I have to defer to your more recent experience. Aside from the occasional
job requiring my portable development station, I seldom used CP/M after 1984
or so. I did have a farily flexible prom programmer with which I could
program parts not yet supported on my PC-based programmer, but in the span
between '81 and '84, I had other concerns.
I have no idea, however, how you block and deblock I/O with 1K blocks when
you have only 1k in your sector buffer. I suppose I could go back and look
at the software, but the stuff I had at my disposal at the time seemed to
work best with a big hard disk requiring the largest available granules
(allocation blocks) and since the logical drives were limited to 8MB and
since CP/M was pretty much a thing of the past, I didn't see any point in
wasting time and resources fine-tuning it. I used it because I had a few
already-paid for cross assemblers and other tools for CP/M. Once a decent
version of the PC-DOS became available, I was sure to make the switch. Of
course I didn't realize how long that would be. Nonetheless, once I had a
PC with a '186 processor, I could run the CPM emulator to use my tools and
the more modern hardware to do my work, and the CPM became a relic.
It had performed fairly well and competitively with the PC up to the point
at which I got an XT clone which used a '186 at 16 MHz. Together with a
couple of fairly fast drives it outperformed CP/M on the Z-80 even when it
was emulating CP/M.
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Monday, March 29, 1999 8:01 PM
Subject: Re: followup: Rinky dink hamfest
><I agree that the ramdisk improved performance. It was just the
><implementations that made the system so fragile once ramdisk was in place.
>
>I have a kaypro with a 2048k ramdisk, it screams and would beat any kaypro
<snip>
>Allison
>
Received on Mon Mar 29 1999 - 21:55:02 BST