[rescue] 8 bit computer software

[Sheldon T. Hall]

"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <gsm at bfr.co.il> wrote

> I used to have (and probably sill do somewhere) have software that runs
> under dos on a PC to read CPM format disks. It read something like 80
> formats, but they were all 5 1/4 inch disks. How many of you out there
> still have 5 1/4" drives? Now, how many have them in a working computer?

Me! Me!  I've got that software, too.  Disk22 or something like that.  It's
probably still available on CompuServe.

> Things that it did not read were nonstandard floppies such as Apple II
> GCR (yes, I had a CP/M system that lived inside an Apple II clone),
> hardware sectored disks (a hole for each sector, instead of one index
> mark), and of course less common formats such as audio cassette tapes,
> Commodore Vic 20, C64, and C128, disks (although the CPM ones for the
> C128 where standard floppies) etc and of course "square frisbee's" (8"
> floppies).

I've got the doco for the Microsoft CP/M card for the Apple II, should
anyone need it.  It's one of the few bits of CP/M stuff that survived the
Great Purge when we moved from California.

Back in the CP/M era, I worked for Peachtree Software, and we published
stuff on many, many different disk formats.  All CP/M machine with 8" disks
could read the standard format, but their was no standard format for 5.25"
disks.  We made the disks on the "native" machines, and it seemed like every
one had a different method of getting the stuff transferred.  The
duplication department was a wilderness of ugly computers and 25-pin ribbon
cables.

> The CPM floopy reading programs did die out quickly however, as soon as
> it became common for those CPM systems that could read IBM floppies, to
> have programs to read them.
>
> The last few years I had a working CPM system, I was only able to get
> public domain software for it on PC format floppies.
>
> I also somewhere had (hopefully have) a copy of wordstar for the PC,
> which was a direct port of the CPM version.

If you don't, I have copies of Magic Wand, a/k/a PeachText, which, while not
being WYSIWYG, produces superior printed output, including microspace
insertion justification, proportional spacing, and kerning.  On daisy-wheel
printers.

Somewhere, I've also got a copy of the graphics add-on I wrote, so you could
put charts and stuff in your PeachText documents, and print 'em.  On
daisy-wheel printers.

> Intel at one time produced an 8080 -> 8088 assembly language translator.
> This version of Wordstar I had was created by running the source code
> through it and fixing enough bugs to get it to work. :-)

Please don't remind me.  My son's taking an assembler course, and just
looking at the op codes brings back many bad memories of the output of that
translator.

Even worse were the Sourcim ACT-80 and ACT-86 macro assemblers.  When we
(Peachtree) bought Supercalc from Sourcim, we got it in ACT-80 source, with
a copy of the ACT-86 translator-compiler and a copy of the compiled version
that worked under MS-DOS.  ACT-86 was _supposed_ to take the ACT-80 source
(for 8080 under CP/M) and produce 8086 object for MS-DOS.  In fact, it
produced crap.  We culd never get it to compile something that looked
anything like the already-compiled file we got.

Since we had a schedule to meet, we just took a copy of the compiled file
(which worked fine), fired up DEBUG, changed all occurrances of "Super" to
"Peach", and shipped that.

Bloody good thing those two strings were the same length.

-Shel