Anthony Anson wrote:
The message 200404140850.53379.ALUGlist@digimatic.plus.com from Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.plus.com contains these words:
On Tuesday 13 April 2004 20:59, Anthony Anson wrote:
I have CP/M but the box it lives in is borked ATM
ooooh, what sort of box is it. I have a Reasearch Machines 380Z sitting in my parents garage, booted last time I dug it out, got all the floppies somewhere safe. It had been built up to a 480Z with bits and bobs laying around my old schools IT department. Double sideded Drives, Colour Graphics card etc...
Sorry to disappoint you but it's an Amstrad PCW 8512, but it does have a 3½" floppy drive as well as the 3" one, and has been added to so that it has a proper parallel port and an inkjet printer and (take a deep breath) a modem.
Also somewhere I have another CP/M machine built around a more standard bus (STE bus perhaps, not sure now but it was something quite generic) But that had a dud disk controller last time I tried to fire it up.
In short if you need help trying to resurrect your old CP/M machine, or want me to rumage though the 2nd machine I have for spares then let me know. The RM machine will be naff all use to you unless you needed drives or yours was a RM, they used a funny bus and "sometimes" a funny subset of CP/M.
I think the only promble is a borked elastic band on the 3" floopy drive, and I can get those. well, I did have the address but come to think of it, the drive it was written on stopped going round.
The reason I kept two of the Amstrads is that I have about forty CF2 discs to transcribe, the offer of a Locolink (if only I could remember who offered it!) and a set of Locoscript Professional floppies (for DOS).
I had the (silly) idea that if I transferred the stuff from the 3" discs to 3½" ones (I still have some old double density ones) I could run a CP/M emulator on the PC and sneak the stuff in that way.
But no: I might have guessed. Disc format not recognised. Return to GO, do not collect £200.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the ZX80......
Hi Tony, Robert and all,
well, i'm *another* new member, and this is an even smaller hello, as i'm rushed off my feet with various projects and activities at the moment. Don't worry about the disc transfer PCW to PC, all is not lost. I have a PCW 9512 and have locolink installed on this PC, and i *might* even be able to find the installation CDs - having moved house since i last used them. Whatever happened to locoscript and the PCW? I did all my letters and book drafts on mine in the early nineties until getting our first PC, and like you have quite a lot of content on PCW discs. I also have something called Moonstone2in1 which runs on the PCW, and if i remember correctly, is needed to convert PCW format files to MS-Dos format. So I hope to get along to a meeting *someday* soon, of someone could just help me get a bit more organised...:) I won't bore you with the fact that i'm running win98se on a PC which has already been back to OneStepBeyond once, where i lost a hard drive which was omitting smoke. They fitted a fan to the new 80gb slave drive i insisted they sell me and back up the remaining drive immediately. The fan is now giving making strange ticking noises, and as the PC lies on its side with the cover off, i notice that my older 60gb boot drive is considerably hotter than the new one - really i think they would have done me better service by fitting a fan to this, too (both are seagate barracudas). And somwhere in the depths of this PC, distributed amongst the drives, is (I hope!) the remains of my dual-boot Fedora linux installation which was fine, 'til having to reinstall win98 caused grub to vanish!. Boy, something just made a weird noise ! - it's like listening to a car engine, wondering if your 'big end' is about to go! So if you don't hear from me, you'll know it has....
Seriously though folks, I go by the netnick 'kee', cos there seem to be about a million richard smiths - maybe we should co-ordinate via google - we'd out-do Dave Gorman. Anthony, the Locolink thing is a serious offer, it just might be a little while before i get to it. If anyone knows the simple way to use my Fedora coveridisc 'linux rescue' function to actually rescue my grub boot loader and dual install, i'd be grateful. I'd just got it working nicely with my NTL cable connection, although i had to install a new nic, as Fedora couldn't recognise my old Compaq 'netelligent' one. Oh yes, i've been 'dabbling' in computers since i did a short course in COBOL at Control Data in Birmingham in 1980. It didn't get me a new career, but i did get to play 'Colossal Cave' on their mini-computer, and a couple of years later bought a Spectrum 48k, so i could complete it. Ah, the many strange and distorted paths that led us all here.... I also have a computer mad 15 year old son who you might meet at some time - are meetings in pubs open to under 18s, or i guess realistically if you have any in the Millennium Library i'm more likely to make it there.
See ya!
kee