BARD@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bard Bloom) (06/25/86)
They are marginally compatible. It is possible for a program written
carefully for one to work on the other. That's about it. They don't
have the same keyboard sequences (or anything remotely similar), the
same size screen, the same format floppies, etc.
Rainbows can read single-sided /9-format IBM disks. There is a program
floating around (I can hunt up a copy if you want) that formats a MSDOS
disk that a Rainbow can write and an IBM can read. In both cases, if the
wrong computer writes on the disk, the disk dies horribly.
There is rumored to be a gizmo that kind of converts the Rainbow into
a Rainbow+IBM. I can't remember much about it, though.
If you want more details, I can try to give some. I've written programs that
had to do fullscreen stuff on both Rainbow and Ibm, for example.
Regards,
Bard Bloom
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