Holy Crap! IMSAI's weren't this expensive when new!

From: Bob Stek <r.stek_at_snet.net>
Date: Sat Feb 10 18:25:48 2001

Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 22:12:50 -0700
>From: "Richard Erlacher" <edick_at_idcomm.com>
>Subject: Re: Holy Crap! IMSAI's weren't this expensive when new!
>
>Well, hopefully he recognizes what a DOG this system is, with its NorthStar
>controller.

There you go, needlessly trashing N*'s again! You must have been bitten by
a hard-sectored disk when you were small. NorthStar responded when
hobbyists who couldn't afford 8" drives wanted a disk drive for their
Imsai's and Altairs. They were VERY popular and well supported. Their
boards and systems were well done and reliable. They even provided a
hardware floating point board for number crunchers long before other
vendors. NorthStar's own DOS and BASIC were probably initially brought up
on more Altairs and Imsai's than CP/M was as a first OS. It was a very
usable BASIC with BCD arithmetic and cleaner random access file handling
than Microsoft BASIC ever had. Sure, CP/M became THE OS of the day, but N*
DOS was there first. The Horizon supported CP/M 1.4 and later 2.2 was
distributed by NorthStar. And take a look at Walnut Creek's CP/M CD-ROM -
just figure out the percentage of the CD-ROM that concerns itself with
NorthStar, CP/M or otherwise, and compare it with the support for other
computers which supported an OS other than CP/M.

 It will never have a decent-sized TPA thanks to the
>memory-mapped controller,

Pure nonsense! Even without moving the boot-prom, (an option supported by
NorthStar or a simple mod for users of the day which would give you a 62k
CP/M system), NorthStar's and Lifeboat's and SAIL Systems's CP/M would give
you a 56k or 58k system with the standard boot ROM. I NEVER found a CP/M
program I couldn't run in 56k, and I ran ALL the popular CP/M programs -
dBASE, WordStar, BDS C, SuperCalc, FORTRAN, various Pascals (including N*'s
own version of UCSD Pascal, though not under CP/M), SpellGuard, etc.


and it will never read soft sectored diskettes
>either. Fortunately, he can probably afford to put up with the associated
>problems.

Never had any problems - just perceived that way by folks too rigid to take
other than the soft-sectored path! And NorthStar was popular enough that
when George Morrow designed his DJ-DMA controller, he supplied a BIOS for it
that could read and write both N*'s hard-sectored format as well as other
soft-sector formats. That was the main reason I got a Morrow Decision I.
It wasn't until late in the CP/M game that utilities began to appear for
reading other manufacturer's formats. I added a Morrow Disk Jockey 2 board
to add my 8" drives to my Horizon in order to transfer the standard SSSD 8"
CP/M formatted disks - the ONLY standard for CP/M. Even soft-sectored 5"
formats were specific to their manufacturer.

>
>I advised Tom Bassi to dump the NorthStar stuff any way he could, and,
since
>he had several IMSAI's at the time, this was how he chose to do it. I'm
>really glad he did so well.

I am glad he did well, too, despite your advice. (hi, Tom!)


You can see from the pictures that he does
>clean work and keeps things looking good.
>
>Dick


Bob Stek
Saver of Lost Sols
Received on Sat Feb 10 2001 - 18:25:48 GMT