I do have some Isis documentation but no way to convert to electronic
format at the moment.
George
=========================================================
George L. Rachor Jr. george_at_racsys.rt.rain.com
Beaverton, Oregon
http://racsys.rt.rain.com
United States of America Amateur Radio : KD7DCX
On Wed, 5 May 1999, Derek Peschel wrote:
> > I'm trying to put together a Prom Programming station based on the iPDS
> > (Intel's Isis luggable) computer. I've managed to locate the OS, and some
> > applications but am still in need of the Prom programming software. I
> > think it was titled 'IPPS'.
>
> Sorry, I can't help you. I was actually going to ask _you_ some questions.
> You may want to try Intel's site, though. They have a small amount of ISIS
> stuff there (an emulator and maybe some other things). It's very
> disorganized -- you have to use the search function. Intel doesn't seem to
> care about such ancient history.
>
> Do you have any documentation for ISIS? I tried playing with the emulator
> and couldn't manage to do anything. I'm mainly wondering what features ISIS
> provides as an operating system and what its commands are.
>
> It's also very enlightening to compare ISIS to CP/M. Although CP/M was
> designed with an external interface that looked sort of like DEC's PDP-11
> OSs, internally CP/M seems to have been inspired by ISIS to some degree. I
> forget why I came to that conclusion (because I don't have the appropriate
> articles in front of me) but I know the register conventions were similar
> and I think the modular construction, memory layout, etc., may have been
> similar too.
>
> The funny thing is, CP/M has some silly flaws that shouldn't have happened,
> because ISIS doesn't have those flaws! Two especially come to mind:
>
> - No supported way to tell where in memory the parts of CP/M are.
> DRI's approach of "assemble CP/M for your particular system" is
> only workable for hobbyists that build and program their own
> machines and never use anyone else's binaries. I think ISIS has
> a system call that gives you the current memory layout.
>
> - Not necessarily easy to get to the non-file parts of a disk
> (the boot tracks, directory blocks, etc.) I've heard ISIS had
> a number of fake "files" for the non-file parts of a disk, which
> made disk hacking a lot easier.
>
> - Warm boots. I never understood why the warm boot in CP/M was
> combined with the routines to reread a disk directory. They are
> not the same thing. Changing disks is such a nuisance. Oddly,
> CP/M keeps enough information in memory to tell it that the
> directory is invalid... so why can't it just read the new
> disk instead of giving an error? I forget if ISIS solved this
> problem as well.
>
> Of course CP/M eventually got some features that I doubt ISIS ever had
> (longer file names, network and graphics support, three different hardware
> platforms, more software).
>
> -- Derek
>
>
Received on Thu May 06 1999 - 10:47:05 BST