: Hess.Unicorn at MIT-MULTICS, INFO-PC I haven't noticed the download problem you mention. I have downloaded files using this program several times without trouble. Is your RS-232 card next to your diskette controller card? Perhaps they are interfering with each other. I went out and bought the IBM Asynchronous Communication Support package back in March when I got my PC. What a burn! The IBM terminal emulator will only talk to TSO, CMS or other PCs. And it's just a glass TTY. And it runs real slow. I spent a day writing VT52.BAS in Basic using the RS232INT machine language module that comes with the IBM package. As you might imagine, executing screen commands in Basic is very slow. Also, the RS232INT package does obnoxious things like using a whole bunch of RS-232 lines it doesn't really need, which requires you to buy an expensive cable or trick up a cheap one. So I gave up on it and wrote a real terminal emulator in assembly language. I've noticed that EMACS does bad things to PC terminal emulators, like causing framing errors when it rewrites the mode line. I'm completely mystified as to how it can cause communication errors (assuming it uses the normal TOPS-20 JSYSes). /Dick ------------------------------ Date: 8 Aug 1982 1318-PDT From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE at USC-ISIB> Subject: Tall Tree Review To: INFO-PC I wrote the following review for a local IBM-PC users group. Dick has asked me to send it along to INFO-PC. Tall Tree 512K Jram card & Quad Disk Modification Tall Tree Systems makes a software package to modify PC-DOS to use quad disk drives. The terminology here is a little strange. First, all current disks are double density. I guess single density disks must have gone out of style long before I became interested in personal computers. The standard drives supported by IBM are all manufactured by Tandon and have 40 tracks per side. With 4K bytes of usable information per track, each diskette surface holds a total of 160K bytes. Double sided disks can hold a total of 320K bytes. Tandon also makes drives which can write 80 tracks per side. One of these drives will store 640K bytes and is called a quad drive as it holds four times the information of the standard IBM drive. These drives plug right into the PC and look identical to the standard drives. The following table illustrates the various disks one can use on an IBM PC. Drive #Sides Tracks/side Total capacity Remarks TM100-1 1 40 160K Standard DOS 1.0 drive TM100-2 2 40 320K Supported by DOS 1.1 TM100-3 1 80 320K TM100-4 2 80 640K Supported by Tall Tree My system consists of a Tandon TM100-2 as my "A" drive and a Tandon TM100-4 as my "B" drive. I paid $306 and $405 plus tax for the two drives from Priority 1 in Chatsworth. I have since seen cheaper prices. If I run standard DOS 1.1 on my system, it will behave as though I have two 320K byte drives. DOS will use all the available space on the "A" drive and the first 40 tracks on both sides of my "B" drive. The diskettes are NOT interchangeable, but I used such a system for a few weeks while waiting for the Tall Tree software to arrive. Tall Tree supplies two programs, JFORMAT and JEL. JFORMAT replaces the FORMAT program in DOS. JEL is a program to reconfigure the system. For example JEL will allow the user to mount a single sided 40 track diskette (as written on a TM100-1) on a quad drive (TM100-4). One can then read and write that disk just as if it was the standard IBM 160K drive. How does this all work? I don't know, but I suspect the program simulates a 40 track drive on an 80 track drive by writing a track then skipping a track etc... This is a somewhat dangerous proposition. Tall Tree guarantees that you will be able to read and write 40 track disks, but they warn that not all 40 track drives may be able read disks written by 80 track drives as the tracks are narrower and the drive will be more sensitive to errors in alignment. There may be yet another problem with protected programs. I don't know how these disks will perform with stand alone bootable systems that read the disk without the help of DOS. Frankly I couldn't care less about this issue. I have no intention of purchasing any software that can't be copied to a Winchester disk. The current crop of copy protected products will not run on a Winchester system. This shouldn't be too much of a problem if you keep one of the standard IBM supported drives as your "A" drive. I have also purchased Tall Tree's JRAM card which contains 512K of RAM. This memory can be used as main memory available to DOS or made to look like an extra disk drive. I typically give DOS an extra 128K of memory (for a total of 192K) and use the rest to simulate a third or "C" disk drive. The first question that comes to mind is: Is 512K really twice as good as 256K. For me the answer has definitely been Yes. I do most of my work using the macro assembler which is a terrible memory hog and slow enough without waiting around for floppy disks. I usually use my "C" disk as the system disk. With the macro assembler, linker, editor, and working copies of my programs and listings, the disk fills up pretty quickly. I have ordered FORTRAN and my memory needs are growing. The two passes of FORTRAN and library alone take up more than 256K. Pascal takes up 336K. It is in this area of expandability that the Jram board really shines. Up to four JRAM boards can be used on a single system, resulting in 2M bytes of memory. Each 512K byte board uses one system slot. You might ask how this is possible when the 8088 only supports 20 bits of addressing and and not all of that can be devoted to real user memory. The Jram board has special hardware to allow it to change its apparent address on the bus. The mechanism is quite simple but beyond the scope of this review. In short it allows the use of gobs and gobs of memory. Right now more memory is beyond my pocketbook's reach but memory chips are only getting cheaper, and I look forward to the day when I can afford to have a few megabytes sitting on my desk. I have not done any extensive benchmarks, but I have made one informal test. I use a batch file to assemble and link a program I am developing. If I run this application using a combination of my two disk drives it takes 3 minutes 24 seconds. If I run the same file using the electronic disk it takes just under two minutes. I expect this gap will widen as my programs grow in size. I can not recommend the JRAM board to users who tend to use packaged programs and BASIC for program development. Neither of these applications do extensive disk I/O or require huge amounts of memory. The board is pretty expensive and these users would probably be better off getting one of the multi-function boards that includes a calendar clock and I/O ports. If one is doing program development with the macro assembler, FORTRAN, Pascal, or perhaps the new BASIC compiler, the JRAM board will save a lot of wear and tear on your disks and your nerves. The JRAM board retails for $1200 or $2000 for two boards. The JFORMAT JEL diskette with DOS modifications to support the electronic disk and quad drives sells for $50. A diskette is included when you buy the JRAM card. Tall Tree Systems 1036 Los Altos Avenue Los Altos, CA 94022 (415)941-8748 Since I wrote this review there have been several new developments: First Tall Tree has released a print spooler as part of their software package. I don't have a printer so I can't give any first hand information on how the spooler performs. I am told they are also working on an operating system modification to write 9 sectors per diskette track rather than IBM's standard 8 sectors. John Henderson of Tall Tree informs me that this modification will be transparent to the operating system, and that the drives will auto sense which type of diskette is currently mounted. This modification will provide an extra 512 bytes per track or 20K bytes per side on a 40 track drive or 40K bytes per side on an 80 track drive. This will bring the total capacity of a TM100-4 up to 720K bytes. ------------------------------ Date: 8 Aug 1982 1451-PDT Subject: Format of .EXE files... From: William "Chops" Westfield <BillW@SRI-KL> To: Info-PC at ISIB Can someone explain the format of MSDOS .EXE files ? I want to have a program that is both BLOADable from basic, and executeable from DOS. (or, is there a quicker way of reading a .COM file (other than input$, poke. (which fails if there is a ^Z in the file someplace, BTW.)) Thanks Bill W ------------------------------ Date: 8 Aug 1982 2024-PDT From: Dick Gillmann Subject: Re: format of .EXE files... Sender: INFO-PC at USC-ISIB To: BillW at SRI-KL, info-pc The format of .EXE files is explained in Appendix F of the DOS 1.1 manual. It's not in the DOS 1.0 manual. Can someone explain the format of .OBJ files? I'd like to write a compiler that doesn't require running the assembler, too. /Dick ------------------------------ End of Info-PC Digest ********************* -------