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TRS-80 OS Subdirectories

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ngtwolf

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Been wondering this for a while. Was there ever any TRS-80 OS's that supported subdirectories? Maybe even a hack? Was this just not supported on CP/M at all, or specific to older machines like the TRS-80?

Just curious since it sure would be nice if we could do subdirectories on our hard drives. :)
 
unfortunatly no , there are no sub directories as you know them, I know someone made a program that made illusion fo a sub folder (database) that kept everything neat but never was able to find it
 
IIRC either CP/M 3 has a kludge for treating user areas as makeshift subdirectories or there's a fairly common BDOS extension to support it, but the problem is that even then most applications don't support it so you're really just stuck with extended access in the CCP. It's probably the single biggest issue I have with CP/M.

(MSX-DOS - Microsoft's in-house CP/M clone/hack for MSX computers - used FAT12 instead of the CP/M native filesystem, and I think version 2 supported subdirectories, but I can't really remember. Wonder how simple that would be to backport...)
 
Well, while it's probably not exactly what you're after, but for the TRS-80 Model 16 there is TRS-XENIX.

There was a shareware "subdir" FOR LS-DOS 6, but as I recall it wasn't very robust.

I personally used DiskDISK on my Model 4D back in the day.
 
Some of the more obscure operating systems that supported directories on the TRS-80 are

TPM-I for the Model I
TPM-II for the Model II


Screen Shot 2020-04-17 at 5.03.53 PM.png

UNOS for the Model 16 - UNOS was an unreleased Unix-like multi-user operating system from Charles River Data Systems that was ported to the Model 16 and ready for testing by Tandy R&D. It was killed by Microsoft as they made a deal with Tandy at the last minute for XENIX.
 
The actual program was part of the CN80 collection. As I was looking for a list of those files, I ran across some good news: David Cooper's site, www.trs-80.us, has actual information on it again, even if that information is that it is being worked on. Take a look at http://www.trs-80.us and instructions are there on how to contact David Cooper, aka Marmotking right here on VCF.

I don't know the status of the David Goben collection of software that CN80 sold; David Cooper may.

UPDATE: Check on Ira's site, http://www.trs-80.com. There's an older version there.
 
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Made a little progress. There appears to be multiple iterations of this Subdir program. Some related, some might not be.

SubDir 1.0 on Ira's site. No-one seems to know where that one came from and listed as 'unknown programmer'. Looks like it was for LDos 5.x. This was re-released in TRSLink Magazine #29.

SubDir 2.1 This was an revised version of the program done by Richard VanHouten. This is listed as SD56V21.ZIP (or .ARC) and was released in TRSLink Magazine #29.

Model 4 Subdirectory Utilities. This is the one with that nice PDF. Since we have no idea where to find this, can't really tell if it was modified from the earlier programs or David Goben made something completely different. While the older SubDir programs only had CD, MkDir, RmDir and PWDx (some kind of path command), this version has a few more tools including SCAT (Subdirectory CAT?), SDIR (Subdirectory DIR), Unremove (undelete?), and Swap command.

Anyway, SD56V21 document says it's offered to the public domain, so i'm going to attach it here since there shouldn't be any copyright issues. There is also the ASM source code included which encompasses both 1.0 and 2.1 files (so no need to hunt down the 1.0 archive on Ira's site).

Would be nice to find that David Goben one, but I'm not sure if it'll do anything more or better.

View attachment SD56V21.ZIP
 
hornbetw said:
PWD should be Print Working Directory, a common Unix/Linux command to tell you what directory you're in currently.

Tom
Click to expand...

I think it's unrelated, just a coincidence for acronyms. From the documentation:

PWDx/CMD - Paths of Working Directories. Shows you the paths of the
directories like the MS-DOS command, PATH. It shows all logical drives and the current active directory on that drive. If you are just using the regular directory, it displays \.
 
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