• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

ADDS Multivision

J

Jannie

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 5, 2017
Messages
276
Location
Cape Town
Looking for any information and, especially disk images, for the ADDS Multivision system, if anyone can help, please.

In general, where are the good online sites to find obscure disk images?


ADDS Multivision - 04.jpgADDS Multivision - 02.jpg
 
looks like people have been trying to find this for 30 years

verycomputer.com - This website is for sale! - verycomputer Resources and Information.

This website is for sale! verycomputer.com is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, verycomputer.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!
www.verycomputer.com www.verycomputer.com
I checked the full Maslin archive, and there isn't anything from ADDS there.

I have the theory of operations manual on bitsavers, copied by sites all over the net.
 
Last edited:
The Principles of Operation on bitsavers is pretty comprehensive, including schematics for the beast. It shouldn't be impossible to get MP/M running on the thing.
 
Al Kossow said:
looks like people have been trying to find this for 30 years

verycomputer.com - This website is for sale! - verycomputer Resources and Information.

This website is for sale! verycomputer.com is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, verycomputer.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!
www.verycomputer.com www.verycomputer.com
I checked the full Maslin archive, and there isn't anything from ADDS there.

I have the theory of operations manual on bitsavers, copied by sites all over the net.
Click to expand...
Thanks Al, appreciate it.
Also thanks for the link to the other posts from the 90's. I'll definitely see if I can find some of those people. :)

From those posts, it would seem that MUON and MP/M could also be key words to search on.
 
Last edited:
I know it's a very little contribution, but on the MSPP microbee archive, "tech/tech" section they recovered a tool named "BEE Alien".
It is capable of reading on "ADDS Multivision" disk type to extract data.
The uBee512 emulator is good enough to simulate the low level drive formatting capabilities, well, also MAME should be able to.
SO creating a valid DATA disk for the Multivision is not an impossible task, just quite difficult. Building a valid CP/M BIOS and making it bootable is another pair of shoes..
 
By dissecting the mentioned tool, I can say the MUON Operating System (Applied Digital Data Systems Inc.) disks had 40 tracks, 2 sides, 10 sectors per track, 256 directory entries, 2 boot tracks. Extent size: 2048.
 
Jannie said:
This is the EPROM on the CPU board.
Click to expand...
Jennie, my.company was one of Applied Digital Data Systems first Multivision resellers in the NY Metro Area in 1979-1980. We spent many hours at they facility in Hauppauge, NY debugging the firmware, hard drive controller and MUON. We developed a number of small business management systems to run on the platform and I have an full Multivision stack consisting of the I, II and III modules. The system was last booted in 2017. I am.looking for a home for the system.
 
I was part of the developing team for the Multivision. I wrote the drivers, low level hw interface, diagnostics and the like.
Adds started the Mulivision project offering the team of about a dozen of us to shrink the System 70 (8" disks, 1kx1 static memory, 8080 cpu) from a desk to a shoebox & make it multiuser in time for the NCC show 8 months later. We did it but the "pot of gold" promise by Geoff Karlin (director of the group) turned into one big lie for me.
Adds purchased all of Microsoft's apps in source so we could modify them to run on the earlier product - System 70 - which was developed to replace dumb terminals in mainframe systems.
We wrote comm apps (which became PC Anywhere after this product line was shut down), Word of the time (faster than any other editer), an ISAM DB (which was far better than DBase).
My two officesmates at the time were personally offered jobs my Bill Gates to be MS employees 35,36 & 37. two of us - me included - turned him down because of how obfuscated their apps were written (to be as small as humanly possible). Officemate # 3 accepted & later flew back to visit his parents on his jet.

If you would like to chat on my purchasing/trading for your Multivison, I would be VERY GLAD to talk.
 
ymssystems said:
I was part of the developing team for the Multivision. I wrote the drivers, low level hw interface, diagnostics and the like.
Adds started the Mulivision project offering the team of about a dozen of us to shrink the System 70 (8" disks, 1kx1 static memory, 8080 cpu) from a desk to a shoebox & make it multiuser in time for the NCC show 8 months later. We did it but the "pot of gold" promise by Geoff Karlin (director of the group) turned into one big lie for me.
Adds purchased all of Microsoft's apps in source so we could modify them to run on the earlier product - System 70 - which was developed to replace dumb terminals in mainframe systems.
We wrote comm apps (which became PC Anywhere after this product line was shut down), Word of the time (faster than any other editer), an ISAM DB (which was far better than DBase).
My two officesmates at the time were personally offered jobs my Bill Gates to be MS employees 35,36 & 37. two of us - me included - turned him down because of how obfuscated their apps were written (to be as small as humanly possible). Officemate # 3 accepted & later flew back to visit his parents on his jet.

If you would like to chat on my purchasing/trading for your Multivison, I would be VERY GLAD to talk.
Click to expand...
Thank you for sharing this interesting story!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top