Date   : Thu, 22 Aug 1991 18:31:24 GMT
From   : cis.ohio-state.edu!sample.eng.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!po.CWRU.Edu!rfd@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Richard F. Drushel)
Subject: CP/M and the Coleco ADAM

       This is just a feeler post to see how many (if any) ADAM
users are out there.  Locally (Cleveland, Ohio USA) our users
group has a lot of activity with ADAM CP/M 2.2 and a PD rewrite
of CP/M called TDOS 4.58 (which accesses all the 3rd-party
hardware developed for the ADAM after Coleco went bankrupt, like
320K/720K/1.2M/1.44M disk drives, 10/20/40/60M hard drives,
RS232 cards, parallel printers, and paged memory expanders up to
1 meg).  Most ADAM CP/Mers/TDOSers use 80-column serial terminals
to avoid the ugly screen shifting right-and-left necessitated
by ADAM's 40-column video chip (under TDOS; ADAM CP/M 2.2 used a
graphics mode of the VDP to get a whopping 31 columns).  WordStar
3.0 is a big favorite for word processing, and there is a CP/M
version of dBASE which has much use.

       All in all, our orphan ADAM is not doing too badly in
a few key centers in Canada and the USA.  And not just with CP/M
and TDOS---there have been many utility, graphics, game and
computer languages written lately in ADAM's internal EOS opera-
ting system.

       I have programmed PDP-11/34s, IBM xx86s and Macintoshes;
but I have *REALLY* learned how to program hardware from my
Z80 programming on my 64K ADAM with 16K of VRAM, 2 256K digital
data drives (mini cassette-based file-structured magtape) and
2 160K single-sided floppies.

       WordStar 1.0 for the IBM-PC was a 26K .COM file ported
over from the CP/M version.  What is WordStar 5.0, 300K of
bloated, compiled C or Turbo Pascal?  8-bit microprocessor
programmers are probably the last group of real assembly
language programmers left (except for maybe a few OS programmers
at MicroSoft and Apple).  I hope the few of us remaining
continue to maintain CP/M; it is not a bad OS by any means.
UNIX is not the Philosopher's Stone!  :)
-- 
Regards, Rich Drushel  CWRU Dept. of Biology
InterNet rfd@po.cwru.edu   BitNet rfd%po.cwru.edu@cunyvm
"They fell:  for Heaven to them no hope imparts, / Who hear not
for the beating of their hearts." --Edgar Allan Poe, "Al Aaraaf"