Date : Tue, 08 May 1984 02:30:07-PDT (Tue)
From : hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!ritcv!moscom!@Ucb-Vax.ARPA
Subject: Review of Morrow MD3
To practice what I preach - here is a short review of a Morrow MD3 I just
acquired. (I had a DEC Rainbow 100 for a year until I changed companys last
November - you may remember my reviews of that.)
The Morrow is a bit hard to get. They don't have many dealers. Call their
800 number and get a list, all far away, and start calling. I got a MD3
without terminal, $1499 list, 4MHz Z-80, 64K RAM, 2 DSDD floppies (384K user
space each), 2 serial ports, 1 parallel port, NewWord, Correct-it, LogiCalc,
MBASIC, Personal Pearl, Pilot, Quest Bookkeeper, & CP/M 2.2 all in the one
package.
The unit is quite small (16.5"w x 12"d w/plugs x 5.5"h), easily fits on the
corner of your desk. Has a sturdy metal case with a flat top that can support
a printer or terminal. The unit has no fan and is dead quiet unless the disks
are reading or writing, and those are quiet, too. Nothing gets hot or even
warm, except strangely, the floppy disks themselves are warm when you pull
them out even when they have not been spinning. Everything worked right out
of the box just exactly as described in the manuals. No surprises of any sort,
no mad scrambles back to the manuals, no calls needed to the company. The
manuals are all well done, particularly for a novice. I have it right next to
a FM set and on the same circuit with a TV and notice no interference (but,
the Concept terminal frazzes some FM stations).
The serial port to the terminal comes setup at 9600 baud with ^S/^S flow
control (well thought out, no zoom-off-the-screen, no scramble to find that
damn ^Q). It took a lot of doing to get it to work with my beloved Concept
108 terminal, but most normal terminals are included in the setup menu. The
serial port to the printer/modem has a "gotcha" in that the 12 and 5 volt
power is brought out on it. Connect it wrong and you get smoke (this is
clearly shown in the manual, as are scores of jumper options for various
situations). I bypassed all this in connecting to the 212 UDS modem by
wireing up a M to F cable with the following 6 wires: 1 - 1 , 2 - 3 , 3 - 2 ,
7 - 7 , 8 - 20 , 20 - 8. The parallel port uses a standard Radio Shack 26-4401
printer cable (not supplied) with the ribbon side down.
The following 12 liner keyed into DDT gives a terminal pass-through
(use ^Z to get back to CP/M, it doesn't hangup on you):
lxi sp,0150
call f320
jz 0113
call f332
cpi 01a
jz 0
out 0fe
call f4d4
jz 0103
mov c,a
call f482
jmp 0103
The CP/M release disk comes with all the CP/M goodies (including the disk
formatting program - are you listening DEC?) and the complete heavily
commented BIOS and BOOT source. Now that is thoughtfulness to be commended.
There is a program to change the disk read and write parameters to emulate the
disk units of several other CP/M systems. Thus you can read and write IBM PC
(CP/M only), Osborne, & Xerox disks. The BIOS has a neat feature for allowing
disks C, D, & E to be addressed even though there are only A & B physical disk
units. The BIOS handles the operator messages to change disks in the A unit,
the running program doesn't know anything about it. This is very, very handy
with text editing where you want to save out something to another disk, or
read in something; for spreadsheet work the same way; and for just copying
things on and off different disks. I don't see why this hasn't caught on as
the standard way to handle floppies. I can't think of a single thing to gripe
about the hardware, manuals, or the system software. It all runs very well
indeed with lots of thoughtful extras to make things easier.
The NewWord text preparation program is an exact copy of a subset of WordStar.
It works exactly as documented, is very fast, and well thought out. However,
I would prefer full WordStar. The only missing feature I have run into so far
is the "print to a file" capability, but I sorely need that to interchange
text easily with UNIX (that hates those 8th bit thingies). As a long term
emacs, and a sometimes vi, user - let me state that WordStar and NewWord are
a hundred time easier to use and have more useful capability - if WordStar
were available on DEC-20 and UNIX, emacs and vi (and nroff) would join BAL,
AutoCoder, FAP, ALGOL and the other guru'isms of the past.
The LogiCalc is a good-enough Visi-Clone, but I got SuperCalc 2 which is
much better (SuperCalc 2 has date handling functions for scheduleing and
project planning uses). Quest is super; now if only I had my own business
to do bookkeeping for. MBASIC is the regular MBASIC - it runs all the games
from RBBSs I tried it on (JETSET2 is the most fun). Personal Pearl has too
thick a manual for me to get into, and the cursor keys are yet a different set
- phooy! Correct-It is dumb. The authors couldn't have possibly ever used it
themselves, and neither could the Morrow people. It natters at you constantly
about menu selections nobody in their right mind would ever use, demands you
type in the same correction over and over if you misspell something more than
once, and then always asks you at the end for the name of your dictionary file
- which of course has some inane name that you couldn't possibly remember, and
if you don't cough it up the program promptly forgets all your new words -
dumb! The only sour note in the package. PILOT is OK, perfect for the menu
front-end Morrow supplies; and really good for creating CAI scripts. The
menu front-end is really handy for doing the initial setup. Much better than
going through a printed checklist. It only takes a ^C to escape from, so it
doesn't get in the way at all (unlike the menu stuff on the FORTUNE and 3B2).
All in all, I like the Morrow. I use it for SuperCalc and NewWord mostly, and
it does these both with adequate speed and competence. It took all of an
hour to get the terminal pass-through, MBOOT, and MODEM up an running; thanks
to the BIOS source and experience with DDT, SAVE, and PIP. My impression is
that it is faster and easier to use than the IBM PC and Rainbow - it sure is
more pleasent to use (I love this Concept keyboard).
(strictly the personal opinions of) Mel Haas , houxe!mel