RCONN@Simtel20.ARPA (07/21/84)
From: Richard Conn <RCONN@Simtel20.ARPA> I had a long chat last night with Frank Gaude at Echelon, and a number of items came up which I thought might be of general interest. 1. Echelon will sponsor a ZCPR3 newsletter. It will be short at first, and it will appear as-needed. Its initial purpose is to answer the basic questions about ZCPR3 that keep coming up. Contact Echelon for details. 2. Echelon now has a temporary bulletin board up. It will be used until Echelon has time to bring up the full system. The bulletin board will provide, among other things, a method to access the newsletter, a forum thru which to direct questions and filter them thru to me if necessary, and status reports on the ZCPR3 System. Details on the book will appear there also as soon as they are known. FYI, the bulletion board is an Ampro Bookshelf computer with a 10M Winchester attached. (Or perhaps it is just the Little Board - my notes are not clear here - but it DOES have 10M with ZCPR3) The phone number is 408-258-8128. 3. ZCPR3 is up and running nicely on the Kaypro-10 now. Reports are coming in on a lot of different installations popping up, the latest of which includes the Osborne. 4. On Monday, 16 July, I sent the first draft of the ZCPR3 book to the publisher. This draft outlined all of the sections planned at that time for the book. The Table of Contents was 8 pages long, the text of the book was 380 pages long, and the Index was 10 pages long. I received a phone call from the publisher on Thursday, and his staff had gone over the book twice, finding no fault with it at all! They are running a full check for typos and misspellings now and giving it to some "technical types" in NYC who are going to double-check it for clarity of the technical material. They want more of the book as soon as possible, and I should have 2 more packages done and shipped to them this Monday. Again, you can contact Echelon or Zoetrope directly if you want more details. Release of the book is still set for 4th Quarter of this year. 5. Echelon expects to have a version of their ZCPR3 auto-install program ready this weekend for Beta Test. I should have it sometime next week. I must be clear on this: the Echelon ZCPR3 auto-install program is completely COMMERCIAL in nature. I am not involved in its development but I will assist on the Beta-Test. In my earlier mention of this product, I called it an auto-boot. I was wrong. It is an auto-INSTALL. With it, regardless if you know assembly language or have the source code to your BIOS, you can INSTALL ZCPR3 on your Z80-based CP/M 2.2 machine IN ANY DESIRED CONFIGURATION (full TPA, min TPA with RCPs and all of the other packages, etc). Frank claims that it will run on any machine (APPLE, OSBORNE, KAYPRO, etc), figure out how the system is put together, patch it as necessary, allow the user to select the features he wants, and build a complete ZCPR3 system image (ZCPR3 CP, etc) and system segments (RCPs, FCPs, IOPs, and ENVs) as the user selects. It creates the SYS.ENV file (which defines the ZCPR3 Environment Descriptor) so installation of whatever ZCPR3 utilities the user wants can be done via Z3INS. It almost sounds too good to be true, and I'll be able to say more after I begin testing it. Joe Wright, who did the software for it, is a BIOS expert in Silicon Valley (he did the Ampro BIOS), and I have a warm feeling about this since he really understands disk accessing for a variety of systems, and this is needed to make an auto-install work. More later. Contact Echelon for even more details. 6. ZCPR3 Phase 2 is coming along very nicely. Beta test goes to Echelon Monday. The Beta test will be on VFILER, VMENU, DU3, MU3, and a host of smaller support routines like SHSET and CMD. CMD is done for now, and the test capability is in place now. The "CMD;IF ERROR;WS;FI" sequence I was talking about in a previous message works nicely now. I decided on the ERROR message for the CMD return code. 7. I am starting to schedule talks on ZCPR3 now. I will be speaking at the Dallas CP/M UG soon (maybe Sept), North Texas State University at Denton, and the Air Force Institute of Technology at Dayton (Ohio) in November. Since I'll be in the area, perhaps side talks could be arranged if people are interested. Contact me directly or thru Echelon (maybe the BB?). 8. User's Guide will be doing an article on ZCPR3 for release soon (perhaps Sept). Several other articles are being planned by various people, and I'll be doing one or more for Microsystems "real soon now". A libraries article (on SYSLIB3, Z3LIB, and VLIB) is also being planned by me for Microsystems. 9. I was given a copy of a book entitled "The Free Software Handbook" by Platt, Hatcher, and Van Meter (1984-1985 CP/M Edition) the other day by Greg Platt, one of the authors. It is published by Peopletalk Associates, Inc, PO Box 863652, Plano, TX 75086 (cost is $17.95). I have scanned thru it a couple of times, and I really like it. It is well-written, and it is a collection of references for 70 programs which are free for CP/M-80. The authors went thru thousands of programs and picked out what they liked the best, installed them, used them, and then wrote their own documentation on them. I found that I missed several of the programs they mentioned, and I am duly inspired to go out and find them. They gave a brief overview of ZCPR2 (6 pages). In the back of the book is an order form to them so the reader can send in $50 and get a disk containing the programs (it didn't say if ZCPR2 was included). They also publish a newsletter ($20 for 4 issues a year). The book is written for the beginner, but the more experienced user may find it of value also. I really like it, which is why I mentioned it here. Well, that's all for now. Will stay in touch. Rick