Date   : Fri, 20 Mar 1992 11:17:24 GMT
From   : dog.ee.lbl.gov!hellgate.utah.edu!caen!deccrl!news.crl.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!maxi.enet.dec.com!brown@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Raymond J. Brown)
Subject: Re: Need someone who knows about CPM...

In article <1992Mar19.070244.18051@bradley.bradley.edu>, trekker@buhub.bradley.edu
(Tim Lister) writes...
> 
>    At my evening job they are having me sell off some 
>Rainbow 100A's that they used as terminals.
>    I am surprised people are still using CPM.  What is it
>good for?  What are its advantages?  The computers each have
>two 5.25" floppy drives.  HOw do I determine if they are 
>800K or 1.6Meg?           
> 
>Tim Lister

A Rainbow 100A is much more than a CPM machine. It contains both a Z80
and an 8088 processor and can run CPM 80/86 or MSDOS. It was designed
before the IBM PC had become an industry standard and therefor is not
IBM compatable. The differences are in the way it handles the screen
keyboard and disks. The disks are RX50's and are 80 track 10 sector
single sided for 400K bytes each.  A driver exists that will allow
an IBM AT class computer to read and write the RX50 formated disks.
At one time there were Rainbow support groups all over the country.
There are still many of these units being used.
Text only programs written for the IBM PC that access the screen
and keyboard using DOS calls will run on the Rainbow.
Ray Brown  rjbrown@giamem.enet.dec.com
              or
           rjbrown%giamem.enet@decwrl.dec.com
                or
           decwrl!giamem.enet!rjbrown