Looking for Heath H89 software and some advice

From: Dave Baggett <dmb_at_itasoftware.com>
Date: Tue Nov 30 11:46:42 1999

I just got two Heath H89's to replace the one my parents
took to the dump 10 years ago while I was away at
college. Both these machines seem to work fine -- they
will boot CP/M and I can run programs, etc. One of
them is in absolute mint condition -- a real beauty.

However, the vast majority of the disks I have (circa 1979)
are HDOS disks. I would like to be able to read these
disks and use the software (e.g., Walt Bilofsky's C
compiler), but I can't get any of my bootable HDOS
disks to boot. Would anyone be willing to make me a
bootable HDOS disk and mail it to me? If so, I would greatly
appreciate it. Let me know by email (dmb_at_ai.mit.edu) if you
would be willing to volunteer. :)

I'm also looking for any of Evryware's interactive fiction
(text adventure) games for the H89. They had a whole
series of these games (starting with "A Remarkable
Experience") and I would like to resurrect them by porting
them to a modern platform. (Yes, there are still people
who like text adventures. See the Usenet newsgroup
rec.arts.int-fiction for ample evidence of this!)

Back in 1994, I ported Crowther & Woods' Adventure
from the original FORTRAN source (for PDP-10, I believe)
to an object oriented language called TADS that was developed
specifically for text adventures. This port was quite popular
with the rec.arts.int-fiction crowd, and was itself ported
to various other platforms, including Infocom's Z-Machine.

I actually contacted one of the Evryware founders --
they're still making games -- but they said they don't
have any copies of their H89 stuff anymore. So if
anyone has them and would be willing to furnish copies,
please let me know.

Finally, does anyone know if it's possible to read/write
H89 disks in a PC? I mean, I know that the disk format
is radically different, but are PC 5 1/4" drives even physically
capable of doing this? It would be very nice to have a
PC-based program that could create H89 disks from
disk images, and I'd love to write one, but frankly I'm a
software guy and have no clue about the hardware side
of floppy disk formats. If anyone has any sage advice,
I'd be much obliged.

Dave Baggett
dmb_at_ai.mit.edu
Received on Tue Nov 30 1999 - 11:46:42 GMT