I bought this wonderful system off Craigslist a few weeks ago from someone who worked at Mostek in the early 80s as a product manager. He was given this machine which he listed as a "Mostek Development System".
It is a prototype that was made by Mostek around 1984 (or 1983) as they were trying to get a foothold in the microcomputer (complete) systems market I believe.
It uses the STD-Bus, a variant of the S-100 bus, and has 5 Mostek MDX cards installed on a backplane: CPU3 (Z80), RAM (128 K), FLP2 (floppy controller), SASI (hard disk controller), and an SIO card (serial input/output). This is driven by a 250 w power supply. There is a 10 MB hard disk (Miniscribe III) and a 5.25" DD, DS floppy drive installed in the custom made case (the owner said the case alone must have cost Mostek about $500 to get custom made back in the 80s - its super durable and well made). CP/M 3.0 was installed on the hard disk, and the system booted off the hard disk reliably.
The floppy controller was configured to drive an 8" drive, which was also included in the sale. This was external to the main unit and connected to one of the ports in the back. Lots of 8" floppies were included, including one entitled "CP/M 3.0 SYSGEN".
Also included was an ADDS terminal and keyboard. What an awesome system, I was so psyched to get it.
So... now the awful part.
I don't know much about CP/M to begin with, but even less about version 3.0. For some unknown (and ridiculously stupid) reason, I was messing around with the .COM files in the main root directory just to see what the programs did, thinking they couldn't do any actual damage without some prompt like "are you sure you want to do this?"
So long story short, I ran a program called GENCPM, and quickly ran through a series of prompts about floppy disk parameters and some other (probably critical) settings. The program exited with an error, saying it couldn't write to some file I believe.
The next time I booted the machine (and ever since), the CP/M Loader starts up and then hangs with the error message "can't read file CPM3.SYS"
So I've learned a LOT about CP/M 3 in the days since I made this ridiculous and horrendous mistake. It turns out I ran the utility that generates a new CPM3.SYS file, which is the customized version of CP/M for a specific hardware setup, and mine ended on an error. What a mess. This is truly a low point in my retro computing career.
Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
It is a prototype that was made by Mostek around 1984 (or 1983) as they were trying to get a foothold in the microcomputer (complete) systems market I believe.
It uses the STD-Bus, a variant of the S-100 bus, and has 5 Mostek MDX cards installed on a backplane: CPU3 (Z80), RAM (128 K), FLP2 (floppy controller), SASI (hard disk controller), and an SIO card (serial input/output). This is driven by a 250 w power supply. There is a 10 MB hard disk (Miniscribe III) and a 5.25" DD, DS floppy drive installed in the custom made case (the owner said the case alone must have cost Mostek about $500 to get custom made back in the 80s - its super durable and well made). CP/M 3.0 was installed on the hard disk, and the system booted off the hard disk reliably.
The floppy controller was configured to drive an 8" drive, which was also included in the sale. This was external to the main unit and connected to one of the ports in the back. Lots of 8" floppies were included, including one entitled "CP/M 3.0 SYSGEN".
Also included was an ADDS terminal and keyboard. What an awesome system, I was so psyched to get it.
So... now the awful part.
I don't know much about CP/M to begin with, but even less about version 3.0. For some unknown (and ridiculously stupid) reason, I was messing around with the .COM files in the main root directory just to see what the programs did, thinking they couldn't do any actual damage without some prompt like "are you sure you want to do this?"
So long story short, I ran a program called GENCPM, and quickly ran through a series of prompts about floppy disk parameters and some other (probably critical) settings. The program exited with an error, saying it couldn't write to some file I believe.
The next time I booted the machine (and ever since), the CP/M Loader starts up and then hangs with the error message "can't read file CPM3.SYS"
So I've learned a LOT about CP/M 3 in the days since I made this ridiculous and horrendous mistake. It turns out I ran the utility that generates a new CPM3.SYS file, which is the customized version of CP/M for a specific hardware setup, and mine ended on an error. What a mess. This is truly a low point in my retro computing career.
Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
