Date   : Wed, 16 Dec 1992 20:50:00 MST
From   : "Frank J. Wancho" <WANCHO@WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL>
Subject: PC/Blue

Mark,

The PC/Blue collection started out as a collection of CP/M programs
that were converted to run on the early IBM PCs.  This was at the time
the IBM PCs had just come out on the market and there was little to no
software, either public domain or commercial to run on them.  Because
most of the CP/M programs were written in an assembly language, such
as M80 or ASM, to fit within a max 56K address space, conversion
initially meant running the source code through an ASM-80 to ASM-86
translator.  The results were mostly usable, but far from efficient.

That inefficiency spawned a small market in Baby Blue cards, which, as
I recall, were single slot Z80 computers designed to run in an IBM PC
machine.  You could run your CP/M programs full tilt, usually much
faster than the translated version.  This resulted in the temporary
impression that the native IBM PC (at 4.77MHz) was much slower that
its Z80/Z80H counterparts, and, they were, until programs written in
native ASM-86 were developed, specially designed to take full
advantage of the 8088/8086 architecture.

The PC/Blue collection then became THE vehicle for the distribution of
public domain and the new category of shareware (also called begware
by dyed-in-the-wool CP/Mers who would never think of asking for money
for their masterpieces).  Nonetheless, the PC/Blue name stuck, in
spite of the fact that it went far beyond its original purpose.

For those of you who still remember, the PC/Blue collection was
originally available on the net from SIMTEL20, going back to 1983.  It
was removed at a time when we were severely short on disk space and
preferred to devote the space to the ever expanding MSDOS collection.
Besides, the PC/Blue collection had grown to over 600 volumes, with a
large percentage of newer and newer versions of previously released
packages (witness the modem programs "wars").  In other words, a lot
of self-duplication, and redundancy with the MSDOS collection, which
had the policy of keeping only the latest versions of much of the same
software packages.  (Also, the MSDOS collection was usually several
months ahead of the PC/Blue releases, which suffered severe latencies
due to daisy-chain surface mail and copying delays at each link.

By the time we got disk space elbow room, we had to remove the
"entertainment" (games) as a matter of policy and stick to carrying
only the justifiable packages.  Because the PC/Blue collection
contained "games" and because we would only carry canned packages
as-is, we did not restore the PC/Blue collection to online status,
deferring to the mirror sites.

--Frank