I am not totally sure where to post this - please forgive if not really in correct forum
A couple of months ago i was approached by the father-in-law of a good friend. He has a software business that deals in gas station management, that he started about 30 years ago. In his early days he had stuff running on an ALTOS 8000 platform - now it is all on linux servers etc.
However he got a wild hair up his butt he wanted an Altos8000 to show off in his headquarters as memorabilia of his company.
So he found one somewhere. It did not work. That's when he approached me.
After pulling out my hair (and i have very little to pull) for a couple of months, i have the machine successfully booting CPM 2.21. I have a working Altos diagnostic disc, and a working CPM boot disc constructed (THANKS to bitsavers for image files!!!!! and to Dave Dunsfield for his IMD tools!!!!!)
I am able to successfully format discs, make boot copies, run memtest etc. My CPM knowledge is very rudimentary, but I can get this far.
So my question is, what now?
He has given me some discs that presumably had his early software on them - only a couple have anything readable on them.
Some of these have files with an .ovl extension. Does anyone know what these files might be? Or how to use them?
Does anyone know of techniques for recovering data from bad discs?
How do you load software into a machine like this?
Is getting a disc the only way?.
Is there a file transfer protocol where software could be loaded from the rs232 port? I see a program called FTP.COM on one the discs that could be read. Does anyone know what this does, or how to use it? I run it - it just puts up the character 'w' over and over.
Does anyone have a guess at what the original programmers would have been using as far as language and compiler on a machine like this? circa 1979-1980 I believe.
A couple of months ago i was approached by the father-in-law of a good friend. He has a software business that deals in gas station management, that he started about 30 years ago. In his early days he had stuff running on an ALTOS 8000 platform - now it is all on linux servers etc.
However he got a wild hair up his butt he wanted an Altos8000 to show off in his headquarters as memorabilia of his company.
So he found one somewhere. It did not work. That's when he approached me.
After pulling out my hair (and i have very little to pull) for a couple of months, i have the machine successfully booting CPM 2.21. I have a working Altos diagnostic disc, and a working CPM boot disc constructed (THANKS to bitsavers for image files!!!!! and to Dave Dunsfield for his IMD tools!!!!!)
I am able to successfully format discs, make boot copies, run memtest etc. My CPM knowledge is very rudimentary, but I can get this far.
So my question is, what now?
He has given me some discs that presumably had his early software on them - only a couple have anything readable on them.
Some of these have files with an .ovl extension. Does anyone know what these files might be? Or how to use them?
Does anyone know of techniques for recovering data from bad discs?
How do you load software into a machine like this?
Is getting a disc the only way?.
Is there a file transfer protocol where software could be loaded from the rs232 port? I see a program called FTP.COM on one the discs that could be read. Does anyone know what this does, or how to use it? I run it - it just puts up the character 'w' over and over.
Does anyone have a guess at what the original programmers would have been using as far as language and compiler on a machine like this? circa 1979-1980 I believe.