"David Williams" <dlw_at_trailingedge.com> wrote:
> I once hacked
> an Apple // OS called Apex which was only out on 13 sector format
> at the time to work with the 16 sector format when it came out.
> That was fun.
Wow, it's pretty rare to find anyone who remembers Apex, since it wasn't
ever all that popular. It was distributed by Apparat, and they were more
famous for NewDOS/80 for the TRS-80 Model I and Model III.
The 16-sector hack should have been quite easy, since the source code of the
disk driver was printed in the Apex manual. I don't recall if it was provided
on disk. Apex used Apple's RWTS routines sans some of the formatting code, in
order to free up the page between $bf00 and $bfff for other uses. If you'd
gotten in touch with us, we would have sent you a 16-sector update.
Apex was written mainly by members of the "6502 Group", which has met on the
Colorado School of Mines campus in Golden every Tuesday* since it formed in
1976. These days the discussion topics rarely involve 6502s, but the
name has stuck for historical reasons. At its peak around 1981, a typical
meeting had perhaps 80 attendees, but these days it tends to be fewer than a
dozen. I no longer live in Colorado, but whenever I go back to visit family
and friends I try to attend a meeting.
Apex evolved from earlier operating systems called FFS (Floppy File System)
and TFS (Tape File System), which were never widely distributed. The
command interpreter and most of the utilities were written in a language
called XPL0, conceptually similar to the way that parts of CP/M were
written in PL/M.
The main people behind Apex and XPL0 were Peter Boyle, Wayne Wall, Larry Fish,
and Loren Blaney. I'm sure I've omitted other contributors; my apologies to
them.
The XPL0 language has been ported to other processors including the x86:
http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/computers/xpl0/
Apex was ported to the 68K, and ran on some models of Macintoshes. It was
used by DFM for telescope controllers:
http://www2.csn.net/~dfm42/dfm.html
Apparat's EPROM programmer for the Apple ][ was originally supplied with
APEX-based software written by Larry Fish (who also designed the hardware),
using special routines by Roger Nace to read and write Apple DOS 3.3 disks.
Because this was somewhat inconvenient for most of our customers, I wrote
entirely new software for it that ran directly under DOS 3.3.
Cheers,
Eric
* Actually we missed a few due to weather and holidays. But almost every
Tuesday.
Received on Thu Sep 10 1998 - 19:12:42 BST