"Frank J. Wancho" <WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA> (01/08/85)
Bill Westfield and I were working on somewhat different versions of C sources to SQ for TOPS-20 use, using different compilers. My version, based on SQU-PORT.LBR, a "portable" version, uses the "MIT C" compiler and runtime package, and was completed shortly after Bill's announcement, with Eliot Moss' help. Although there are some significant differences in both versions - look for an announcement momentarily, both produce files with a byte size of 8. One difference is that my version produces files with the ITS Binary header. This caused a problem with MODEM only - the other CP/M-related programs for TOPS-20, such as USQ, handled this just fine. So, there is now a new version of MODEM (310) for TOPS-20 with reworked automatic file type determination code, and which now also happens to write ITS Binary files with a bytesize of 8 instead of the old 36. Source and a ready-to-run executable are in MICRO:<CPM.TOPS-20>MODEM.* here. For those of you wishing to try my version of SQ, you may FTP it from SYS: here. Sources are not quite ready for release yet. As Bill noted earlier, both versions of TOPS-20 SQ are capable of squeezing arbitrarily large TOPS-20 files (hopefully text files as both programs assume). Unfortunately, USQ/TYPESQ use file memory mapping techniques which limit the size of the files that can be handled. (At the time USQ/TYPESQ was written, it wasn't expected to handle but typically sized CP/M files.) There *may* be a version of USQ/TYPESQ available to handle such large files in the near future. In the meantime, be aware of the potential problem. --Frank