Universal drive

From: Doug Spence <ds_spenc_at_alcor.concordia.ca>
Date: Sat Oct 10 19:00:40 1998

On Mon, 5 Oct 1998, John Foust wrote:

> At 09:03 AM 10/4/98 -0400, Doug Spence wrote:
> >There was a commercial product called either DOS-2-DOS or DISK-2-DISK (I
> >forget which) which was able to access 1541 disks on a filesystem level,
> >for reading AND writing.
>
> That company was Central Coast Software, run by George Chamberlin.
> He sold out to New Horizons, another pioneer Amiga company. Eventually
> NH's assets (including all the source code) were auctioned off and
> went at a discount price to a Canajun company whose name included
> the word "wonder", and I don't know what happened to it after that.

I looked back into my archives and found that some of the New Horizons
stuff went to SoftWood, including ProWrite. Wonder Computers started
their Lazarus Engineering division based mostly on old NH stuff, I think.
According to a post I found from Jason Compton, some stuff went to Quasar
Distribution, Australia.

Jason was the spokesman for Wonder at around this time.

Lazarus Engineering at least managed to get a new version of DesignWorks
out the door before Wonder went belly up. (They're back in business as a
smaller Amiga store chain, but I don't know if Lazarus Engineering is
still with us.)

BTW: I found this post from you on this subject:

>From: syndesis_at_beta.inc.net (John Foust)
>Subject: New Horizons liquidation
>Date: 5 Apr 1995 15:54:46 GMT
>
>I missed the start of this thread, but when I called the
>lawyer listed in the description, she said "they didn't
>authorize that posting, it was done by a creditor who
>took it upon herself." Sounds like someone wanted some
>money.
>
>Either way, Softwood got quite a deal... even as used
>floppies, they're still worth 10 to 25 cents each, and
>the white generic boxes might be worth twice that...
>not to mention the value of the mailing list being sold
>and re-sold. You can still rent C-64 mailing lists.
>
>What was called "Lot 2" is still available, as the source
>code for everything except Disk-2-Disk, minus the inventory,
>which somehow went to Softwood, too, in court a few weeks ago,
>for $2,250.

[Back to today]

> I bid in the auction and missed it by a few hundred bucks. I wanted to
> take all their products, source and docs, and sell them on a CD as is.

That would have been excellent.

I've tried the Disk-2-Disk demo version that can be found on Aminet, and
the parts that weren't crippled do indeed seem to work. I guess most of
the demand for this kind of utility fell off sharply in the first few
years of the Amiga's existence as the user flow from C64 to Amiga died.

> - John

-- 
Doug Spence
ds_spenc_at_alcor.concordia.ca
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~ds_spenc/
Received on Sat Oct 10 1998 - 19:00:40 BST

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