Re: Home brew Z80 CP/M computer

no.spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:00:52 -0500, Jack Crenshaw
<jcrens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

no.spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:14:31 -0500, Jack Crenshaw
<jcrens@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ole Christensen wrote:
Jack Crenshaw skrev:
---snip---
Also the eZ80 can add things like SPI ports (easy interface to SD
flash) and Ethernet.
Have you actually added a flash drive to an ez80? Has anyone?
If we talk about SD/MMC card + CP/M 2 then yes, there are code,
(a eZ80 project pack), on the net somewhere, if You don't find
it drop me a line then i will send You...

I'm not averse to doing a little work. But I'd sure like to know I'm
not pioneering the universe.
In the next couple of weeks, (months), i will be playing with this...

Plus, I need another SBC like a hole in the head.
Me to,... just playing around, add CP/M+ CP/NET, then...?
A Word to Wordstar translator? <grin>

Seriously, if I could get a modern monitor and a WYSIWYG editor working on a CP/M machine, I'd switch back so fast it would make your head swim.

I am _SOOOOOO_ tired of a rocketship Pentium IV computer with software that seems to be permanently and unfixably broken.

A coupla years ago, Microsoft sent down an upgrade -- Service Pack 2. The installation failed halfway through. My system was broken so badly, neither Dell nor Microsoft could fix it. I had to wipe the hard drive clean, and reinstall everything.

A coupla months ago, Microsoft send down SP3. It broke my connection to the Internet. It seems that ATT's driver for the wireless modem didn't work with SP3 (wouldn't you think MS would check with some of its major users, to see if everything still work? Oh, wait, I did say MS, didn't I? Never mind).

I must have spent two weeks on the phone with tech support people, trying to fix the problem (in the meantime, I rolled WinXP back to SP2). Each techie told me that the last one gave me the wrong instructions, and gave me new ones. It took an ATT guy on site (at my expense) to finally get things sorted out.

About a week later, some software app vendor (don't know who) sent down their own "Upgrade," which broke one of my major apps (Mathcad). Turned out to be an incompatibility with the Java engine.

Bah! In retrospect, my old CP/M machine, which only got upgrades from _ME_, would seem like Heaven on Earth. Except, I sure do like that WYSIWYG part <sigh>.

I'd be tempted to say that the problem is clearly not with the hardware, but with MS's software. Except that this isn't true. With installable drivers, Plug-n-Play hardware, etc., the hardware design of a PC isn't completely blameless.

I've been told more than once that Linux doesn't suffer from all these problems. But that isn't true, either. A few years spent running big apps on a Linux box showed me that their apps fail at just about the same frequency as Windoze.


Jack

<ole>
-------
There is only one solution... Z80, CP/M and VEDIT editor with Runoff
to pretty print it all. Or you can always get Wordstar.

PCs are so fast they are always at the scene of the crash.. there own.
I like that! Gotta remember that one.

If you gotta run a PC try linux.
Please don't get me started on Linux. See the above comment.

I really, really do want to use Linux. I've been a huge fan of the Unix/Linux concept of lots of small, simple and _STABLE_ functions, linked together with things like pipes, scripts, etc. I was thrilled when I first heard about Unix, some 25 years ago now. I was even more thrilled by Xinu and Minix. The idea of "less is more" goes right to the core of who I am.

Unfortunately, it seems that the complexity of both Unix and Linux has grown greatly since the "Good Old Days," As I mentioned, my experience with Linux has been that it's buggy, too.

Then there's the people. I'm sure there must be lots and lots of really nice people in the Unix/Linux world. Like the ones I used to hang out with, in the old CPM forum on Compuserve. In fact, many of the CPMFOR and Unix people were the _SAME_ people.

Then you have the Unix Wizards. People whose only claim to fame is that they learned how to hack the Unix kernel as juniors at some university. I worked with a bunch of them, and found them to be arrogant, insufferable boors, suffering from hugely overinflated superiority complexes. I'm sure you know the type. Some of them were simply in the wrong line of work. As software engineers, they would have made great taxi drivers. Their marriage to Linux was far more psychological than technical.

I know, I know, you get people like that in all walks of life, but I found more of them in the Unix world than most places.

Why do I care? Because when I get software from them, I need to know that it's reliable. That it's written to be good, not to be someone's statement of their own over-inflated superiority.

Funny you should mention runoff. There was another utility that we also used -- can't remember the name, but it was supposed to be for printing tabular data. My wife had to use it a lot, and she railed over the fact that she could never get the vertical alignments right.

It wasn't anything she was doing wrong, it was that the driver that sent commands to the printer (and has to be tailored to the printer) was broken. It wasn't computing the proportional fonts right. She went to the SysAdmins over and over, trying to get them to either fix the problems or tell her how. All they could say was, "Well, keep trying and let us know how it works."

In short, they saw the "fix" as simply trial and error. Mostly error.

In time, we came to learn that the reason they didn't fix the problem is that they hadn't a clue _HOW_ to do that. They could talk the talk, but not walk the walk. And their idea of software engineering was much like Microsoft's:

"When it compiles, ship it."

Well, I _DID_ ask you not to get me started <grin>.

Jack

;)

Short and to the point on PCs, yes, they are buggy. M$ is a standard
by force of weight, linux is gaining and has bugs. The difference is
the latter can be fixed while the former is broken. Hence my comment:

If you gotta run a PC try linux.

An excellent point, and I hear you re "fixable" vs. non.

Many years ago a fellow from a company I used to work for changed jobs to Microsoft. This was back in the z80 days, before MSDOS. He sent us an email back, and said, "Whatever you do, don't buy Microsoft Fortran."

He said that not only did it have bugs, but that they had not the slightest clue how to fix them.

Sound familiar? Like the infamous "Disk Full" error in Word. Microsoft swears that this bug -- which was still there in Word 2003 -- first appeared in the Win95 version. That's a lie. I first encountered it in Word Version 2.0.

Say, didja see that all the Zuse's in the universe crashed yesterday? Seems that someone at MS couldn't figure out how to compute leap years. Ain't that a _HOOT_? After the Y2K fiasco, they still don't get it.

Yesterday I was on my PC, checking on FoxNews.com, watched some videos, everything worked. Went to lunch, came back. No sound. Rebooted, still no sound. Tried everything I could think of. Called "YourTechTeam," whom I'm paying $150 a year for premium Dell support. After 3 hrs on the phone, and many download/upgrades later, he got the sound back.

I asked, "What did you do to fix it?"

He said, "I have no idea."

Don'cha just love it?

Jack


Me, I prefer CP/M, RT11 or a Vax running O-VMS for stability
but inthe real world I sorta have to have PCs for all the other thnigs
tied to that. With that said I've found linux is stable and unlike
winders if it isn't, it can be fixed. I'm not a *nix fan only someone
that wants the MIPs PCs can provide cheaply but has limited
tolerence for buggy OSs that make doing works a pain.

I've been working with a PC at work, with Windows, for the last 20 years. We have a love/hate relationship. I mortally detest having apps crash, having to recover corrupted files, having things change while I'm out for lunch. I really love the results when I get a complicated Word doc, with lots of equations, right, and it prints out nicely. I love tools like Mathcad and Matlab. Mathcad crashes so often that I've learned to keep two copies of everything, and update them in ping-pong fashion. But again, I can do things with it that I can't do any other way. There is no Mathcad for Linux. There's Octave, a free version of Matlab, but it seems to be buggy too, and it has no Simulink feature.

I fear that I'm stuck with PC/Windows for much of the stuff I do for other people, but that doesn't mean I'm forced to use it when I'm just enjoying myself. For that, I want something stable, as you say.

Jack


Allison


.

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