Date   : Wed, 04 Aug 2004 09:57:59 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Winchester user manual scan anywhere?

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 00:50, Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
> > Message-ID: <1091483431.24463.16.camel@...>
>  
> Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...> wrote:
> > There's some interesting stuff on the drive, including some references
> > and details on Brazil (the OS as used on the ARM Evaluation Kit IIRC),
>  
> Drool!

There's also reference to a machine called Squirrel; I'm still trying to
work out what that is. Sounds like it was some sort of super-BBC clone
by a different manufacturer - I'm not aware that it ever made the light
of day. The data I've got implies that Acorn were worried that the clone
manufacturer was lifting large portions of their OS code without
permission, so maybe they got sued into oblivion...

> > mysterious thing called ARX (see
> > http://www.fact-index.com/a/ar/arx.html), and what appears to be an
>  
> Drooooool!
>  
> I'd love to have a play with a copy of whatever you recover from the
> drive.

Well most of it's Topologika source code (which isn't really interesting
to me personally), but there are a few other snippets of info here and
there. 

There's a vague reference implying there was a working TCP/IP stack for
the ARM Evaluation Kit produced in-house - I'm not sure how the heck
that works (IP over Econet?). Not found any specific data yet though.

There are a lot of floppies too, and I have the card index for them
which hints at nice things like source code for the various Acorn OSes
(including the ABC line). Remains to be seen if that's the case and if
they're readable though...
 
> XFer should just use the file paths you tell it to. If you tell it to
> transfer ":4.fred.jim.sheila" it should do it. I've only ever played with
> version 3.00 from 1998 which had a lot of hardwired any assumptions
> built into it.

Phew - at least there's a linux version. I didn't realise it used its
own server; I'd assumed it talked a well-known modem transfer protocol
so that I could use any old comms app at the remote end - d'oh!
 
> You could use the "ADFS Utils"'s backup program to back it up to ADFS
> floppies. How big is the drive?  The biggest 8-bit Acorn ADFS hard drive
> I've seen is 30M, so that would go onto 40x640k ADFS disks (assuming the
> drive is full), from which you could transfer onto a RISC OS machine.
> Thence, it could be copied anywhere.

Yep, this one's a 30MB and it's pretty full. Dircopy did the job happily
of copying from the 30MB drive to this larger one, and the data looks
good. 

Dircopy didn't throw up any errors, but I'm not sure if it would or if
it silently ignores any problems - the source 30MB drive made a few
trashed-sector noises when reading so it's possible a few files are
corrupt. I'm not aware of a utility to recursively verify files between
two drives though. But then if there are a few bad sectors on the source
drive there's not a whole lot I can do about it anyway.

> According to Jon's Winchester User Guide, which I've borrowed to
> photocopy,

Will you be scanning that? (hint, hint :-)

seeya

Jules