CCP/M-04.88 Meeting Notes 04/01/88 I am writing this using MICRO-TEXT, a ROM-Based editor on the Royal. It costs $29 and is available from RR Salvage. For those of you without drives, this and an audio cassette tape are an excellent minimal word processing system. It even does color! The joint meeting of the Yankee Osborne Users Group and the Connecticut CP/M Users Group had its pluses and minuses. Due to some miscommunication, the start time and the door-unlocking time differed by 45 minutes, leaving the people outside in the cold for a while. Also, the meeting site location itself was switched from the American Red Cross in Farmington to the St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Meriden, causing at least two people (one of whom is a skilled user of TC.COM, the Peach Tree Telecommunications program) to miss the meeting. The other minus was that because yours truly did not thoroughly research the situation, the room reserved for a Photography Club was chosen as the room to have our meeting, and when the Photography people showed up, we had to move to the room that had been reserved for us, a much smaller room. Since about 50 people showed up, it was a bit cramped to say the least! On the plus side, I think and hope the people who came got a lot out of the meeting. Several new members joined the CCP/M ranks and I think the YOU ranks. Daryl Gehlbach did a short introduction to CP/M, I opened up the Royal and pointed out what ports did what, how to change the baud rate jumper to 1200 baud and later three systems were set up and demonstrations of Public Domain software were done. The next meeting of CCP/M will be on April 12th at the Farmington Public Library. The topic will be WordStar version 4. Al Bolton for one has been trying to install WordStar on his Royal. He called MicroPro and they gave his some suggestions but so far we have not been successful. I have managed to get the printer to print but the screen control is still not quite right. The Royal uses a VT52-like escape sequence to position its cursor but something still causes WordStar to be off by a line here and there. I am sure we can solve this problem thru a combination of reading the manuals, the information on the supplied disks and working together on it. Al Hathway has been working on function key macros for WordStar and indicates that he may have something ready to show us at the meeting. Daryl Gehlbach thinks we may have enough people to place another block order to MicroPro due to the recent increase in membership by new Royal owners. See you in Farmington. The May meeting will be another joint YOU CCP/M meeting and will be on May 17th. I will try to get the American Red Cross in Farmington. Although not ideally located, I feel the crowded conditions and building availability at St. Andrews Episcopal Church make the ARC a better choice. The topic will be Programming in BASIC. Tom Veile will co-ordinate the effort. Please note this is the THIRD Tuesday in May, not the second. Tom plans on going over the fundamental instructions in BASIC and those of you who are new to computer programming should get a lot out his talk. The Royal continues to be the major topic. At least three people are actively involved in building drives for it. Frank Pellicano is working on building the F2, the second drive. John Williams is working on building the controller for the F1. He has located an outfit in Connecticut that sells the two key chips in the controller and will be either wire-wrapping or building a PC board. Both Frank and John are engineers and are doing this work in their spare time. Not sure what they will come up with or what it will cost or when it will be available but can say they are both enthusiastic and are learning a tremendous amount in the process. The third person working on this was hired by RR Salvage and I don't know what progress he's made. If experience counts, I'd put my money on Frank and John. Both have F1 drives and technical manuals and both care about owning drives themselves and learning and helping out the Royal owner. Nothing like self-interest to get a project off the ground. The drives are only one of the things needed. Manuals, cables, software and assistance follow close behind. The parallel printer cable appears to be simply a 34 pin ribbon cable with a Centronics plug at one end (crimped onto the cable) and a plastic 34 pin crimp-on plug at the other. All parts are probably available from Radio Shack. I will check and, if they are, will price the parts. Bob DeLeonardis reports RR Salvage wants (you ready for this?) $50 for this cable. Many people did not get manuals with the Royal. I have sent a copy of each of the three manuals to one person for him to copy. If anyone else needs them, let us know. A design for a fully functional cassette cable has been distributed by Erik Lindquist and appears elsewhere in this issue. If you don't mind pushing buttons on your cassette recorder, I picked up five cassette cables from Radio Shack and am selling them at cost. The cable needed to support the modem is simply a 25 pin ribbon cable with crimp-on DB-25 (RS-232) male plugs at both ends. I think the serial port may be used by serial printers as well (you need to toggle the 5th switch on the blue rocker panel inside the Royal to change it from parallel to serial printing.) Echelon, Inc. P.O. Box 707001-800, South Lake Tahoe, CA 95705 has announced the availability of Z-Com, Version 2. Price is $69.95 and is certainly the most important software breakthru for Z-80 based ccmputers ever. Quoting Z-NEWS 808 page 1, "Joe Wright, San Jose, CA, has produced (with help from Jay Sage and Bridger Mitchell) one of the most significant developments ever to come along in the microcomputing world. His new Z-Com offers flexibility never seen before, or thought possible, for Operating Systems. Z-Team comes thru! Z-Com, Version 2.0, does what we have wished for so long: an Operating System for all seasons!" I will be sending away for this and will try to bring it up on a Kaypro 4 and on a Royal. The key claim for new Z-Com, ie. Z-Com Version 2.0, is that it will run on virtually any Z-80 based computer. Bob Forsberg and David Wright and others feel there is a need for some introductory articles on what the "Z System" can do for you and I agree. Perhaps a second "Z-Fest" which features ZCPR v3.4 and ZRDOS v1.9 on the Commodore 128 and the Royal alphaTronic PC and conducted by Joe Wright in the Fall could be arranged... The Mouse House PBBS/RCP/M ((203) 665-1100) has recently been supporting an extended string on the relative [de]merits of the Commodore 64 computer. I've stayed out of this one but think it's worth saying a few things at this time. No matter which side is "Right" on this one, one thing seems very clear to me. Both sides seem to be only slightly interested in actually listening to the questions and answers the other side has. I think people tend to think their own computer is better than anyone else's, and don't like it even if the facts are otherwise. People want their favorite things to be accepted by others. I think Rick Swenton (who privately and repeatedly admits that the main thing he's up to is just plain good fun anyway) might learn a few things if he picked up a C-64 and actually used it instead of basing his remarks on probably just a gut feeling, and I think Steve Tardif might also do well if he too purchased the kind of computer that Rick supports (surely a Z80 compatible under Z System) and tried it out. It's only when both sides really listen that learning takes place. As Jim Taylor points out, it's all ASCII in the final analysis. Whether is was created by a 6502 under whatever OS the C64 uses (note my ignorance) or by a Z80 under ZCPR, it's ASCII and can be interesting or dull depending on the skill of the author. I feel, as Rick feels, that the complexity of a thing and the struggle involved in using it, make something a non-Toy. This is why I like the Mouse programming language. It's sometimes hard to get something to work in Mouse. But when it does work, I feel I have conquered something and perhaps done something that most people are not able to do. This makes me feel smart and I like that feeling. I enjoy playing with this language. Which makes it a Toy... Maybe what Rick and I like are Adult Toys. AT's for short. Well, that's all for now. Now to collect Mort's dBase offering, pictures from Bob Forsberg, Walt's Clock article and something to celebrate the fact that it is, after all, April 1. I'm sure there's something outrageously unlikely around here somewhere. Lee Bradley, CCP/M, 04/03/88, Easter Day