Date   : Wed, 08 Jul 1992 19:22:57 GMT
From   : ulowell!woods.ulowell.edu!welchb@uunet.uu.net
Subject: Re: Any AMSTRAD users out there?

I sent email to Plane to clarify some points, because of still-
confusing info.  Note that in particular, I am talking about the PCW8256
Personal Word Processor, sold on the American market.  In the meantime, 
here is some food for thought.

A lot of this messing around pertains both directly and indirectly to
how much disk space is available, where, in what format.  I.e.,
maybe I would not need a B drive to gain more space, if I had a
communications interface so I could upload some of the stuff from my
A drive to some other machine.  But it is probably fair to say that
few people have modem connections to their Amstrad.

What I am now suggesting is something I would have considered illegal
a few years ago; it may still be impractical now.  That is, that there
be a depository (reachable by telnet) which has the Locomotive and
CP/M binaries; this might enable some of us, by a roundabout series of
downloadings, to get 3.5 disks or 5.25 disks with the correct software
on them, which would be bootable as the A drive.  Obviously the easiest
way is to first get the foreign drive installed as the B drive, and let the
Amstrad itself do the thinking about how to copy correctly from A to
B.  And, I admit, I do not need such support at this instant; I was able
to get my A drive going again by taking things apart, and putting them
back together.  I however do have a program, using CP/M on a DEC Robin,
which reads and writes in many 5.25 formats of different machines, and
I thought that that could possibly be a way of kludging something
together which would be readable by the Amstrad.  Does anyone know what
the numbers are (tracks, sectors, bytes, etc.)?
-- 
Brendan Welch, UMass/Lowell, W1LPG,  welchb@woods.ulowell.edu