Date   : Mon, 13 Mar 2006 23:01:21 +0000
From   : Fragula <fragula@...>
Subject: Re: 6502s and SASI/SCSI.

Hi Rob!

Rob wrote:

>> Two discs and one manual of the "Pace OBBS BBS System" for the BBC 
> ...by me ... :-)
Ohhh! And how would you feel about this getting imaged and distributed
to the 20 or so hard core Beeb nutters left in the world? :-D

> I was paid the princely sum of 1 VHS video recorder (rrp £360)
You did well! Some folk I know got paid with 10 year old unMOTable
Citroen 2CV with a door missing, a box of 50 cassette copies of a
sinclair game that had flopped two years before, four uncased italian
14"  RGB monitors, and I once got paid with a (used) disk drive
(DSDD40T) 10 blank floppy disks, 10 pre-used 27128s with bent pins, 20
blank 15 minute unlabelled cassettes, a few bottles of Bells (drunk at
the end of each working day!) and a fairly small bag of "herbal tobacco
additive", for one job, which entailed two consecutive 7 day weeks of
straight 8am-11pm lunch-is-pastie-on-keyboard 6502 coding. (a disk
analyser/duplicator)

IIRC that was when I actually learned 6502 (my 2nd
not-typed-from-listing 6502 program ever, the first being a swipecard
reader/writer. Don't remember if I ever got payed for that.

Actually I might have got the prom blower the same way on another occasion.

According to my ladyfriend I was babbling menmonics and complaining
about my ROM being full, through what little sleep I managed to get. Fun
times.. :-/

 for
> that... oh, and I got a hand made, development, auto-answer board for a
> Nightingale modem too,
>  I've still
> got the board, but not the modem for some reason.)
Ohhh! That's the reason I didn't run it. No auto answer!
> 
> I'm not sure I ever saw an "original" pace manual for it - I've got the
> proofs, though.
Its a small thin thing. Should I scan it for the documentation project?

> I think it was the first (of very many!) BBS softwares for the Beeb,
Only one I ever saw.

> a couple of months...  I first ran it on an old 300bps GPO Modem
LOL.. I used to have one of those.. Well mine was "multi standard", did
V23 as well, but no dialling or answer. Big tan box with a cardframe
inside.. power supply module. Modulator, Demodulatorr and something
else..(?)

Does anyone else remember Spitting Image? Well I didn't have a cable, so
I just scratched up some connectors and wire, and sat down with the
soldering iron about 5Pm. My mate Ian turned up, and we had to figure
out how the thing went together with the beeb, armed with a scope and
tracing the tracks. We got it working properly by about 10PM (tested by
surreptitiously linking the wire from our house, to the neighbours (I
didn't have a phone, coulnd't afford one!) who had the old GPO "box" on
the window still.. and just tapping (with my mate holding the wires in
place) on to that. IIRC the number for either Telecom Gold or Prestel
was 444444, and you had to crawl in (username 4444444444 and password
4444 = on all fours) That was the start.. Names like "Gnome at Home" and
"Owl BBS" spring to mind.

We gpt into the living room for some couch time, and to get the flux
fumes out of the nostrils, at around 10 or 10:30pm, just in time to see
the start of Spitting Image (around 1984 i guess) and well. either we
had been working too hard, or some demented latex muppet creature with a
passing resemblance to someone from "Micro Live" or somesuch, was
running back and forth the screen between sketches waving a coiled up
wire with a D25 on one end and domino DIN on the other yelling something
each time about it being an "RS232C Connector". Ian and I looked
<expletive deleted> speechless@... other.. it must have been that
same look on my face...  Then i thought.. Well a country of 50-odd (at
that time) million people, somebody had to be doing it.. it just..

Does anybody else remember that sketch? Did I dream it???

> was so huge that the beeb sat on top of it!
Must be around the same size as mine.. Big brown diecast sides, sheet
metal top and bottom, weight about 30 kilos. Large black and chrome
"GPO" badge, and "property of H.M. Government" on the back? Brown line
cable with spade connectors?

 I've still got all my
> original and backup working discs, plus I'm sure I'll have the source
> code (i.e. the uncompressed Basic!) somewhere too..
Grrrrrinnnn! :-D

> When I finally get
> my econet all set back up, I'll try and find it and release a clean
> copy.  Maybe get an emulated beeb up on a server somewhere running the 
> BBS again...
Hmm. Don't fancy building in a telnet-over-econet server do ya? ;->

Cheers!

M.