As I may have mentioned a while back, I have dug out my
backup floppy disks from my National Semiconductor Genix
system. In 1984 or so, I built a clone of a Logical
Microcomputer 32016 system and copied the OS. I used it for
a while, but it was maddeningly slow. This system used a
Multibus backplane and a Konan Taisho disk controller, that
could handle MFM floppies and hard drives. This backup is
from my copy of the system, and so has a few tidbits of
mildly interesting stuff. One thing is I was helping Steve
Ciarcia of Circuit Cellar magazine answer his mail, and as
this was my only system with 5" floppies, I used it for
that. So, this backup probably has some rather amusing
replies to the totally INSANE questions he got. One of my
favorites was "Steve, can you jot down on the back of an
envelope the schematic for an IBM PC so I can hand wire
it?" I also wrote a VERY BAD driver for a Versatec printer.
It worked, but was insanely inefficient in graphics mode,
and took a half hour per page to print. Worked fine in text
mode, though.
I don't remember what compilers we had on this, obviously C,
and maybe Pascal and FORTRAN.
Since it worked fine to read and write PC compatible
floppies, the floppy format should be easy to read. But, I
think this "backup" is a block by block dump of the file
system. Notes on the floppies show :
cp dc(0,0) on the first,
cp dc(0,800) on the second, etc.
So, if anyone wants to try to recover the files off this,
I'd be glad to donate the set. It appears to be 2 boxes of
floppies, 28 in total. I have some more floppies that seem
to be the last half of an earlier backup, with less info on
how it was written.
Thanks,
Jon
