One other thing that was apparently incorrectly recorded in that history, is
that the tape decks for which Wayne Wall wrote drivers to be used with his
Digital Group system were not "phi-Decks" but rather were Lexitron digital
cassette drives that we all got from California Digital back in '77-'78 and for
which Wayne wrote some really cool driver code that used software timing and a
couple of parallel port bits to drive the data and control lines. These held,
on a C-60 audio cassette, about what an SSDD 5-1/4" floppy of the time held i.e.
256KB. He adapted Peter Boyle's FFS ( a single-drive Floppy DOS and precursor
to APEX) into TFS, a tape file system. The tape file system was pretty amazing,
though, like anything based on tape, it was dreadfully painful waiting through
the tape latencies. Chuck Robertson, who was then a student at C.U. Boulder,
and now is a senior VP at Mentor Graphics, modified the TFS code to support TWO
of these digital cassette drives. I had built a box with a small motherboard
and two drives in it and was happy to see the two-drive software up and running,
but the one and only copy of it that existed because of everyone's limited
resources, was destroyed in Wayne's office when Chuck was having Wayne check the
executable code out. Nothing further was ever done with the Lexitron drives,
AFAIK.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Huw Davies" <Huw.Davies_at_kerberos.davies.net.au>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2001 1:43 AM
Subject: Re: Ancient 6502 FOCAL source code
> At 12:55 AM 27/09/2001 -0600, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> >Well, you're in luck, as Larry Fish, one of the founding members of the still
> >barely surviving Denver Area 6502 Users' Group wrote a history in which he
> >does,
> >to some extent, tell the tale, naming names and spelling out events. That's
> >accessible at www.6502group.org. It's not "up" at this moment, so I don't
> >have
> >the exact URL, but when the site's up, the history is readily available.
>
>
> It's up now and the history can be found at http://6502group.org/HIST6502.HTM
>
> Some things in the history aren't quite right - a black PDP-10? Perhaps it
> was the special Stealth version :-)
>
>
> Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies_at_kerberos.davies.net.au
> | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
> | air, the sky would be painted green"
>
>
Received on Thu Sep 27 2001 - 10:02:49 BST