my old FIDO CP/M-80 machine running

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Mon Dec 20 16:26:40 2004

Deciphered the missing keyboard cable and the far, far too
complicated keyboard interface (I practically rewired a Cromemco
PRI board to be an interface for this lovely Microswitch parallel
keyboard -- very hardware-head), soaked & washed the mouse
poop off the floppy cable, repaired the section of conductor
#50 nibbled by said rodentia, picked a system floppy at random
(DSSD), typed "b" at the prompt... READ ERROR.

Pulled a SSSD system disk, booted fine! Some fiddling, I can't
read any sectors of side 2. That I will figure out. It does
figure out sidedness.

Found I have bunches of blank NOS DSDD floppies, not one SSSD
blank! So no formatting etc.

So I ran all the progs on the system disk (wordstar, sid, pmate,
stat, etc) OK. Since I've got a bunch of SSSD system disks,
I stuck another in the B drive (a sssd drive, since mice ruined
the orig. drive), and ran MBASIC 5.03 off it.

Man, the B drive spindle bearing is trashed; it's
conversation-level loud. The G and right-shift keys on the
keyboard don't work, and the RETURN key sends a garbage character
then CR (but Control-M works so I can do stuff).

I need to fix the "G" key, figure out the serial port stuff,
then I can export the SSSD diskette contents. Once I fix the DS
thing I'll do the other non 3740 format diskettes. I don't know
yet what order I'll do things in though I will probably get one
of the serial ports working to make sure. Luckily I have ZAPLOAD
(bin to hex) and telink (telecomm) progs on the system disk.
Received on Mon Dec 20 2004 - 16:26:40 GMT

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