BBC printer port (ever used for anything else?)

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Sun Sep 19 10:20:20 2004

On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 10:05 -0500, Graham Toal wrote:
> I know, look in the sources of ACW kermit and see who ported it :-)
> I was amazed (and depressed) that the ARM port of Kermit was simply
> my ACW port with another layer added to fake out the ACW routines,
> which themselves were just a veneer over BBC OSBytes! What a mess!

In case you're interested and/or have bits to offer, I'm trying to
preserve whatever media (docs and software) I can for some of the more
unusual Acorn odds and ends (ABC range, 32016 second processor, ARM
Evaluation Kit, Springboard etc.)

I've got some items scanned / imaged from various sources, but I'm
mainly sorting out who has what at present.

Getting archives of full sets of 'core' media together seems to be
possible; enough people have stray items around from which full sets can
be made. What's severely lacking (mainly because they would have been
severely lacking even when current, and time hasn't helped!) is any
'user land' type stuff.

I'm yet to find *anything* that was marketed for the ACW; it's possible
that PSpice ran on it, and possibly the QuickChip software (Witchy seems
to have the only surviving copy of that on an ACW, and it's
unfortunately screwed).

I've got some data suggesting rumours of an IP stack for the ARM Eval
Kit running over Econet, but unfortunately no code as of yet - I've got
some tapes yet to read though which have system backups on and may
contain something interesting...

> But my experience has been that sucking off the entire disk as an image
> is not only faster, its more reliable in terms of disk errors, plus you
> find interesting deleted files that way :-)

Heh, indeed. In addition, I've just been reading the password file from
an MDFS fileserver from an image of the drive so I can get access to the
real thing - people really did (do?) have things like 'password' for
their password...

cheers,

Jules

ps. Ever heard of a project called 'Squirrel'? Seems to have been some
sort of 'super-BBC' clone, but I've only got the vaguest of references
to it amongst some Acorn docs unfortunately...
Received on Sun Sep 19 2004 - 10:20:20 BST