Date   : Sun, 10 Jul 1983 20:46:33 CDT
From   : Stan.Hanks <stan.rice@rand-relay>
Subject: DEC Rainbow software

WANTED !!!!WANTED !!!!WANTED !!!!WANTED !!!!WANTED !!!!WANTED !!!!WANTED !!!!

Tree of Knowledge or Apple therefrom. Seeds not accecptible. Snake
furnished by DEC.

*****************************************************************************

Now that the frivolity is out of the way, I desparately need some info
on the DEC Rainbow. Rice is running a summer computer camp using these
beasties, and I (being our resident CP/M type system hacker) got elected 
to provided technical support. 

My problems are many; my resources are few. I will supposedly be
getting a technical manual sometime in the next month or so, but that
will be a bit too late.  Any help that can be provided will be muchly
appreciated. And now, my problems:

1) I need to be able to format disks for the 100. There is (as best I
can tell) NO format utility supplied with it.  Q: Is there one that I
am just not seeing? Q: Does ANYONE out there have one? Q: Does anyone
know what the disk pararmeters (tpi, sides, skew factor, etc.) are so
that I can write my own on a REAL machine?

2) I need to pipe some stuff over from a very different machine. 
It is, however, another CP/M machine, so I could PIP from it's RS232
port to the Rainbow's communications port. Q: How is the communications
port defined in the Rainbow IOBYTE? Is it defined in the IOBYTE? Q: Is
there a more convenient way to do this? (I was planning on PIP'ing in
HEX mode, as it is a HEX file.

3) Should I just give up and throw it (physically) out the window?

Thanks. Replying to me is a bit difficult. Please use one of the
following, regardless of how my return address looks when it gets to
you.

                       stan.rice@rand-relay            ARPANet
                       stan@rice                       CSNet
                       ...!{parsec,lbl-csam}!rice!stan uucp

                       Stan Hanks
                       Department of Computer Science
                       Rice University
                       Houston TX