Hyperion was not alone in having trouble with comm ports. Columbia
University (my alma mater) reported in January 1984 that unmodified
Kermit ran on Compaq and Columbia PCs, but Eagle and Seequa needed
custom code.
This is the first that I'v seen anybody with Seequa!
The "Seequa Chameleon 325" was the only commercial PC to have 3.25" disk
drives! (the format that Dysan bet the company on and went under)
I haven't heard how many, if any, of the 325 models were ever built or
sold.
On Wed, 7 Jun 2023, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote:
I can't remember if I ever added a Seequa Chameleon to my collection.
Definitely more rare than the Otrona Attache.
Didn't the Gavilan also use 3.25" disks?
I'm pretty sure I still have a Gavilan...somewhere.
No 3.25" for Gavilan.
The Gavilan started out with 320K 3" disks; I don't remember what brand of
drive (there weren't many), nor the details of the format that they used.
They then switched to single sided 3.5", using a Shugart SA300 drive, but
with Gavilan's custom curved faceplate on it. I was able to mount a
double sided drive of a different brand in it, without faceplate.
But, once I got hold of some Shugart SA350 double sided drives, I could
switch the Gavilan faceplate onto those.
Towards the end (Gavilan went under), they started to support double sided
3.5", with MS-DOS 2.11J? but their disk format was not the same format as
the 720K that IBM came up with for DOS 3.20 .
(A few companies used 3.5" drives, with customization of MS-DOS 2.11
The first version of MS-DOS or PC-DOS to have built in support of 3.5"
720K was 3.20)
After Gavilan went under the Gavilan MS-DOS 2.11K and 2.11L were leaked
out, and supported the IBM 720K format.
The external 5.25" drive was 360K.
The printer was thermal and ink, so it could use plain paper, or thermal
paper, such as that for the Silent 700. Thermal plus ink gave good
quality.
The bubble memory cartridges never caught on.
The early Gavilans, as introduced at NCC 1983, were 8 line by 80 LCD
screen, then they switched to 16 line. Both had an RCA for composite external monitor.
Uncle Roger got several totes of my Gavilan stuff.
A friend used a Gavilan, with external monitor for years as a
"compatible". There is a possibility that she might still have it.
I still have never heard of a machine other than the Seequa Chameleon 325
that came with 3.25" drives, although a number of people hooked those
drives to PC. After MicroPro gave up on any Dysan distribution of
WordStar, I got some of their drives, alignment disks (many of which they
had ended up using as scratch disks!), etc.
I doubt that anybody here needs/wants a repeat of the saga of the battle
of shirt pocket disks, and how Dysan bet the company and lost.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
