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Cp/m & arcnet

I

IBM Portable PC

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I've just obtained a Prolog STD bus ARCNET card, for use with my Pulsar Little Big Board (Not the Ampro Little Board), and wonder what's possible with CP/M and ARCNET?

Obviously with MP/M or TurboDOS, multiuser systems are possible, I guess with CP/M it's simply about resource sharing and remote resource access?

Are there 'standard' drivers for ARCNET?
 
IBM Portable PC said:
I've just obtained a Prolog STD bus ARCNET card, for use with my Pulsar Little Big Board (Not the Ampro Little Board), and wonder what's possible with CP/M and ARCNET?

Obviously with MP/M or TurboDOS, multiuser systems are possible, I guess with CP/M it's simply about resource sharing and remote resource access?

Are there 'standard' drivers for ARCNET?
Click to expand...

I'm running ArcNET with TurboDOS, I would imagine that CP/M would be able to interface with the hardware as well. However, the software would probably be limited to a stand alone executable. With TurboDOS, the ArcNET driver is genned right into the kernel and is available as a resource at all times. Multiple clients can use disk over the network simultaneously, that's when file locking also become a necessity. Remote console access and print spooling is also networked in TurboDOS.

For the most part, ArcNET hardware are all compliant with the 9026 chip, so it's kind of standard, but what you're sending over ArcNET can be whatever you want. I have not seen a CP/M ArcNET implementation.
 
How difficult is it to configure TurboDOS for a CP/M based system?
Click to expand...


The inner workings of TurboDOS is very different than CP/M. The TurboDOS programmers guide gives a list of drivers that every system needs to have written for it to run. The drivers need to be written according to the guidelines in the manual and compiled with the TASM utility supplied by Software 2000. Once you have compiled the drivers, then they are linked together and merged with the vanilla OS kernel from Software 2000 using their TLINK utility. The .SYS file that gets output is your new OS. Not difficult if you have the drivers, but it was mostly OEMs and consulting firms that did the hard work of writing the drivers.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Are you running CP/NET?

You need an MP/M server for it, but it's not a bad resource share for its time.
Click to expand...

Not yet, however I've begun to research it...

An MP/M server can be virtualied, however I'm hoping a DOS or Linux server or client exists.... And after further research:

"The server was not limited to MP/M. In the version 1.2 manual, there
is a section about building a non MP/M
based server. Hector Peraza wrote a brilliant cp/net server for Linux
which I often use."
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.os.cpm/eRG5vRJlGKY

Here it is: http://p112.sourceforge.net/index.php?cpnet
 
Last edited:
"The server was not limited to MP/M. In the version 1.2 manual, there
is a section about building a non MP/M
based server. Hector Peraza wrote a brilliant cp/net server for Linux
which I often use."
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!...pm/eRG5vRJlGKY

Here it is: http://p112.sourceforge.net/index.php?cpnet
Click to expand...

Interesting, but you get the idea of networking under CP/M was pretty primitive.

I seem to recall that Novell (or whatever it was before it was Novell) had a CP/M networking setup that ran on Televideo boxes (don't recall the details; only that physically it was based on RS-422).

There are also the one-CPU-per-user-in-a-box systems that used CP/M, such as Molecular, but I don't recall the details.
 
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