mel@pegasus.UUCP (Mel Haas) (05/08/84)
To practice what I preach - here is a short review of a Morrow MD3 I just acquired. (I had a DEC Rainbow 100 for a year until I changed companys last November - you may remember my reviews of that.) The Morrow is a bit hard to get. They don't have many dealers. Call their 800 number and get a list, all far away, and start calling. I got a MD3 without terminal, $1499 list, 4MHz Z-80, 64K RAM, 2 DSDD floppies (384K user space each), 2 serial ports, 1 parallel port, NewWord, Correct-it, LogiCalc, MBASIC, Personal Pearl, Pilot, Quest Bookkeeper, & CP/M 2.2 all in the one package. The unit is quite small (16.5"w x 12"d w/plugs x 5.5"h), easily fits on the corner of your desk. Has a sturdy metal case with a flat top that can support a printer or terminal. The unit has no fan and is dead quiet unless the disks are reading or writing, and those are quiet, too. Nothing gets hot or even warm, except strangely, the floppy disks themselves are warm when you pull them out even when they have not been spinning. Everything worked right out of the box just exactly as described in the manuals. No surprises of any sort, no mad scrambles back to the manuals, no calls needed to the company. The manuals are all well done, particularly for a novice. I have it right next to a FM set and on the same circuit with a TV and notice no interference (but, the Concept terminal frazzes some FM stations). The serial port to the terminal comes setup at 9600 baud with ^S/^S flow control (well thought out, no zoom-off-the-screen, no scramble to find that damn ^Q). It took a lot of doing to get it to work with my beloved Concept 108 terminal, but most normal terminals are included in the setup menu. The serial port to the printer/modem has a "gotcha" in that the 12 and 5 volt power is brought out on it. Connect it wrong and you get smoke (this is clearly shown in the manual, as are scores of jumper options for various situations). I bypassed all this in connecting to the 212 UDS modem by wireing up a M to F cable with the following 6 wires: 1 - 1 , 2 - 3 , 3 - 2 , 7 - 7 , 8 - 20 , 20 - 8. The parallel port uses a standard Radio Shack 26-4401 printer cable (not supplied) with the ribbon side down. The following 12 liner keyed into DDT gives a terminal pass-through (use ^Z to get back to CP/M, it doesn't hangup on you): lxi sp,0150 call f320 jz 0113 call f332 cpi 01a jz 0 out 0fe call f4d4 jz 0103 mov c,a call f482 jmp 0103 The CP/M release disk comes with all the CP/M goodies (including the disk formatting program - are you listening DEC?) and the complete heavily commented BIOS and BOOT source. Now that is thoughtfulness to be commended. There is a program to change the disk read and write parameters to emulate the disk units of several other CP/M systems. Thus you can read and write IBM PC (CP/M only), Osborne, & Xerox disks. The BIOS has a neat feature for allowing disks C, D, & E to be addressed even though there are only A & B physical disk units. The BIOS handles the operator messages to change disks in the A unit, the running program doesn't know anything about it. This is very, very handy with text editing where you want to save out something to another disk, or read in something; for spreadsheet work the same way; and for just copying things on and off different disks. I don't see why this hasn't caught on as the standard way to handle floppies. I can't think of a single thing to gripe about the hardware, manuals, or the system software. It all runs very well indeed with lots of thoughtful extras to make things easier. The NewWord text preparation program is an exact copy of a subset of WordStar. It works exactly as documented, is very fast, and well thought out. However, I would prefer full WordStar. The only missing feature I have run into so far is the "print to a file" capability, but I sorely need that to interchange text easily with UNIX (that hates those 8th bit thingies). As a long term emacs, and a sometimes vi, user - let me state that WordStar and NewWord are a hundred time easier to use and have more useful capability - if WordStar were available on DEC-20 and UNIX, emacs and vi (and nroff) would join BAL, AutoCoder, FAP, ALGOL and the other guru'isms of the past. The LogiCalc is a good-enough Visi-Clone, but I got SuperCalc 2 which is much better (SuperCalc 2 has date handling functions for scheduleing and project planning uses). Quest is super; now if only I had my own business to do bookkeeping for. MBASIC is the regular MBASIC - it runs all the games from RBBSs I tried it on (JETSET2 is the most fun). Personal Pearl has too thick a manual for me to get into, and the cursor keys are yet a different set - phooy! Correct-It is dumb. The authors couldn't have possibly ever used it themselves, and neither could the Morrow people. It natters at you constantly about menu selections nobody in their right mind would ever use, demands you type in the same correction over and over if you misspell something more than once, and then always asks you at the end for the name of your dictionary file - which of course has some inane name that you couldn't possibly remember, and if you don't cough it up the program promptly forgets all your new words - dumb! The only sour note in the package. PILOT is OK, perfect for the menu front-end Morrow supplies; and really good for creating CAI scripts. The menu front-end is really handy for doing the initial setup. Much better than going through a printed checklist. It only takes a ^C to escape from, so it doesn't get in the way at all (unlike the menu stuff on the FORTUNE and 3B2). All in all, I like the Morrow. I use it for SuperCalc and NewWord mostly, and it does these both with adequate speed and competence. It took all of an hour to get the terminal pass-through, MBOOT, and MODEM up an running; thanks to the BIOS source and experience with DDT, SAVE, and PIP. My impression is that it is faster and easier to use than the IBM PC and Rainbow - it sure is more pleasent to use (I love this Concept keyboard). (strictly the personal opinions of) Mel Haas , houxe!mel