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uSD card content?

 

Remap...
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Lets say drive B is a 8mb container file on some disk.
Elsewhere there are 124 more of them (1GB media).
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My box can make any of those 124 others appear as
drive B: same for C: and D:.??
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Mount is? CP/M program? written in BASIC that reads
a file DISK.DTA and that has all of the mappings
listed by name or a simple number (yet unnamed)
and what ones are active as? Drive letter.? I can
reassign B though C to any of those potential drives.
DISK.DTA is just a database.
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In use I boot nominal first 4 drives A: is always fixed for
sanity and also since all the mainline programs
( marked system) are there.??
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With that I can make C: into CLIB and D: into CPROG.
Or C: as PASLIB and D: PASCAL.? And so on.?
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It allows me to deal with the lack of hierarchical directories
in CP/M.
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The selected disk named are just? pointers to where that
"partition" starts on meda as everything else like size
are fixed.? So the only? parameter in the DPBlock is "offset"
as a variable.? ?That database also has information like
where it was before as in if B was CLIB and I change to
BASLIB it will have an entry listing what B was before.
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I was a VMS user and used to moving around directories?
as needed to organize projects and all.? ?Closest thing is the?
directory system of Linux.?
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?
Allison?
 

Allison,

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Ah yes, the "good" old days. :-)

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My first disk system was a Heath H89 with a single H17 floppy. 40-track, hard-sectored, single-sided, single density, which stored 92k with CP/M. Operating with only one drive was tedious, but possible. Heath's clever BIOS created additional "phantom" disks (A: B: C: etc.) with one physical drive. So PIP B:=C:FILE.TXT would keep saying "put disk B in drive A and press Return" etc. as needed. Copying an entire disk was really slow. Lots of elbow exercise, but it worked!

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Later, I had an S-100 box with a Micromation "Doubler" and two SS Shugart SA801 8" drives, which stored 488k per disk. Then a Micromation "Doubler" and SD Sales "Versafloppy" controllers which put over 1 Mb on 8" floppies.

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Interestingly, my old 8" drives still all work, while most of my 5.25" drives are flakey, and the 3.5" drives are even worse.

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On networking: I have Woolf Software's "Move-It" program, which connects CP/M (and DOS) systems via their serial or parallel ports. Each box can see the other's drives. So A: B: C: are your local drives, and RA: RB: RC: are your remote drives. There was a DOS version as well, but I've lost it. That was my networking solution for many years.

?

Lee

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--

Excellence does not require perfection. -- Henry James

But it *does* require attention to detail! -- Lee Hart

--

Lee A. Hart

 

Yes, those days are now really old...? ;)
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I have a assortment of machines all speaking either CP/M or NS*DOS.
NS*DOS was a strange animal as it was basically bag and tag and tightly
bound to their hard sector controller.
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The worst part of hard sector was it was only compatible with
itself (or same brand) making portability not happening.? I had
to?add a soft sector controller 765 based? and a 8" drive to get
compatibility with the world as in SSSD 8" CP/M format.
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That said one of the more interesting things was to take the source
for NS*DOS and make it independent of the MDC controller.? The
result was a primitive file system but you could create directories
within directories.? It also was logical sector addressed and sector
size independant so that it could be 256 (original hard sector) or
512 (the double density version) or anything.??
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ISIS was another OS that was truly intel and strange.
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Most exciting to me was being able to tech the CP/M machine how
to read a RX01 (also SSSD8")? with RT filesystem (radix50 file names).
With that my CP/M crate to talk to the world of PDP11s and even
VAX/VMS machines that had floppy (RX06) or over the DECNET
Either pipe..
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Networking was easy I read a few papers and then
William? Wongs (microcomputing) and it was?then easy
if speed was not the major issue.?
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Most serial ports on s100 and similar could go fairly fast.? So
a protocol like?csma/cd at the physical level and then pile
stuff on it.? Only two signal lines signal and ground at
TTL levels.? I had easy interconnect wired into the BIOS
and 19.2 KB (faster always left a slow system behind).?
Proto networking between not less than 3 systems.
It would extend to 5 one being a LSI11/23 running
RT11.?
?
Allison

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