Recent content by rlauzon

I have the Stupid PET tricks module (along with a SD2PET for "hard drive" support). I also have PETTerm. But while the keyboard of my 4032 is much nicer than the original "calculator" keyboards that the PET has, BBSing on it is not real fun. The keyboard layout is pretty bad for touch typing.

Already ordered 2. And I'm on the wait list for the next batch of CE-158X. I love playing with my PC-2s.

I used Edwin a lot back in the 2-disk-drive days. I liked it because it used the Turbo Pascal-like commands (Wordstar?) that I was familiar with and it was small and fast. Today, for my MS-DOS machines, I use Norton Edit.

It depends on what old hardware you have. For my MS-DOS systems with 3.5" floppy drives, I have a USB-to-3.5" floppy drive that I can use on my modern systems. For MS-DOS systems with hard drives, I use a IDE-to-CF adapter and the CF card just mounts to my modern system. For my TRS-80s, I have...

Most CP/M systems were designed similar to the way minicomputers were designed: A computer part, and a terminal part. The fact that they were often in the same box made people forget that. So what most of these systems lacked was a way to access screen memory since the screen memory was **not**...

But part of the problem is that Gary didn't have CP/M-86 when IBM needed it. The second part of the problem is that CP/M-86 is not compatible with CP/M-80, so owners would have to re-purchase all their software. So the choices were 1. Stick with the Z80 and CP/M-80, which was harder to do...

The TRS-80 line didn't like CP/M very well due to the memory layout (CP/M expected things to be in certain places and the TRS-80's didn't do that). I think we had to wait until the Model 4 came out to get CP/M. I know that I have a version that runs on my 4P.

Yup. Directories and price. Those are probably the two things that caused CP/M to go down. When the IBM-PC came out, the low end systems were supposed to be "boot to BASIC and use a cassette", but that era was already ending. Heck, even my high school had floppy drives for their Commodore...

One of the things that I've learned when doing a "deep dive" into any historical subject is that the concept of "era" only means "when X was dominant". There were many years where the old was still in wide use while the new was growing. So there's going to be the "era of CP/M" where CP/M was...

Almost right on the modem. It's powered by the internal edge connector. But it hooks up to the serial port via a short cable. But back to the question at hand. Mine lives outside too. But I've seen most people replace one of the floppy drives with their FreHD. You can get floppy bay...

I think Adrian's Digital Basement and 8-bit Guy both did PET troubleshooting videos. That's probably a good place to start.

Having worked on both machines, I can say that the 1110HD and 1100FD are VERY different. Many of the components may be the same, but about the only things that can be swapped on them are the floppy drives and (probably) the LCD. For example, the 1100FD has DOS in ROM where the 1110HD has no...

Oh, well, 20 minutes lost. 2 Tandy 1110HDs saved. I say that's a good trade. I got out the multi-meter and checked F1. Sure enough, it's popped. And the good news is I know why it popped on both units. So all I need to do is replace F1 on both.

Since I spent the better part of 20 minutes trying to figure out where the fuses are (since they don't look like fuses to me), here they are. They are the white, rectangular items.

I need an assumption check. So I have a XTA2SD board - which has a 40 pin connector on it. My Tandy 1110HD has a 44 pin connector. I purchased a 44 to 40 pin cable that does nothing more than connect pin 1 to pin 1, pin 2 to pin 2, etc. plus gives me a MOLEX connector for power (pins 43 and 44...