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PolyLetter 1987 - PolyMorphic

1. In The Public Domain The Other Guys Ads gt Reader s Responses Bit Bucket Sow MWoaoWoaononrr Coming Soon Modems and Communications software More BASIC for Beginners How to UNSAVEP protected Programs More System Programmers Notes Making your PC work like a Poly More Help BugNotes Public Domain Software etc Questions Can you find and answer the questions asked in this issue Send your answers and requests in FIRST CLASS MAIL Back volumes of PolyLetter are available at the same price as the current subscription rate US 15 00 yr Canada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Individual issues are also available 3 00 3 50 4 00 The Newsletter for PolyMorphic Systems Owners and Users PolyLetter 8704 Page Editorial Well I must apologize for being later that I expected This time am happy to report that I have successfully completed my masters thesis in philosophy All the rewriting is finally done I have also passed my oral exam and will be awarded my Master of Arts in Philosophy on September first Well enough of blowing my own horn I am taking to heart the many complaints that have asked me to use blank lines between paragraphs Even though that reduces the information content of an issue it does improve readability Speaking of readability have been looking at laser printers and drooling However the high cost keeps me from
2. Here s where the TV people would insert a commercial or worse yet say to be continued but I m not going to make you wait So back to our story Hurrah I got the gt gt back Now I try CONTINUE and select the display mode Sure enough the figures show what I had previously entered Now first thing I select the save option and write it out to disk Just for drill I try listing the offending drive 1 Would you believe it Now it works I ve traced the intermittent but that s another story for another time How to Fix a Dead Bird or The Essence of VaporWwear by Charles Steinhauser Now I know some of you at one time or the other has turned on your poly and the thing just rolled over toes up This always happens at just the worst possible moment The final inspector for your machine has a last name of Murphy Isn t that nice Well this article is written for you out there that has need to know how to get a dead bird back on it s beak uh feet First we must assume that you have at least some bare assortment of tools and your thinking hat close by Secondly you must have the confidence to attempt repair or the deal is off Here are a few fast tips to get your confidence up and show you just how easy it is to trouble shoot that silicon unit You turn on the system and there is nothing Lets check the obvious did you pay the electric company or maybe your wife spray painted the screen black this a pop
3. OREGON simulates a trip over the oregon trail from Independence Missouri to Oregon City Oregon in the year 1847 and is from Creative Computing May 1978 Your family of five will cover the 2040 mile Oregon Trail in 5 to 6 months if you make it alive BAGELS is another number guessing game from 101 Basic Games Converted for POLY 88 26 FEB 78 by David Larry Johnson 4106 Montreal Ave Prince George VA 23875 You must guess a number Clues will be given as follows PICO means one digit is correct but in wrong place FERMI means one digit is correct in the right place BAGELS means none of the digits are correct AUTORACE is an original program by Tom 5 Weaver 2716 Pinewood Drive Waldorf MD 20601 POUNCE is a game of tag between a cat and a mouse The cat tries to catch the mouse by jumping to exactly where the mouse is sitting Sometimes the cat catches the mouse and then the cat is the winner But sometimes the mouse runs into his hole and then the mouse is the winner From People s Computers Nov Dec 77 By Mac Oglesby Converted PolyLetter 8704 Page for POLY 88 and animation added by David Larry Johnson 25 Feb 78 REBEL is a Civil War simulation played from the Confederate point of view it was adapted from 10i Games by Tom de Felice Box 701 Leominster MA You will take part in a series of battles Facts and figures used are based on the actual occurances Most battles tend to result as they did in the Ci
4. Ed Dear Ralph April 14 1987 I can only repeat the plaudits the other writers to PolyLetter have given you It certainly is great to get helpful information when you are left out in the wilderness alone without any local computer store Bob Bybee has helped me out on the few problems have had with the Poly an 8813 I have his PCalc 1 1 and have found it very useful The reason for writing I have a Diablo 620 printer I get along fine until I try to print out a PolyLetter 8703 Page long program then start getting garbage I presume the computer is sending more information than the printer can accept I read your article in the last issue of PolyLetter and thought perhaps you could help me Would you send me a wiring diagram for the header that possibly would correct this Keep up the good work Gary Sterling Hendrick 10 It sounds like your Poly is not honoring the printers handshaking signal My earliest printer had only three lines in the cable They were the Data line CTS Clear to send and a ground These lines were connected to RS 232 cable pins 3 5 amp 7 On the Poly header plug on the Printer mini card I connected pins 1 to 15 3 to 14 and 3 to 12 and pins 9 to 10 This allows the CTS signal on pin 3 which was generated by the printer to drive both the CTS signal line on pin 14 and the DSR line on pin 12 If the printer does not provide a CTS or DSR signal then the baud rate must be adjusted so th
5. PolyLetter The Newsletter for PolyMorphic Systems Owners and Users PolyLetter 8701 Page Editorial With this issue PolyLetter is back on schedule The JAN FEB 1987 issue is actually being published within the JAN FEB 1987 time slot Readers have expressed interest in a variety of subjects A number of readers have responded to say that they are using a clone along with their Poly but still like the Poly better I know the feeling I am using an XT clone but still prefer the Poly I know how to make the Poly do what I want to with the clone it s a fight Readers have asked for more information about communicating between the Poly and clones and between the Poly and a Mac At least one reader has told me on the phone that the one computer that finally measures up to the Poly is an AT Unfortunately there is still not a good set of system software comparable to Poly s Imagine that The Poly s ten year old System 88 software design 1s so good that it takes an AT with an 8 MHz 80286 cpu with ten times the memory to equal a lowly 8080 cpu running at 1 8432 Hz Just imagine what could be done if the software engineering and inovation that went into the Poly over 0 years ago were put into the computing power available today Oh well back to reality How many of our beloved Poly users would like PolyLetter to include some items about clones in our sacred pages I got a call from one reader who practically begged me to mov
6. SOFTWARE SPELL i MAXALL diskettes 5 10 hard sector 13 per box of 10 Hayes Micromodem 100 for only 40 300 baud in bus direct connect modem limited quantity HayesSys modem software for the Micromodem 100 35 AVS Spell a good spelling checker for 35 Abstract Systems Exec Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 Abstract Systems Proms Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 PolyGlot Library Volumes 1 thru 22 6 each Send 1 00 for a complete catalog free with any order Make checks payable to Ralph Kenyon N ya mw PolyMorphic Systems 7334 H Hollister Avenue Santa Barbara CA 93117 805 685 6238 Users Manuals and Theory of Operation Manuals CP M hardware conversion 100 plus parts CP M license manuals and software 200 16K to 64K memory card conversion 125 00 plus parts The 16K board has to be a Poly board and in good working condition Eight inch MAXALL 32 hard sectored diskettes for your MS 15 00 per box or 115 00 per ten boxes Al Levy Post Office Box 71 Hicksville NY 11802 516 293 8368 For Sale Multiple 8813 systems each with 3 dr ves 64K Monitor and Keyboard Make offer Robert L Schwartz 906 Main Street Cincinnati OH 45202 513 241 3447 For Sale 64K 8813 with 3 drives Make offer Vince Greenen 445 Buckeye Naperville IL 60540 312 961 2511 For Sale 8813 with 3 SSSD drives 20 Meg hard disk Make offer Bruce Buckley
7. an opcode its arguments if any and a comment also optional To fit the housekeeping into this format certain instructions to the assembler are placed in the opcode field and are called pseudo opcodes POPs The POP which tells Asmb where the program is to be loaded and started is IDNT This POP takes two arguments the first is the load address and the second is the start address For most programs that will be the start of user memory which is 3200H or the label USER The code would appear thus IDET 32008 32008 The POP which tells Asmb where to start generating code for is ORG which takes one argument ORG sets the value of the program counter Most programs start out with ORG 32001 IDET 8 is a special assembler variable the current value of the instruction pointer In this example ORG just set the program counter and IDNT takes that value for the load and start addresses The last thing the assembler must see is the END POP To make things easier Poly has a library of system labels in the file called SYSTEM SY There are two POPs which allow us to use the contents of SYSTEM SY The POP REFS opens the file for the assembler The POP REF reads an item from the file As an example let us get the system label USER using these POPs The following would appear in your program REFS SYSTEM SY REF USER The System Programmers Guide contains a list of these labels and macros and a descriptio
8. British Columbia Canada Hi Len PolyLetter 8606 NOV DEC 87 contained an article on testing the printer interface using the confidence test Make a RS 232 plug which connect pin 2 to pin 3 pin 4 to pin 5 pin 6 to pin 20 and pin 17 to pin 24 Make a Poly printer card header plug connecting 1 to 15 2 to 16 3 to 13 4 to 14 5 to 11 6 to 12 and 9 to 10 Run the confidence disk press CTRL S and select the Serial interface test This will tell you if you have problems anywhere between the CPU and the serial card PolyLetter 8702 MAR APR 87 contained an article on hooking up printers to the Poly serial interface I can test your printer interface card if you send it to me I do not have any info on those particular RAM cards but they should be addressable on any 8K boundary You can set the boards by trial and error using the confidence test Make up a setting on one of the boards Put it in Boot on the confidence test package Look to see where it shows RAM If you don t see any extra RAM assume the board is addressed somewhere where you already have ram and try another setting Usually you will have 3 switches which will be set in binary The board may have from 3 to 8 switches which may give memory protect as well as wait states or phantom Sometimes you will have one switch for each of the 8 possible locations and must turn on only one I could probably find the combination assuming the boards are good The top pri
9. McCormic Equipment Co Inc 11591 Grooms Road Cincinnati OH 45242 9 MAR APR 1987 513 489 0100 For Sale 8813 Twin system with MS 1 5 drive Best offer Larry Isaacson P O Box 93887 Atlanta GA 30377 404 351 3652 9 5 EST For Sale Video Board 95 8 Disk Controler 150 Printer Interface 50 Poly CPU 125 Priam Hard Disk with Poly Interface card and Power Supply 400 Poly Keyboard Screen enclosure 175 Charles Trayser 415 651 5931 4050 13 For Sale 8813 System Hearthstone Court Cincinnati 752 7186 Karen Klysz OH 45245 Poly for sale C Barclay Gilpin 407 Lenwood Drive Costa Mesa CA 92627 714 642 0390 FOR SALE Two 5 SSSD SA400 drives 36 each Ken Lowe 5936 W Zina Circle West Valley City UT 84120 801 969 7736 Charles A Thompson PolyCom Associates 2909 Rosedale Avenue Dallas Texas 75205 1532 Phone 214 368 8223 PolyCom General Ledger 125 The PolyCom General Ledger has gone through several revisions and is an excellent way to keep books on your Poly It sold for 750 in 1983 and is much improved since that time There are two versions Version 4 is the original form where you keep each separate set of books on separate diskettes Version 5 is menu driven and allows you to keep a number of different sets of books on line Version 5 requires a hard disk preferably or at least DSDD floppies Either version is 125 00 including the operat
10. When I first turn it on it does strange things like telling me it can t find that file and putting garbage on the screen and other strange things After a few minutes however it settles down to operate normally The confidence package bombs during this initial few minutes Does anyone have any ideas about what may be causing these symptoms Since writing this I have eliminated the problem by cleaning the contacts of several chips on the Video board Some were coated with a black material which changed the conductivity of the connection The old antistatic foam was corrosive and caused problems with the chips which had been stored in it I used a soft eraser and stuck the legs of the IC s into it to rub off the black film So far so good The problem came back but cleaning chips on the CPU card seems to have taken care of it I had a rude awaking the last time I went to have PolyLetter printed The printing costs has gone up by 40 percent Now PolyLetter has not raised its subscription rate since 1980 but we can t keep this up if the costs keep going up PolyLetter is contemplating a subscription price increase starting in 1988 The new rate will be 18 00 per year and will go into effect January 1988 If you wish to beat this rise you may extend your subscription now for a year at the current rate Please make checks payable to Ralph Kenyon Well by popular demand commercial advertising space will be available again No
11. a tape recorded on one recorder may not play back on another The most serious problem though is that if the computer has the Version 81 Poly ROMS installed the cassette handling routines aren t there FILMS GO calls these ROM routines and without them you re out of luck On the other hand I don t know how many PolyOwners converted to the Version 81 ROMS You can find out which ROMs you have by going into the front panel CONTROL Z in enabled mode and entering L0439 This is VERLOC VERsion LOCation and the number displayed after the arrow is the version of the installed ROMs Another way of using cassette tapes is to use BASIC A01 and Exec 4D instead of FILMS GO There are built in cassette routines available there I believe you still have to have ROMs previous to Version 81 3 Re Readability of PolyLetter The last issue was fairly readable though I admit to being an unreconstructed letter quality only freak My main suggestion for improvement of readability is that you put a blank line between every paragraph This reduces the amount of material which can be published but what s there is much more readable Best regards Chuck Thompson Dallas TX 2 SEP OCT 1987 I just checked out FILMS 3E with DisAsmb GO FILMS 3E does NOT call the cassette routines in the ROMS The whole purpose of the program FILMS was to provide the tape handling routines which were originally in the 4 0 monitor part of PROMS v
12. and the overpowering sense of doom that I feel about my Poly system dying just when I need it the most with no one around to fix it and no spares parts available I went through Hell trying to get our system at work repaired I thought I was going to lose my mind being without old faithful for about six months Well did end up losing my job this past October but not due to the computer The new company president decided that all the work I was doing should be done by Engineering the fact that they can t get their own work done notwithstanding Now I am relying on my Poly to produce my resumes and cover letters But I want the printout to be from this Royal typewriter rather than my Prism 80 Royal has an interface which have ordered 170 that they claim will connect any serial or parallel computer to the typewriter model 700D contains 4K of RAM as a buffer and is compatible with a Diablo 630 standard whatever than 1s Any way since I won t be buying a new computer in the near future I have decided to subscribe to PolyLetter again Enclosed is my check for 15 I enjoy every issue of this newsletter though I know nothing about assembly language and have decided that that s the way I like it I m an experienced BASIC programmer I do like Exec and almost dread having to eventually learn a new DOS Well I ll be waiting for my next issue of PolyLetter Thanks again Sincerely yours Norman E Shimmel Butl
13. by you re having advertised your MAKEREL program even though my MakeRel was first I decided to move more quickly on DisAsmb GO I sent out a direct mail promotion in early June and had sold several copies by the time the Jul Aug PolyLetter announcing DIS80 hit the streets While we re on the subject of relocatable loaders I have come across a third party version which has the original Poly WPS loader messages still in it Now that is neither reverse engineering nor independent development It is clearly piracy What you and I did with WPS GO was akin to reverse engineering We learned enough about how it worked to write our own Now I have never seen your MAKEREL program in any form but I did see your LOAD program after I gave you the code for the relocation bitmap In regard to Ethics you appear to be guilty of 50 50 not 20 20 hindsight You must remember that those times were before ROMABLE code was established as subject to copywrite I quote from my letter to you at the time As for selling custom PROMS I won t be the first one to do so I know of three others and none caused any heartburn with Poly It s not as if I m taking away their market I m not I have also made the source of my custom proms available to Poly for inclusion Cor not in their next version who knows when Ken Gudis was most pleasant and responsive the last time I talked to him Nov 82 As far as copywrite laws ROMable is maybe
14. m back to Exec Try CONTINUE nothing still in Exec It must have been a subroutine rather than the run loop Better be careful the wrong overlay call might clear the run time environment Ok let s save this stuff before we lose anything Put a scratch disk in drive 2 and use SAVE to store a copy of the memory content on disk First do a DISPLAY and get the top of memory It s FD90 Ok the start of the last sector is FC91 5 JUL AUG 1987 Let s subtract 7F sectors that gives 7D91 as the start So we SAVE from address 7D91 Starting at 0403 Loading at 7D91 7F sectors in file lt 2 lt TOP Now 7D91 3200 is 4B91 bytes or 4C sectors So SAVE from address 3200 Starting at 0403 Loading at 3200 4C sectors in file lt 2 lt BOT There ll be some overlap but that s better than missing some Ok this saves everything in memory to disk Now how do we get it back into a live BASIC program Well I ll try starting the program exiting with EXEC restoring memory and then resuming with CONTINUE Let s try it First I load the program and go to where was when the crash occurred Now try CTRL Y Oops CTRL Y dumps me back to the initialize routine Another one puts me back in Exec and kills the run time environment Ok REENTER and LIST the program looking for those offending ON ESCAPE statements Ah ha there s one So as not to change the storage used in memory carefully retype in the entire line replacing the
15. running standard 8086 programs Initial support will be in real address mode limited to 1 Mbyte of address space running either Concurrent DOS MS DOS or CP M 86 A catalog of available and projected roducts is available along with a price ist from Lomas Data Products 182 Cedar Hill Street Marlboro MA 01752 617 460 0333 At one time I owned both a 1961 VolksWagon amp a 1974 Olds 98 I preferred the VW and drove it for close to twenty years I would like to state for the record that I truly respect and admire Richard Lomas for his efforts and accomplishments There are too few people walking this earth who could boast of one quarter of what this man has done It would fill my lifetime just trying to understand everything he takes for granted I was prompted to write this article for two reasons First I am always taken back when a speaker feels obliged to constantly compare his product to that of another company Second I have heard too many cliches about this business In the past two years I have heard S 100 is Dead and We Are Not Competing With IBM too many times There is room for everyone and there is a place for every machine A concept of NEGATIVE COMPENSATING FACTORS is ever present Let s talk about 5 100 S 100 1s a hardware standard set by the IEEE committee In days gone by 1975 and up some manufacturers built boards components PolyLetter 8701 Page for boards and even entire systems
16. the results will be unpredictable To restore the integrity of the system after using RDB it is best to reboot the system with the reset button The boot command is not sufficient since the INITER vector table is only restored when the program counter starts from 0000 boot doesn t go back that far Public Domain PolyLetter has just received the disks of user programs which were in the old Poly 88 user group I haven t had time to catalog them and incorporate them into the PolyGlot Library but you can look forward to that being done in future issues Lets give Roger Lewis a vote of thanks for submitting them The Other Guys Well I ve spent more time being frustrated with my XT clone these last two months 1 recently found out that CTRL U on the clone does what CTRL X does on the Poly I thought of using the ANSI SYS driver to map CTRL X to CTRL U but did not do it I absolutely hate having to shift to get the colon on the clone so I switched the colon and the semi colon using the ANSI SYS driver Of course it is bypassed in most applications so I have to remember when the mapping works and when it doesn t Of course to make the clone keyboard like the poly s more keys need to be moved and that includes some control keys If anyone wants to know how to do it give me a call and I ll provide the details I finally got GW BASIC for the clone It doesn t have MAT And the file handling is so complicated Poly BASIC kn
17. 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Editorial Contributions Your contributions to this newsletter are always welcome Articles suggestions for articles or questions you d like answered are readily accepted This is your newsletter please help support it Advertisements by subscribers are free of charge PolyLetter is not affiliated with PolyMorphic Systems 10 JUL AUG 1987 does a computer eat In This Issue Editorial 5 x 3 Abstract Systems SORT Program Letters To amp from The Edito CRASH How to Fix a Dead Bird In The Public Domain HELP How does it work Ads 3 4 What to do with a New Disk BugNotes f 10 Reader s Response f TQ Bit Bucket J A gt eg ht OmmMmayI Mu YK Coming Soon Modems and Communications software More BASIC for Beginners Serial Device Driver Explained How to UNSAVEP protected Programs More System Programmers Notes Making your PC work like a Poly More Help BugNotes Public Domain Software etc Questions Can you find and answer the questions asked in this issue Send your answers and requests in FIRST CLASS MAIL Back volumes of PolyLetter are available at the same price as the current subscription rate US 15 00 yr Canada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Individual issues are also available 3 00 3 50 4 00 Page Editorial My computer is getting cranky
18. A dress Correction Requested Patybetter Editor and Publisher Baigh Lenyon Subscriptions US 15 00 yz Sanada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 90 yr payable in YS dollars to iaigh Kenyon Ed toriai Contributions Your contributions to this newsletter are always welcome Articles suggestions for articles or questions you d tike answered are readily accepted This 15 your newsletter please help support it Advertisements by subscribers are frae of charge Polybetter is not affiliated with PolyMorphic Systems 10 JAN FEB 1987 More articles on BASIC programming I d like to see programs for sorting quicksort algorithm I have written a program which removes the hee and un numbered remarks from a BASIC program and would be willing to put it in the public domain if you re interested George Mack Fort Wayne IN In This Issue Editorial s 3 1 Poly Problems 3 i 1 Letters To amp from The Editor 2 lt A gt lt C gt lt T gt Report LICA 5 Sticking Keys 7 Bugio tsa 7 Help F z 7 Public Domain 8 Ads R 3 9 Bit Bucket 5 9 Readers Responses 10 coming Soon Asmb GO Housekeeping Requirements RS 232 Cables and Jumper Plugs Modems and Communications software More BASIC for Beginners How to UNSAVEP protected Programs More System Programmers Notes Mak ng your PC work like a Poly More Help BugNotes Public Domain Software etc Questions Can you find and answer the questions asked in this issu
19. FOR THE POLY 8 HELLO TX 111 DOCUMENTATION TX 75 DEMO BS 50 General Programming Functions BS 2 BSdef D 10 INTRO BS 52 SUPERMAN BS 23 INSTRUCTIONS BS 9 PRIME 8S PGL V 22 has more financial programs Contents Disk PGL V 22 has 8 files on it 350 sectors in use 131 YPS 42 85 40 AS DATE BS 24 AS DATE OMNI BS 60 CASHFLOW BS 65 CREATE BANI BS 13 MORT2 BS 9 FIFO LIFO INVENTORY COMPARISON 35 YPS 42 BS is a nesting of ten programs whose purpose is to supply information on any loan as to number of payments interest rate regular payments principal balance yield price balloon payment balance remaining total interest paid days between dates and percentage of discount AS DATE BS and AS DATE OMNI BS print Loan Amortization Schedules The above programs were PolyLetter 8702 Page written and submitted by James J Trahan PO Box 217 Oxnard CA 93032 CASHFLOW BS by PolyMorphic Systems is also included on this disk It was submitted by Joe Toman PolyLetter has a 32 page manual for CASHFLOW which includes 15 pages of documentation and 14 pages of program listings The copy and mail cost for this manual is 3 50 CREATE BANK BS is a Deposit Slip Check Entry File Maker submitted by Al Levy It s got some interesting messages in it MORT2 BS and FIFO LIFO INVENTORY COMPARISON BS were submitted by James Goodall Abstract Systems etc 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 8421 DISKS MODEMS PROMS
20. I am 4 Bits Ronald Moffatt of Rochester NY writes Have you had a nibble on your 4 bits uestion yet SEP OCT Congratulations on You got tt 4 bits is halt a byte PolyLetter 8701 Page Apple tried to make us spell it nybble at one time but I don t think that caught on Anyway Ron you have just earned yourself a free public domain disk Just let me know which one you want and I ll send it your way K 93 How many of you remember the computerized mechanical dog K 9 from the British Doctor Who television series currently running on the PBS The next question is What do you feed K 97 or a nibble Readers Responses Best article Frank Stearns Confessions Impressive batch of issues you ve cranked out Re Bagley letter PL 8605 P3 It should be taking the Parrot by the beak or by the feathers For Jim Purvis amp Others I can copy from 5 SSSD to 8 SSDD Russ Nobbs Spokane WA We have 2 Twin systems 4 single users 2 8813 singles cannibalized for parts All still running like a charm a real workhorse 24 hrs a day Posnett Lynas Newport Beach CA Best article Device Driver Direct Access More articles on languages Tell us about relocatable files I have a relocator program for 8080 from BYTE a few years back but haven t had much use What does the RL extension do Allen Daubendiek Palm Bay FL PolyLletter 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 8421
21. I have some time amp get together with him we ll fix them Len Thomsen Delta BC Canada In answer to your questions PAGE works on BASIC C04 and has the same effect as PRINT CHR 12 PRINT CHR i2 will work in earlier versions of BASIC FNEND or FN END should work even on BO8C the error may be on the line before FN END DEC8iDOM has Exec 83 with BASIC CO1L Later than yours Exec 83 supports sub directories Sub PolyLetter 8703 Page directories are created with the COPY or EDIT commands by using the lt character For example EDIT SUB lt NAME EX will open file NAME EX in sub directory SUB DX to see what s in a sub directory use LIST SUB Sub directories were not implemented before Exec 80 PGL V 01 has Exec 4D with BASIC A01 than yours BASICS run A00 on cassette A01 with Exec 4D B08 and B14 with Exec 73 BO8C with Exec 76 C00 and COOL with Exec 78 and Exec 80 C01 and COIL with Exec 80 and Exec 83 C02 with Exec 90 C03 with Exec 94 and Exec 95 and C04 with Exec 96 the latest The latest version of Exec 96 which comes with BASIC C04 is available from Poly Price Earlier versions come on various public domain or commercial disks I d have to check which is where but I think Exec 83 is the common one I offer my Exec A S with HELP systems for 35 BASIC not included which is better than Poly s latest Earlier Exec A S is the complete set of modifications to Sys
22. I start plugging boards in from the dead 8810 Video works fine Likewise the memory boards Similarly the disk controller card By now I am suspecting that the problem is in the dead 8810 s backplane and confidently plug in the CPU card from the dead 8810 Oops Smoke pours out of the backplane of my good 8810 and I get this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach The power available light goes out too So that s why they call it a smoke test I look at the fuse and find that its smokey black Nothing is left of the wire Hoping the dammage is nothing permanent I quickly replace the CPU with my good one and put in another fuse Nope the video display is stable but useless Holy cow More smoke and the lights go out again Sure enough the fuse is fried again Okay I remove all the cards pull the power supply plug and replace the fuse I start searching for any scorching on the power supply end of the back plane The resistors all look fine I test the capacitors to see if they are shorted nope That leaves the diodes They don t look damaged so I try my multimeter on the diodes and find that they seem to show a low resistance both ways which just ain t right It s supposed to be low one way and high the other Okay sez me maybe we can t test it in the circuit and I gets out me soldering iron to unstick one end that way I can get PolyLetter 8703 Page a true reading The first one is fine but the se
23. Moffatt for coming up with the correct answer Question What kind of soup does a computer eat Answer Alphabit soup Ron you ve been a regular winner How about coming up with a new contest for us How many kinds of bits can you think of thought of little tid part and o honey Send in your thoughts PolyLetter 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 3597 Address Correction Requested Polybetter Editor and Publisher Ralph Kenyon Subscriptions US 18 00 yr Canada 20 00 yr Overseas 25 00 pr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Editorial Contributions Your contributions to this newsletter are always welcome Articles suggestions for articles or questions you d like answered are readily accepted This is your newsletter please help support it Advertisements by subscribers are free of charge PolyLetter is not affiliated with PolyMorphic Systems 10 NOV DEC 1987 No Confidence When doesn t the confidence test work right When the printer minicard fails in the on position When clear to send is set permanently on In This Issue Editorial Poly s Best Kept Secret Abstract Systems PramKey Program Letters To amp from The Editor Abstract Systems Policy A Parallel 8251 UART Parallel 8251 Schematic In The Public Domain Ads Annual Index Readers Requests Bit Bucket z E e a a a a a Coming Soon Modems and Communications software More BASIC fo
24. N S To turn side ways scrolling off use the sequence ESC CTRL N W This version of Edit also has a cursor centering feature When selecting this feature the cursor always stays on the center line To activate this feature use the sequence ESC CTRL N C A variation on this 1s the page centering feature The cursor moves down or up away from the center until it hits the top or the bottom of the screen It then suddenly jumps to the center of the screen To activate this feature use the sequence ESC CTRL N P To return to the norma or free floating cursor mode use the sequence ESC CTRL N F The memnonic values of these sequences are simple CTRL N stands for New feature S for Scroll W for Wrap C for Center P for Page floating and F for Free floating I also have a clone here and have transferred files back and forth from the Poly to the clone I am running the public domain software package called Procomm on the clone I just connected a cable between the Poly s printer port and the clone s serial port I made an 8 conductor cable connecting pins 1 through 7 and 20 straight through The Poly header is the same one I use for all my printers 1 15 2 16 3 13 4 14 5 11 6 12 and 9 10 On the Poly I defined a printer with Setup which I 2 MAR APR 1987 called pce in which I set the baud rate to 1200 and set the lines per page and characters per line both to 255 I tell Procomm to use 1200 baud
25. ON ERROR with a REM everything else is the same Ok there s another Now I try RUN and get back to where was This time a CTRL Y gives the familiar Interrupted in line and the gt gt prompt Ok EXEC Now I type in lt 2 lt TOP and get Exec A S Then type in lt 2 lt BOT and get Exec again Cross your fingers here goes nothing I type CONTINUE expecting to be back at the gt gt in BASIC Hey I get Exec back What gives Of course dummy you gave 0403 for the start address It warm started Exec and destroyed the interrupt environment We can t use 0403 as the start address What we need is the address of a return instruction We know just where one is loret starts at 0064H and consist of POP H at 0064 POP D at 0065 POP B at 0066 POP PSW at 0067 EI at 0068 and RET at 0069 Okay I could go through the process of loading memory and re SAVEing it using 69 instead of 403 but it ll be faster if simply change the start addresses in the directory using Superzap Ok let s try this again First load the program Change the ON ESCAPE lines RUN get to where we were CTRL Y and EXEC It s faster the second time Now load TOP again We get a So far so good Now load BOT and get the again Ok type CONTINUE expecting to get the gt gt prompt Something s wrong I got the gt prompt instead Oh well try CON anyway Can t continue Okay LIST the program and find the sub
26. Odd parity 7 data bits 2 stop bits and then use ASCII file transfer protocol To send from the Poly I just PRINT the file To send to the Poly I run my DownLoad program I used 1200 baud because that s the fastest I could go without getting a lot of garble Ed Dear Ralph January 14 1987 I am enclosing the 8810 which I donate to you for your work with PolyLetter It includes the basic unit and a keyboard both of which I think need some help There is nothing wrong in using it for parts if there is nothing else left to do with it I have a monitor that I will be sending you as soon as I have a crate suitable for sending it Thank you for your help Robert L Schwartz Cincinnati OH Dear Robert Thanks very much for the 8810 It will be put to good use here at PolyLetter The Keyboard has some of those sticking keys I wrote about in the last issue so it can serve as a supply of parts for the sticking keys of our readers Keyboard II only Also see my article entitled Smoke Test coming in a future issue Now that I have located the basic problems in the system I can convert it to a 96 tpi system which I can take with me when I go to visit other Poly Users It ll be a lot easier to handle than an 8813 Thanks again Ralph Dear Ralph January 12 1987 I received the copy of PolyLetter in November Thanks for thinking of me I had dropped my subscription because of my frustration with Poly the lack of software
27. PolyMorphic system that I had been using for years The salesman would walk out of the office in bewilderment wondering how it could know that they came there and could write a letter all by itself and be so specific Of course it was all done in Basic Our Poly became a closed club for elite users who were way ahead of the rest of the world Poly knew Serial was better than Parallel that Sixty Four 64 characters across were more visible and practical than Eighty 80 and that Editing was a science and skill with depth limited only to the desire of the user Being the first on the block with new toys s really fun for a while but ten you find that it 1s a habit you can t break Those of you who subscribe to this letter are probably more gadgeteers than computer enthusiasts We are the ones who struggled through the early marketing who purchased cords for their units that did not always work and that sometimes had little wires on them correcting mistakes on the printed circuit We knew the glitches and the bugs and we learned to work around them like don t ever be full of electrical static when you sit down to your computer and how to open the unit to check for bad contacts before we ship it PolyLetter 8704 Page back to California Do people laugh at you and say PolyWhat Do you spend a lot of time explaining why you are proud to use a Poly Have you succumbed to the IBM P C Enter the IBM Clone which surrounds us
28. SPELL programs I ve used Frank s for years and without seeing yours I wouldn t even guess whether yours has the look and feel of Frank s or contains any of his code or algorithms I do know that Frank s worked well and quickly I used it for many years to help proofread PolyLetter But no spell checker can find everything especially misspelled words which happen to form other valid words I new he was coming I would like to ask where you got your dictionary file from Is it derived from Frank s files Or perhaps from another spell checker s file like an IBM PC speller We have all learned and borrowed from each other over the years We improve on each other s ideas And we each have a set of principles which we follow in determining our actions Ralph your readers must decide if they think a product is a rip off of another product and they can demonstrate their decision by boycotting any product which does not conform to their standards of ethics PolyLetter 8706 Page I encourage them to do so and to keep this dialog going Bob Bybee Stone Mountain GA Bob some of your recollections do not agree with the facts 1 My DisAsmb GO was released in June 83 and was sold by direct mail promotion PRIOR to DIS80 s July 83 appearance By the time DIS80 was announced DisAsmb GO had already sold several copies 2 I furnished you with the relocatable file bit map code during mid 1981 well PRIOR to DIS80 and
29. Services in Santa Monica and the UCLA computer That was when Regulation Z went into effect and such things as APR s and Disclosure Statements became part of the loan business Also loans became a bit more sophisticated due to the PolyLetter 8703 Page fact that the other guy had the same weapons with which to flimflam the public Along came the TRS 80 Model 1 from Radio Shack with a cassette storage that had a habit of losing everything spontaneously and maliciously Now we come to the good part I spotted a Poly at a computer show in Los Angeles and I guess the attractive thing about it was the beautiful wood cabinet How many computers have you ever seen with a natural wood cabinet Poly had it all a dependable storage I have never lost one item in all the years of punching keys attractive cabinet and it was about as bug free as you could want With it my business prospered and I was hooked enough to buy another to keep at home and write programs for business and recreation Eventually I bought a third one for parts Over the years that I have the Poly s I also bought two Apples one Kaypro and three IBM PC s All are dependable machines but the sweetest sound is a booted Poly and the second is a Shugart SA400 drive trying to find tract 0 Watching it run a loan collection program doing batch processing using all three drives makes my heart soar like an eagle Also with other computers you don t get to know nice guys s
30. Systems Note 1 system enhancements which must be installed will not be furnished unless a system disk is provided on which to install it Note i Abstract Systems does not furnish software which is available from PolyMorphic Systems Requests or inquiries for PolyMorphic Systems Software and Documentation are referred to PolyMorphic Systems as the appropriate source Products which require a system disk will be furnished with a previous release of System 88 The current version of System 88 is available for sale from PolyMorphic Systems 7334 H Hollister Avenue Santa Barbara CA 93117 Phone 805 685 6238 Abstract Systems is not affiliated with PolyMorphic Systems Exec tA S is the complete collection of all custom and general operating system enhancements which were previously available as individually installable items So many individual enhancements and bug corrections were made that it made sense to put them all together in one package It comes as a bare bones disk onto which the rest of Poly s software must be copied to make a complete system To make a whole system Edit GO Asmb GO BASIC GO and their associated overlays must all be added All the enhancments had been offered to Poly at one time or another and Poly has been furnished with a copy of the current version All the bugs I have reported to Poly have been corrected and all the custom enhancements I have made for myself as well as at others sug
31. a status register and an interrupt facility Our parallel printer port must emulate these registers and functions if we are to fool the software into thinking it is still working with a serial port Let s take a look at the control logic of our black board at this point Four control lines are used to control the 8251 or our black board A brief aside Signal names preceded by a are low true and those preceded with a are high true The 4 signals are WR RD C D and CS WR goes true when the computer wishes to write or output to the 8251 RD goes true when the computer wishes to read or input from the 8251 C D goes high when the computer wishes to output to the command port and low when the computer wishes to input from the status port C D is driven by the address bit 0 line The remaining address lines are decoded and used to select the 8251 via the CS Chip Select line A 74LS138 U1 is used to decode the 4 control lines and generate strobes used to control the remainder of our project We do not need to worry about data INPUT but we do need to support data output the DATA OUT strobe is used to load data into the 74LS374 U2 which has 8 internal latches one for each data bit At the same time the strobe is passed to the printer to let it know that there is data being presented to it The status byte from the 8251 has to be emulated quite exactly The Printer Busy signal can be invert
32. a utility program to compress a BASIC program by removing spaces and REM s EXPAND BS puts the spaces but not the REM s back in and COMP EXP EXAMPLE TX is an example of their work FRACTION METRIC CONV BS converts back and forth between fractions in inches and metric decimal equivalents BASE BS converts numbers among Decimal Hexadecimal and Binary representations COMPARE TWO BS compares two BASIC programs REMS LINES OUT BS removes the line numbers from REM lines HOURS DEMO BS converts minutes into hours and minutes Abstract Systems etc 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 3597 DISES DRIVES MODEMS PROMS SOFTWARE SPELL MAYALL diskettes 5 10 hard sector 12 per box of 10 Hayes Micromodem 100 for only 25 300 baud in bus direct connect modem Limited quantity HayesSys modem software for the Micromedem 100 25 AIS Spell a good spelling checker for 35 Abstract Systems Exec Enhancements bugs corrected 35 Abstract Systems Proms Enhancements bugs corrected 35 PolyGlot Library Volumes 1 thru 24 6 each Send 1 00 for a complete catalog free with any order Make checks payable to Ralph Tenyon ne SO ew PolyMorphic Systems 7334 H Hollister Avenue Santa Barbara CA 93117 One source for new and reconditioned systems hard disk sub systems parts conversions manuals and service We ve got it all CALL 805 685 6238 P
33. acknowledge that coding styles regardless of the language used are nearly as individual as preferences in interior decorating You might not like the color of my living room walls I may not like yours The only published external documentation for SPELL 3 0 was the user s manual which you Cand nearly everyone else praised highly Just as a point of interest I had outlined an OEM manual for SPELL 3 0 thinking that someday 1 might sell or license the source I did write a chapter of that document As a programming and writing sample the strength of that unfinished manuscript clinched a major technical writing contract that was pivotal to 4 SEP OCT 1987 my success in that profession As far as the gentleman s agreement I stand by the statement made in my first letter and note your statement I did try to make mine fA S Spell operate like yours SPELL 3 0 in its user interface and display but there the similarities ended You might want to review the case of Apple Computer vs Digital Research DRI got in big trouble because the GEM DESKTOP operating system and its applications looked a little too much like the Macintosh Lisa operating system and applications At least at the lowest level the code was completely different because the Mac and Lisa machines use the Motorola 680XX family of processors and DRI s GEM runs on DOS machines which use the Intel 8086 8 and 80286 machines DRI as far as I know had t
34. an exchange because Charles the previous editor said that he had a printer driver that would solve a problem that I have when using my Epsom RX80 printer bit 8 is set high on some of the characters so that they come out in italics copy enclosed do you know the answer to this one However if you would like to put the programs in the public domain please do so will send the documentation to anyone who s interested The disk has a suite of programs that are used for stereological analysis of light and electron micrographs useful for any biologist geologist materials scientist wanting to get quantatative data from pictures not image analysis We are using these constantly in our research work Bt thie disk is suitable for inclusion I would like to receive a copy of PolyGlot Volume 6 in exchange I also have a bitpad input saving routine which runs serial ports at both 1 and 0 before Poly did too it which Kon might find useful The latest PolyLetter contains some very interesting points and I was particularly PolyLetter 8701 Page glad to read the articles on CP M I have two CP M machines here in the department and use them a lot of the time t would be a Bebe advance to run Poly disks on an IBM clone If a board becomes available I ee be very interested it in knowing about I originally Bde ae in 1979 after starting with ol 8 Det tke distributor soon folded asa I ve been on my own ever since I think
35. and 8 controller manuals I see lots of Poly hardware advertised but no docs Also The year end issue of PL for 1980 mentions a November Disk of the bi month with some interesting stuff on it is it available How much are you charging for PolyLetter back issues Is Don Moe s FORM OV in the public domain Enough Keep up the excellent work Best regards Marc de Piolenc PO Box 1549 La Jolla CA 92038 1549 619 272 1725 Any S 100 compatible board with a serial or a parallel port should be made to work on the Poly provided software was written to drive it and the board was addressed so as not to interfere with the Poly s system calls I wrote a parallel interface driver for the WW Components VIO X2 board It s easy to interface the driver to the Poly system by making it a custom driver Poly s program FILMS GO will read and write to the Poly Cassette interface card The capability you desire is old and exists All you need to get is a cassette interface card and a copy of the PolyLetter 8703 Page program FILMS GO I was testing one out last month and read an original poly file with FILMS The one drawback is that the transfer takes place at 2400 baud in the PolyPhase format and there is no way to validate that the transfer was error free except by re reading the entire tape The Poly VTI card has the provision to provide unregulated 8 Volts or Regulated 5 Volts for the keyboard As you say there are provisions on t
36. and explanation of any recent printer driver how to kill special handling of printer control codes backspace LF CR etc John McNally Goleta CA I have written a program which removes the spaces amp un numbered remarks from a program and would be willing to put it in the public domain if you re interested George Mack Fort Wayne IN Have 2 88 s Enjoy PolyLetter very much August Flassig Portage IN More information on hardware function amp repair perhaps fault tracing am very pleased with the content amp look forward to receiving PolyLetter regularly Keep up the good work Dr Briarity Nottingham Great Britain I haven t had much time but I did glance at the last page of PolyLetter 8702 Please send me the PolyMorphic Systems Quick Reference Card Cap San Francisco CA The changes are great I anticipate the PC Poly disk info You are doing a wonderful job Richard Wagner Dallas TX Ways of talking to PC s I will probably phase out the Poly this year after 9 5 years of use It is a shame I prefer the Poly Editor to write programs PolyLetter 8703 Page but the lack of a file management program dooms it Jack Hill White Rock New Mexico Keep up the good work Percy Roy Edmonton Alberta Canada Darn hard to improve it keep up the great work Robert Johnson Roanoke VA Thanks for PolyLetter Palmer Poroner NY NY Very informative Margot Bit Bucket K 9
37. as the perogative of past editors this is your last issue You will find a renewal card enclosed Poly s Best Kept Secret During the last couple of months a chain of events has lead to the uncovery of one of Poly s best kept secrets Gnomus I spoke with Sirous at PolyMorphic Systems on November 23 and he has agreed to put Gnomus in the public domain This includes the source code as well as the machine language routine Gnomus is on PGL V 25 Now then what s all the hullabaloo about First some background Gnomus was written by Bob Martin in 1977 aparently exclusively for Poly s in house use It is a memory resident hot key program for creating storing and retrieving macro routines It has the capability of defining and executing macros as well as saving them to a file or reading a file of such macros Ho hum you say we ve had that in the editor since way back True BUT how would you like to be able to do some of those ESCAPE library routines from Exec or in BASIC When I am developing a program often execute the same sequence of commands many times It sure would be nice to be able to do that with one well two really key stroke For example in revising my PramKey program I went thru the following sequence several times DE PK RL Asmb lt 3 gt pk AS PK RL N N N TEST CD With Gnomus I only needed to define the sequence just like from within the editor ESC G followed by the exact sequen
38. camera and the telephone answering device We are the last survivors of the gadgeteers We know that but nobody eles dose and nobody else cares so let s hang in there Brother Users lets promote the PolyLetter and let s have a good time with that old equipment notwithstanding the fact that we probably all one day will be clone operators and only we chosen few shall know we are PolyPeople at heart Very truly yours Robert L Schwarts Cincinnati Ohio Amen Ed Dear Ralph July 6 1987 You ve gone and pissed me off and I hope you ll publish the following rebuttal to your first page editorial about SPELL which appeared in the May June 1987 PolyLetter This letter is also on the enclosed DOS diskette formatted for handling by the Poly editor I m miffed that after gave you source for SPELL and the dictionaries you would belittle my original SPELL product While it borders on ridiculous that I need to defend a product that is nearly five years old owe such a defense to those many and quite satisfied customers who own SPELL 3 0 and who are still using it 2 JUL AUG 1987 First do you remember the gentlemen s agreement we made when I released source to you You would rewrite SPELL to suite your tastes and not sell it to the general public without permission You said you d go ahead and disassemble the code anyway if didn t send you the source Perhaps the program wasn t so horrible after all if you were th
39. can order edit GO by sending me a check for 15 payable to Ralph Kenyon Letters Ralph July 9 1987 Just read the latest PolyLetter which arrived some time back but I only scanned Here are some comments on a couple of things mentioned there 1 Re Problems with using Diablo 620 printer There s a very simple solution to the problem if the handshake arrangement doesn t work or he doesn t want to fool with it The Diablo 630 1610 20 1640 50 and probably most others are capable of handling the ETX ACK protocol The standard PolyMorphic printer driver is easy to use with ETX ACK To use the ETX ACK protocol use Setup GO and 1 Answer Yes to Is this printer similar to a Diablo 1 Answer Yes to Is this a blocking device 2 Select 255 as the block or buffer size 255 is the biggest Poly can handle though most Diablos could handle larger blocks 3 The printer does NOT need a start character no 4 The EMD character is 3 ETI 3 The ACKNOWLEDGE character is amp ACK By using the ETX ACK protocol you can use ANY baud rate the printer is capable of accepting The way this works is that the Poly sends a block of 255 characters followed by the control code ETX end of text and then stops and waits The printer processes the 255 characters and when it reaches the PolyLetter 8705 Page ETX it sends ACK acknowledge back to the Poly The Poly then sends another block of 255 etc The o
40. files on it 308 sectors in use 3 Copysys TI 1 Unsys 60 14 FILWS 6O 2 Graf 0V 1 1 0 BS 5 PLOTTER BS 9 Basic SY 1 Sexy 0V 3 FRED BS 3 TEIT DT 15 EDIT TY 1 STAM BS 1 DRAW 3S 2 SQUARE BS 4 SHATAS BS 3 POLY BS 3 8813 BS 11 Initial BS 13 Printer 60 4 POLYDEMO BS 3 STUFF BS ti fred BS 1 ifo BS 6 plotter BS 3 poly BS 4 8813 9Y 9 INITIAL BS Disk PGL V 19 has 17 files om it 315 sectors in use 260 ROSE DATA DT PLOT DATA DT 3 TEIT DT 1 Sexy 0V 2 How to use the Demo program TX 2 INITIAL TY 9 INITIAL BS 1 GARBAGE DT 4 TEXT Dt 3 CTEI D PGL V 20 has two groups of programs The first group is for stereological image analysis The second group are for use in chemistry calculations Contents Disk PGL V 20 has 24 files on it 350 sectors in use 58 IMPS52 85 58 IMPS52 1 8S 62 IMPS52 2 85 28 IMPS52 3 8S 14 STEROT6 BS 2 CENTIGRADE BS 5 TELEX 3S 7 EH PH BS 12 WOLW BS 8 SPECTI BS 2 ARRHENIUS BS 4 XLENGTH BS 5 POLAROGRAPHY 8S 4 Eyring BS 3 Arrhenius BS 3 GUGGENHEIM BS 25 LLSQPLOT BS 7 PKA BS 9 CVE BS LINCHANGE BS 2 DISTANCE BS 3 RCALI BS 11 SPECTRAL ANALYSIS BS w Interactive Microcomputer Program for Stereology IMPS is a suite of programs which can be used to collect data and to process it for a wide range of stereological applications The RAM requirement depends upon the size of arrays dimensioned in the experiment being run a fairly large experiment for each group 5 objects x 5 samples x 3 pictures
41. is getting weak Can t anyone come up with what he is to be fed It s worth a free public domain disk if you are the first one with the correct answer Zeroth generation computers were simple electro mechanical control circuits First generation computers were made with vacuum tubes Second generation computers were made with transistors The third generation uses integrated circuits and the fourth generation uses large scale integrated circuits LSI The Japanese hope to combine very large scale integrated circuits VLSI with integrated software design at the chip level to be the first to bring the fifth generation to market WORM Write Once Read Many times PolyLetter 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 8421 Address Correction Requested PolyLetter Editor and Publisher Ralph Kenyon Subscriptions US 15 00 yr Canada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Editorial Contributions Your contributions to this newsletter are always welcome Articles suggestions for articles or questions you d like answered are readily accepted This is your newsletter please help support it Advertisements by subscribers are free of charge PolyLetter is not affiliated with PolyMorphic Systems 10 MAY JUN 1987 In This Issue Editorial S R 3 Abstract Systems Spelling Program Letters To amp from The Editor Assembly Language Housekeeping Smoke Testing x 7 2 BugNotes
42. issues of PolyLetter The current disk is entirly interactive games There are many programs which run on the old A01 version of BASIC which need to be converted to run under current BASICS This project will be ongoing and I will release disks as I get the conversions completed If anyone is interested in the unconverted programs send me a self addressed envelope for a listing of the programs Disk PGL V 23 has 17 files on it 43 free entries 342 sectors in use 0 sectors deleted 8 sectors free Site Mame 22 OTHELLO BS 1 STARS DC 27 STARS BS 9 ACEY DEUCY BS 11 CANNON BS 14 CHASE BS 3 RUSSIAN ROULETTE BS 67 SUMWAR BS 14 TIMEBOME BS 9 TANKS BS 16 SLOTS BS 66 OREGON IS 9 BAGELS BS 9 AUTORACE BS 12 POUNCE BS 32 REBEL BS 1 BOXING BS OTHELLO is played on an 8 X 8 checkerboard The object of a play is to capture one s opponents pieces by outflanking them to create a horizontal vertical or diagonal run of pieces bounded at each end by at least one piece of one s own This will flip the flanked pieces turning them all into one s own The one who has the most pieces when no more moves are possible is the winner STARS is a composite program containing five games converted from 101 BASIC GAMES and People s Computer Company for POLY 88 BASIC by David Larry Johnson 4106 Montreal Ave Prince George VA 23875 November 1977 7 JUL AUG 1987 Game 1 Guess a number from 1 to 100 You have six tries to guess
43. making a move PolyLetter cannot afford to buy one at its present income rate it would take three years to pay for it if I let everything else go Maybe Ralph Kenyon or Abstract Systems will be able to justify one and then PolyLetter will benefit I also attended the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Seattle Washington last month The things they can make computers do and the things they still can t make them do continue to be amazing Of course nobody has anything like the Poly yet anymore The VMACS graphics editor which runs on a Symbolics 3645 a 50 000 00 machine seems to do for graphics editing what the Poly does for text editing While in Seattle I found out where the term skid row came from It seems they had a road that was used for skidding logs down the hill and it was called skid road Later after the logging industry in that area went under derelicts congregated among the defunct buildings along the road and were called skid road bums In the manner that our language evolves after years the final d was dropped and we get today s spelling and pronunciation That s just a bit of local color Well my 11 year old Poly is finally becoming cranky Sometimes I have to boot it twice to get a clean start but once it is running it still is trouble free SORT GO SORT GO is a general line sorting utility that operates much l ke the MS DOS external command S
44. menu where we were RUN 1100 and see Dimension error That means the run time environment went away Well we re still not licked yet Let s try something else BYE and go back to Exec We ll see where the variables start and only load the top data area To find this I start BASIC cleanly with no program Then I use the following to find the hexadecimal start of the variables Z CALL 977 0 9 MEM Z rewards me with 6AF2 977 1s the decimal address of DEOUT Ok bring up the front panel and see PolyLetter 8704 Page Hmm 6AF2 is 00 but that s ok since Z was zero to begin with Backing up to 6A28H the flag byte for the variable Z I find OF But I also notice that there is a 28 68 at 6A24 which is a byte reversed pointer to the flag byte of variable Z Everything else around there is 00 bytes 6A00 seems like a convenient value since it is the start of a page of memory and there are nothing but zeros there what s there Ok this time I load TOP and BOT and then use SAVE from 6A00 starting at 69 loading at 6A00 7F sectors in file lt 2 lt MID Now let s try this out Load BASIC list the program and find those ON ESCAPE lines by now I know that there are two of them in this program and which lines they are After replacing ON ESCAPE with REM I RUN the program get to where I was when the crash occurred use CTRL Y and get the gt gt prompt Next it s EXEC TOP MID and REE Whee we re really flying now
45. not subsequent to it as you just claimed 3 I sent you a copy of MakeRel and LoadRel on November 18 1982 My copy of the NOV DEC 82 PolyLetter announcing MAKEREL was postmarked November 20 1982 LoadRel and MakeRel were also direct mail promoted prior to this date In all three cases you have reversed the order of events I happen to know that a review comparing DIS80 with DisAsmb was submitted to Frank Stearns and never published I can understand your loyalty to Frank and your use of SPELL GO but that does not justify misrepresenting the facts You should have at the very least referred to the records and gotten your facts straight However let us be a little more thorough in examining the historical record Bob we had a couple of phone conversations about the relocatable loader during the spring of 1981 and knew we were both working independently on the same item both of which came from a analyzing the disassembly of the WPS GO loader of Poly s I cracked the bitmap code first and explained it to you This was while I was still in Virginia Beach which was up until June 1981 Subsequently we both wrote loader programs using the information I gave you and our own independent disassembly of WPS GO On December 21 1981 you sent me a copy of your relocatable loader program which used the info I gave to you The copy you furnished me was called LOAD Subsequent to that I began adapting the Poly to use 96 tpi drives and
46. not know what S 100 5 JAN FEB 1987 means Rather subject I will come back to proverb later The lt A gt lt C gt lt T gt group was privileged to have as their guest speaker Mr Richard Lomas of Lomas Data Products Lomas Data Products is one of the two leading manufacturers of 5 100 systems support components and boards ubmitted for your approval are some of pe gesce for the projected S 100 80386 oard than expound on this it and the The 80386 Four Megabyte of Dynamic RAM with 0 wait state read cycles and one wait state write cycles The ram will include parity checking and be arranged as a 32 bit wide memory The initial goal is for 8Mbytes of memory The board will run at 16Mhz rate and be suitable as either a slave in a system with a host processor acting as a front end processor or as a master doing it s own I O processing When accessing S 100 bus devices the interface will be limited to 16 bits wide with a basic clock rate of 8Mhz and either a 3 or 4 clock bus cycle The board will assume that if a 16 bit request is being made of a bus device that it is capable of a 16 bit transfer and will not break 16 bit transfers into two 8 bit transfers SOFTWARE SUPPORT Use the protected mode of the 386 to provide a large linear address space when used as a slave in a standard CC DOS system Provide a CC DOS capable of using the protected mode to provide each of many different users 1 Mbyte of program space
47. order For most applications I don t actually sort the file I usually read in the keys add record pointers and sort the keys Then I access the records in sorted order for printing a label etc Regarding the drives The problem is complicated by the cache maintained by the 8 controler It keeps the most recently read sectors so that the disk doesn t actually have to be read again if there wasn t a write To bypass this boot on a disk which does NOT have the Cache ZO file on it You will get a truer response from the drive then My guess is that the direction select bit input from the controler to the drive is not being processed It could be a bad connection or a bad driver IC It could also be a fault in the stepping motor Each of what you said it does successfully involves moving the stepper motor in only one direction I don t have any 8 drives at all Al Levy can probably get you some But since you are in Georgia try Bob Bybee Also you may find some drives listed in Computer Shopper Ed Dear Ralph September 15 1987 My Poly 88 is as good or better than my Pong 3 SEP OCT 1987 Game Isn t it a shame the Beatles broke up Very truly yours Michael S Schwartz Cincinnati OH Michael Schwartz and Robert Schwartz are both of Schwartz amp Schwartz Attorneys and Counselors at Law in Cincinnati Ed Hi Ralph September 16 1987 Well I moved and forget to send you a change of address W
48. replenishment etc all in 93 character fixed length records Records can be retrieved randomly by stock code or by any other feature with a sequential search The business has limited floor space and tries to offer a wide range of products either from storage or through catalog sales Current accurate and easily maintained inventory records are provided by this system on some 5 000 components FOOTBALL FORECASTING MODEL last Fall I loaded in the schedules of 100 major college football teams and then most Sundays would enter the scores I ran a regression of sorts on these each week weighting more recent games and identifying home games This resulted in a team rating scheme of from roughly 70 145 If the 145 team played the 70 team on a neutral site the 145 team would win by 75 points The rating scheme beat the Harrod s predictions from mid season on by some 60 I plan to set it up again next Fall possibly incorporating 1986 results in the individual game predictions and make it available to any who might be interested There s probably a lot of potential with such a service especially via telecommunications TRIVIA My review on the OKIDATA printers is prompted by a recent printhead failure of my model 193 purchased August 1985 from a Local vendor for some 865 92 incl sales tax The vertical slot through which the pins hit the ribbon had worn wider and the pins were slipping about beside each other and making a fuzzy im
49. suffix prefix recursion to two levels I ve made the recursion go as deep as it wants you said Later remember a conversation where you d put the recursion back to two levels so that just any old thing wouldn t eventually pass The point is Ralph please don t directly or indirectly put down a product to which you were given source and assistance free of charge and don t discount the subtleties of the design based on usage rather than theory Also don t discount those many buyers of the original Frank Stearns Associates SPELL who found the product extremely useful My product was available in 1982 yours apparently based in part on mine is here in 1987 And oops did you run your version of SPELL on the May June issue of PolyLetter Note the series of letters Dammage on page 7 second column Sth paragraph of the article You SPELL meant DAMAGE don t suppose you ve got the non suffix mage in your suffix dictionary Sincerely Frank Stearns Dear Frank August 3 1987 I am in receipt of your letter of July 6 1987 and must say that I am quite disappointed with your response Far from belittling your version of Spell I merly stated that I was not at all satisfied with it and that your dictionaries contained misspelling in the form of double letter endings I was dissatisfied for exactly the same reason that others were Spell 3 0 does not preserve the letter case structure of the misspell
50. the mechanisms of legislation and cases The concepts of law change as well as the application of those concepts In a rapidly changing technological environment the LAW also undergoes rapid change What was not prohibited a few short years ago may become so That is to say the standards for judging whether some action is permitted can change quickly from a time in which the actions were not prohibited to a time in which they are Article I Section 9 paragraph 3 of the Constitution states No bill or attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed This is the so called Grand father clause which means that a law cannot be applied to events prior to its passage The corresponding ethical principle is that we do not judge acts of yesterday by the standards in effect today we must go back to the standards in force at the time The major cases and legislation affecting software all took place in the intervening years In that time it has been established that ROM code is subject to copywrite protection If we had had the clearCer guidelines then that are available now perhaps neither one of us would have taken the course we did On the other hand we both have a strong claim that we did not violated today s standards even back then Be that as it may there is still room for our interpretations to disagree I admit to being a liberal Incidentally I was called by lawyers in a piracy suite to discuss a case in which the com
51. the number Game 2 Catch the jumping number This time the number changes systematically each time but you get hints to help you out Game 3 x STARS a number guess game This version prints more or less stars depending upon how close you are Game 4 Slot machine An inexpensive way to bet Game 5 Acey Ducey a card game The dealer computer deals two cards face up You can bet or not bet depending on whether or not you feel the next card will be between the first two CANNON simulates the firing of a field artillery weapon Copied from Algorithm 1977 J G Lipana 3445 Lama Ave Long Beach CA 90808 CHASE puts you in a high voltage maze pursued by 5 enemies It was adapted by the late Pat Lewis amp Joe Lake AAAA Computer How s 1477 Barrington Suite 17 L A CA 90025 RUSSIAN ROULETTE was coded by Joe Lake SUNWAR by Kevin Daly 5438 N Granite Reef Scottsdale AZ 85253 You are captain of a starship patroling near the edge of human occupied space Your mission is to prevent alien intrusion Your ship is equipped with lasers ballistic torpedoes and electronic deflectors Your ship is capable of speeds from warp 0 to warp 12 The screen continually updates its display of your sector TIMEBOMB coded by J Lake based on Kilobaud August 1977 allows you 10 seconds to defuse a time bomb Very unnerving TANKS is a war game between two tanks Win or lose til SLOTS is a 50 cent slot machine you quit
52. the printer Output data is placed in a buffer The interrupt handler removes data from the buffer and outputs it to the printer port each time there is an interrupt due to the transmitter buffer in the 8251 goes empty This means that the software does not merely execute a tight loop checking the status of the printer It could but the Poly s designers were more far sighted than that Their use of interrupts permits the Poly s internal Real Time Clock to interrupt the printer software and other parts of the system software This makes the software a little more complicated but provides a higher level of sophistication This also explains why we needed to implement an interrupt facility in our black board CONSTRUCTION Obviously this circuit will not fit into the 8251 socket so it needs to be constructed on a small piece of perf board If a DB25S with right angle solder pins is used the perf board can be mounted to the connecter like the Poly Printer Adapter Card Use a 28 pin D I P header to plug into the 8251 socket Connect the appropriate pins to the conductors in a flat cable of sufficient length to reach the black board Although not shown 0 1 uf capacitors would be connected between ground and 5 volts at each I C I generally use sockets designed to be soldered in place and connect the desired pins with 30 gauge wire wrap wire Do not daisy chain the power and ground connections instead run a separate wir
53. video monitor I didn t make the connection before but now it makes sense The new monitor must be generating a stronger magnetic field than the old one and it s interfering with the data Being read from the magnetic diskettes ure enough moving the monitor off to the side of the Poly corrects the problem I m going to keep the Samsung monitor but plan to put it on a stand that keeps it away from the disk drives And if the field is that strong I need to keep my diskettes away from the monitor as well But I ve always tried to do that anyway Is there a moral to the story No unless phooey counts as a moral es feeding the drives y is low feeding both is the lower of the Letters Dear Ralph January 13 1987 First I would like to give you some good news I have one of my Polys up By ue time you get this I should have two up I have several things that I would like to do to make my Poly more efficient When I power up my computer does not always give me FFFF This is because of old memory chips that do not always make contact As my machine gets hot when it is on for several hours the problem seems to get worse For this reason I would like to convert a 16K memory board to a 64K board Is there a way a person can get their hands on the information without paying 125 00 Since I have more than one Poly would like to find out how to make a Twin system it s my assumption that you can get more than 64K wit
54. with merchandise to the point of selling disks in the drug stores and software in every bookstore I held out as long as I could I was not the first on the block with clones The transition was difficult It was like unlearning a language and learning a new language that s missing a lot of words We always knew where that delete key was Now there are two in places where you would not expect them to be The cursor and text movement are now strange animals All those function keys do things that our preprogrammers told them to do instead of what we tell them to do and every program s a little different How do you exit with WordPerfect or from a Modem or from BASIC Where is that confidence building sound that comes from the clicking of disk drives We had it down We were the leaders We were in charge of that Poly but now the personal computer is in charge of us It is hard to ignore the new standards color monitors plentiful new programs and the public domain software that are so pretty fast and so perfect in their ways It is hard to give up our own brain child special programs that we could fix ourselves We just had exactly what we needed and knew just how to use it So much for the game and the fun Now it is just a thing everyone uses wit no special pride We may have been the first on the block probably not just with the home computer we are probably the ones that also were the first with the VCR and the self focusing
55. wrote my program LoadRel and MakeRel to support the new disk driver routines Both were written without benefit of your LOAD program but used the knowledge gained from understanding how WPS GO worked On September 19 1982 you sent me copies of your disassembly source codes for the ROMS along with the comment I m sending you these files for a couple of reasons First to thank you for the assistance you ve given me on numerous occasions And second because if I didn t send them to you I know you could get them anyway from somewhere else I thought your comment a bit strange but I sent you a copy of my own disassembly source code in exchange 4 NOV DEC 1987 On November 18 1982 I sent you a copy of MakeRel and LoadRel My copy of the NOV DEC 82 PolyLetter in which your MAKEREL GO was released was postmarked November 20 Obviously they crossed in the mail LoadRel GO and MakeRel GO were also promoted by direct mail in advance of this submission to you and had told you on the phone about both of them Prior to this At the time I felt mildly annoyed that you had released and promoted your own in PolyLetter but chalked it up to competition This irritation was my motivation when I later beat you to the punch with DisAsmb GO by a matter of a month I had been planning to convert DisAsmb BS into DisAsmb GO for quite some time but finally got around to completing the job in May 83 After having been stung
56. x 12 counting variables x 27 parameters can be run in 25K bytes of free memory without encountering difficulties A full Poly has 38K free bytes IMPS was described in A General purpose Microcomputer Program for Stereological Data Collection and Processing which was published in the Journal of Microscopy number 124 p 219 Nov 1981 The authors were L G Briarty L G and P J Fischer A 56 page handbook is available the reproduction and mailing cost is 6 00 each copy IMPS and STEROT6 were submitted by Dr L G Briarity Botany Department Nottingham Uiniversity Nottingham NG 2RD Great Britain The remainder were submitted by Dr Michael Clarke Chemistry Department Boston College Chestnut Hill Massachusetts 02167 KELEK BS calculates homogeneous rate constants from CV currents CVK BS uses data from disk files EH PH BS calculates Eh values as a function of pH when the oxidized and reduced forms engage in single proton equilibria MOLWT BS calculates Elemental analysis for compounds with up to 25 different elements ARRHENIUS BS calculates rate constants given the 8 MAR APR 1987 temperature and Arrhenius activation energy XLENGTH BS calculates molecular bond lengths and bond angles POLAROGRAPHY BS calculates Log id i i Base 10 and Voltage Current and voltage input can be in arbitrary units LLSQPLOT BS performs a linear regression analysis on data The data is read into two one dimensional arrays X a
57. you be so good as to let me know which issue you think it was in Ralph P S The whenI you spoke of is actually in paragraph 9 PolyLetter is spell checked formatted to a file edited for page headings and printed in one pass I checked and when is NOT in the original file which A S Spell checked Just for drill I ran a test and A S Spell does catch whenl The whenl WAS in the formatted output file so it apears that either format goofed or fil PS goofed or most likely I goofed during the post formatting editing when I delete alternate page form feeds Since the printer does the right justification no space would be expected Unfriendlyness came about because I had failed to remove friendly when I added the LY suffix Removing Friendly from DIC6 8 solves this particular problem since the combined suffix LINESS is in SUFFIX Ed Dear Ralph September 27 1987 I have been wanting to write and thank you for yet another great issue 8704 of PolyLetter It s fun reading the nostalgia articles I still remember my own first encounter with the Poly back around 76 in a little corner store in Santa Barbara CA called the Byte Shop Nothing like today s lavish computer stores Just 1 2 people hanging around an IMSAI or two a couple of Diablo amp Teletype printers and than beautiful wooden box with three disk drives in it sitting next to the little orange 88 I was mesmerized A
58. 1 2 90_Cross Assembler TX Disk PGL V 16 has 7 files on it 53 free entries 327 sectors in use 0 sectors deleted 23 sectars free Size Name 86 EXPRESSION TX id SHOCK IT 112 PARSE TX 44 sasm 60 45 CASM2 SO 16 CASM DOC TX PolyLetter 8701 1 1 80 Cross Assembler TI Page ADS From Abstract Systems etc 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 8421 DISKS DRIVES MODEM PROMS SOFTWARE SPELL 1 MAXALL diskettes 13 per box of 10 2 Two drive external box and power supply 75 3 Hayes Micromodem 100 for only 40 300 baud in bus direct connect modem limited quantity 4 KayesSys modem software for the Micromodem 100 35 ASS Spell a good spelling checker for 35 Abstract Systems Exec Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 7 Abstract Systems Proms Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 8 PolyGlot Library Volumes 1 thru 9 6 each Send 1 00 for a complete catalog free with any order Make checks payable to Raiph Kenyon From PolyMorphic Systems 7334 H Hollister Avenue Santa Barbara CA 93117 805 685 6238 Manuals 1 Field Service 35 00 2 Aligning 88 disk drives 15 06 3 Printer Interface 15 00 4 Adding a SSSD or DSDD drive 15 00 5 Keyboard II amp III 15 00 6 Testing amp Maintaining 88xx 15 00 7 88 MS user s manual 25 00 8 Confidence 25 00 9 Hard Disk 15 00 10 Exec 96 Addendum 15 00 11 Twin System 15 00 12 Twin System Confidence 25 00 13
59. 1 BREAKOUT GO 10 Chase CO 2 NULIFE DC 3 NOLIFE 6O 2 TWEAL DC 1 TWEAE GO 2 SYSMOV DC 1 SYSMOV CO 3 SEARCH DC 2 SEARCH GO 2 IDUMP CO 2 compare CO 7 FORMAT DC 16 FORMAT GO 1 compare DC TBASIC CO 5 Thfa OV 2 DUMP DC 10 Cromus GO 57 Gnomas AS 10 Caomus DC 1 BIT GO 1 SCREEN GO ARISE GO 2 DLIST GO 15 FILMS GO 2 CLEAN CGO CHECKSUM CO 8 amp 8 SZAP GO 4 DUMP CO 1 USINC DUMP TX 3 WORMS CO CONVERTER 5S 7 CALENDAR BS 3 COMPARE GO 3 SORT ROUTINE 5 4 COPYALL BS 5 COMPARE CO 4 DIRECTORY 8S 1 Eater GO 1 Screen GO 1 ScreenOff cO 1 ClockOff GoO 2 Cleck GO 1 KillEater o Screen DC 3 Clock DC 2 ASROM DENO GO 8 NOV DEC 1987 For Sale Video Board 95 8 Disk Controler 150 Printer Interface 50 Poly CPU 125 Priam Hard Disk with Poly Interface card and Power Supply 400 Poly Keyboard Screen enclosure 178 Charles Trayser 415 651 8931 FOR SALE Two 5 SSSD SA400 drives 25 each Ken Lowe 5936 W Zina Circle West Valley City UT 84120 801 969 7736 FOR SALE Poly 8810 box with power supply and mother board 50 plus shipping Charles A Thompson 2909 Rosedale Avenue Dallas Texas 75205 1532 Phone 214 368 8223 Annual Index 08 MIRROR MAZE BS 3 READ THIS TX PGL V 25 contains Gnomus the hot key memory resident macro utility It also contains the programs which were on the first PolyLetter Disk back in February 1980 and which were released to the Public Domain by Bob Martin back when Po
60. 1987 Bit Bucket How many kinds of bits can you think of I thought of little tid part and o honey Send in your thoughts Remember our current contest asks what kind of soup does a computer eat In This Issue Editorial Abstract Systems edit Program Letters To amp from The Editor In The Public Domain Ads One of a Kind Readers Requests Bit Bucket oCow Wn Yee ma e Coming Soon A Parallel 8251 UART by John Warkentin Modems and Communications software More BASIC for Beginners Serial Device Driver Explained How to UNSAVEP protected Programs More System Programmers Notes Making your PC work like a Poly More Help BugNotes Public Domain Software etc Questions Can you find and answer the questions asked in this issue Send your answers and requests in FIRST CLASS MAIL Back volumes of PolyLetter are available at the same price as the current subscription rate US 15 00 yr Canada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Individual issues are also available 3 00 3 50 4 00 5 Editorial Last issue I lamented the increasing cost of publishing PolyLetter and reported that the price of PolyLetter is being increased to 18 per year which is far less than the cost of living increase over the previous price period As an additional cost saving measure there will be no more free rides For those of you who have enjoyed free subscriptions
61. 6 bits PolyLetter 8701 Page OOj 5 0 1 times i To prevent trouble you must set up your printer to agree with the Poly If the printer cannot be changed then we must change the programming byte in Poly s call to SETUP so that it programs the USART with something the printer likes You can use Szap to change the byte or you can GET Printer use the front panel to change the byte and then SAVE a new copy of printer with the changes made Many people have added a disk controler and external drives to convert an 88 into a home brew 8813 system I can sell you a set of ASROM proms better than Poly s for 35 5 shipping You would need to get an extra Disk Controler card and an external enclosure and power supply for drives You can probably get the enclosure and drives cheaper in England but you will probably have to ony the disk controler board PolyMorphic Systems has had them for 149 00 but I don t know what their current stock level is May I suggest that you look through the ads for used Polys in future issues of PolyLetter with the eye to buying another 8813 and save the boards in your 88 as spare parts for the other system s It may be cheaper than upgrading the 88 and you d have spare parts that way ARISE GO undeletes a single file If there 1s more than one deleted file with the same name specify the desired copy after the name of the file for example ARISE FILE TX 3 undeletes the thi
62. 6701 02 Prices of PolyLetter Back Issue 8703 06 Letter Chack Gross 0705 03 Printer 30 Ralph Kenyon 0701 03 Letter Chack Thompson 8702 04 Qs1t 0V information Ralph Kenyon 8703 03 Letter Chuck Thompson 8705 01 Quick Reference Card 4702 10 Letter Dana Gould 8704 04 Radio Shack DWP 230 Priater Ralph Lenyon 8705 03 better Dick Brown 6703 01 REBEL BS Program Description 4704 08 Letter Dr Briarty 4701 02 REMS LINES OUT 85 Program Description 6705 08 Letter Earl Gilbreadth 8702 03 Readers Requests 8706 09 Letter Earl Gilbreadth 8705 02 Readers Responses Ralph Kenyon 8703 09 better Frank Stearas 4704 02 RPE CALCULATOR BS Program Description 8705 08 Letter Frank Stearas 8705 03 RS 232 cable connections Ralph Kenyon 0702 06 Letter Gary Sterling 9703 04 Sideways Scrolling by Edit Ralph Lenyon 6702 02 Letter Glenan McComb 4702 05 Saall C 8701 08 Letter Glenn McComb 8703 06 Smoke Test Ralph Kenyon 6703 07 Letter Jim Trahan 4703 01 SORT GO information Ralph Kenyon 8705 03 Letter Joha Sloan o702 04 SORT GO Program description Ralph Kenyon 8704 01 Letter Jose kipana 4702 01 SPELL 3 0 comments Frank Stearns 8704 02 better Len Thomsen 4703 03 SPELL 3 0 comments Frank Stearas 0705 04 Letter Len Thomsen 4705 07 SPELL 3 0 commeats Ralph Kenyon 6704 03 better Mark de Piolenc 8703 05 SPELL 3 0 comments Ralph Kenyon 0705 05 Letter Michael Aquino 4705 06 Spell GO program description Ralph Kenyon 0703 61 ketter Michael Schwartz 0705 03 Spell A 5 comments Frank Ste
63. Also about 100 usable diskettes Steve Chip Brown Pensionalysis Inc 2116 Union St San Francisco CA 94123 Call 415 567 0125 weekdays What to ado with a New Disk by Al Levy When receiving a disk from another user or software house there are some unwritten conventions 1 Write protect the original 2 Place the disk Resident drive in any drive but the System 3 Image the disk 4 Put the original away in a safe place If you are as neurotic as I am image the copy and keep one as a backup 5 ENABLE your system If there are SYSTEM files it 1s best to know what they are 6 LIST the directory Look for Documentation File Documentation File DC extension TX extension gt Text File gt Command File TX extension TX extension INSTALL TX gt Command File BS extensions gt BASIC programs GO extensions gt Machine language files AS extensions gt Disassembled or Source code for GO or OV files A source code for a GO file could have TX extension The clue would be the name For example MOVE GO Program MOVE TX gt Source Other extensions to look for DT extensions gt Data files OV extensions gt Overlays DX IN Directories gt Formating Files extensions extensions 9 JUL AUG 1987 RL extensions gt Relocating GO files ED extensions gt EDIT libraries SY extensions gt SYST
64. DP type businesses using software packages 2 Non EDP professionals using WORDMASTER EDIT files structures for data management and some limited amounts of software either contracted or simple user designed 3 Non EDP professionals using WORDMASTER and EDIT along with user written BASIC programs 4 EDP professionals using Polys in his business 5 EDP professionals engaged in the sale of Polys or Poly support soft firm hardware I can only get a feel for this from the tone of your PolyLetters but would offer a guess that the percentages of initial Poly owners fall into the categories of 1 50 2 25 3 10 4 10 5 5 I don t know the numbers but at say 3 000 Polys out there originally there are now fewer than 750 in Catagory 1 500 in 2 200 in 3 150 in 4 and 75 in 5 Unfortunately for PolyLetter no one in Category 1 is interested in subscribing and not many in 2 The main interest would come from the category 3 5 Users a potential market of some 425 maximum The type of articles you re offering would seem to perfectly satisfy this market Somehow the Category 3 guys have got to become more involved by asking stupid questions I would classify myself as a Category 3 even though I earned a CDP back in 76 I don t understand an awful lot of what you all are talking about That s OK though because it shows me some of what I don t but ought to know I ll work on it like how can I have a SSDD MS when it came
65. E II having used them for 3 4 years in business mail lists quotations etc I still use your little known booklet about Little Known Poly Commands Keep up the good work What s new by Poly We ll buy it John A Sloan Oakmont PA John Poly has an upgrade which allows running CP M See their ad elsewhere in this issue Unfortunately the only other disk format that the Poly CP M system can read is North Star Single Density I have had my CP M conversion running for years although I seldom use it I have purchased the Nevada series of FORTRAN COBAL and PILOT all on North Star Single density Once the contents were PIPed over to the Poly drives I had no trouble running the software I also bought a Lisp system on an Osborn format and had a friend copy the files over to a Poly using the serial ports and transfer software It ran fine Poly is limited to a 64x16 screen and many CP M programs want an 80x25 screen The person know who has the most experience with CP M programs on the Poly is Al Levy He has copied most of the Public Domain programs over into Poly disk format If you know how to set up Wordstar for a 64x16 screen it might run on the Poly under CP M I m afraid I don t remember the booklet you speak of but I now have my own version of Exec which ads several commands corrects many bugs and has a HELP system with help files on every command Exec A S is available from Ralph Kenyon for 35 Ed De
66. EM libraries 7 Should you discover any DX extensions Directories you should list them Assuming the directory name is DATA DX and the disk is on drive 2 the system command you would use is LIST lt 2 lt DATA alternatives Poly Screen L 2 lt DATA L lt DATA 2 lt DATA l ownewnwn ww pad L One of the best ways of knowing everything on the disk and having hard copy to three hole punch etc 1 Connect your printer 2 Use a system disk that has the program CHECKSUM 3 Type CHECKSUM 2 8 Either TYPE or PRINT any DC file If non exists try this with all of the TEXT files If there 1s any documentation explanations they should be contained in one these files A CP M convention that I have imitated s to use a READ ME file Often I use a HELP DC Watch out for fellas like KENYON who enjoy lower case You are liable to see Help dc Command files are easy to spot They have system commands like COPY or DELETE These make installation easier Commands preceded with a question mark COP prevent the system from aborting a command file Try to get the intention of the author from the command and or documentation Follow instructions and take it from there It is not a good idea to run programs without knowing what they do or what they expect It 1s not a good idea to start editing the documentation It is suggested that you print the instructions or documentation Put it in a loose leaf boo
67. Exiting without entering the file name would be a much more user friendly abort that pushing reset Cor using the front panel if December 1 1982 enabled to warmstart Exec HELP In this section I share with you the have built up over the The entire system is included with Abstract Systems Exec KELP COMMAND ENABLE HELP file for system command ENABLE The ENABLE command activates the CTRL Z front panel allows access to powerful system commands and increases the information displayed by LIST and DIRECTORY ENABLE also changes the functioning of the SPART command Syntax ENABLE RETUEN see DISABLE The following additional commands are available in ENABLE mode DNANE INIT IMAGE DISABLE SetSys Sniff UnSys pyr PolyLetter 8701 Page Public Domain We have a bonanza this issue There are 7 new disks to choose from PGL V 10 has miscellaneous BASIC programs submitted by various persons at various times PGL V 11 has Ron Cain s SMALL C compiler PGL V 12 has a terminal program for modems and an absolute machine language debugger submitted by Stanley Reifel The debugger is very much like RDB which comes on Poly s System Programmers Disk The source listings for both these programs are included PGL V 13 amp PGL V 14 contains the source files for an 8048 Cross Assembler submitted by Stanley Reifel PGL V 15 amp PGL V 16 contains the source files for a submitted by Stanley 6 each Z 80 Cr
68. Housekeeping Smoke Test Modems and Communications software More BASIC for Beginners How to UNSAVEP protected Programs More System Programmers Notes Making your PC work like a Poly More Help BugNotes Public Domain Software etc Questions Can you find and answer the questions asked in this issue Send your answers and requests in FIRST CLASS MAIL Back volumes of PolyLetter are available at the same price as the current subscription rate US 15 00 yr Canada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Individual issues are also available 3 00 3 50 4 00 The Newsletter for PolyMorphic Systems Owners and Users PolyLetter 8703 Page Editorial Well I must apologize for being later that I expected I am presently in the middle of re writing and polishing my masters thesis in philosophy I ll be glad when that chore is done With any luck it ll be done before the next issue East Coast Service Davis McCarn of DMCC in Arlington Virginia 22201 tells me that he still can service Polys Contact him at 3465 North Fairfax Drive Phone 703 243 5730 SPELL Some time ago I got Frank Stearns Spelling Checker from Frank I was not at all satisfied with it and wrote my own which I have been using for some time Now that Frank is no longer in the Poly business I am offering my version of Spell at the incredibly low introductory price of 35 Frank s dictionaries had lots of incorre
69. IC Normally 150 Special 95 3 Other Manuals and Theory of Operation Manuals CALL 4 CP M hardware conversion 100 plus parts CP M license manuals and software 200 5 16K to 64K memory card conversion 125 00 plus parts The 16K board has to be a Poly board and in good working condition 6 Serial mini cards New 150 Reconditioned 75 Bare board 30 For Sale Multiple 8813 systems each with 3 drives 64K Monitor and Keyboard Make offer Robert L Schwartz 906 Main Street Cincinnati OH 45202 513 241 3447 For Sale 64K 8813 with 3 drives Make offer Vince Greenen 445 Buckeye Naperville IL 60540 312 420 8813 days 312 961 2511 evenings For Sale Video Board 95 8 Disk Controler 150 Printer Interface 50 Poly CPU 125 Priam Hard Disk with Poly Interface card and Power Supply 400 Poly Keyboard Screen enclosure 175 Charles Trayser 415 651 5931 For Sale 8813 System with Decwriter printer Make offer Karen Klysz 4050 Hearthstone Court Cincinnati OH 45245 513 752 7186 Poly for sale C Barclay Gilpin 407 Lenwood Drive Costa Mesa CA 92627 714 642 0390 FOR SALE Two 5 SSSD SA400 drives 36 each Ken Lowe 5936 W Zina Circle West Valley City UT 84120 801 969 7736 Charles A Thompson PolyCom Associates 2909 Rosedale Avenue Dallas Texas 75205 1532 Phone 214 368 8223 PolyCom General Ledger 125 Version 4 is the original f
70. ORT It takes input from a file sorts the lines and writes the sorted output to another file Sorting can be in reverse order or by any specified column The maximum line length s 254 characters and the maximum size file that can be sorted is what Letter 1 JUL AUG 1987 will fit in memory somewhere above 40K for a full box Sort places lines shorter than the specified sorting column at the beginning end if reverse order is selected and included lower case letters with the upper case This is especially useful in preparing a cross reference list sorted by various columns or in preparing a sorted list of quotations etc To order SORT send me a check or money order for 10 00 payable to Ralph Kenyon Letters Dear Mr Kenyon May 28 1987 Originally PolyMorphic addressed its advertising to the law office Remember those early advertisements of the Poly 88 and the ultimate Poly 8813 that sat on the lawyer s conference table with law books in the background I bought no less than six 6 PolyMorphic systems All of them filled to the max with memory up and running I invented programs for my bills for collections for accident cases and even had a program for throwing computer salesmen out of the office 1 would type their name and address and Poly would immediately write a letter to their employer advising them that they performed a wonderful demonstration It would explain that their system did not surpass the
71. Poly got sick I was extremely frustrated Since then I have picked up a spare one from a prior owner See the Ads Ed Thanks for picking up the publication I use my Poly most for my Dental practice Do you know of someone in the Atlanta area who can service a Poly The turn around time for shipping repairs to PolyMorphic Systems in California is too long for my needs Mitchell S Lippman Marietta GA Mitch I know the feeling You might try talking with Bob Bybee he s pretty savvy about hardware See his address in another letter Ed Dear Ralph January 6 1987 Enclosed is my renewal check for PolyLetter although I m no longer using my Poly equipment I purchased a Leading Edge that s IBM PC compatible My Poly equipment is being used by my church for bookkeeping and mailing list It is the 3 drive 8813 with 18 megabyte Poly hard disk I also have another 8813 3 drive and MS than are not n use and are available for sale if anyone is interested I do think they need a little work to get going again Someone asked about an inventory program have one with the Poly equipment back in Minnesota I m spending the winter in Arizona It 1s on an 8 inch disk for the MS I bought it from a computer firm here in Phoenix that has since gone out of business The owners were Mark and David Freeman who were Poly dealers I m glad to see PolyLetter back on a regular basis I Enjoyed Frank Stearns letter
72. SH Regarding the exchange of views on SPELL I am impressed with the candid and objective manner in which you and your predecessor Bob Bybee tell it like it is or at least as you see it This is a healthy and helpful environment for everybody when and if issues can be freely discussed and aired in full context without insult I appreciate it Ralph can you help me with 8 replacement SSDD drives How about pressure pads especially for 8 Do you have 8 disks available for sale See Doug Reaser s ad Ed My latest problem the 8 drive 2 will not respond to any call for a directory update not from EDIT COPY or PACK The screw drive will not reverse I restore operations by manually turning back the screw From then on it operates properly with LIST TYPE PRINT READ etc so long as I don t mess with the directory I have yet to commence diagnosing by swapping units and cables and boards Thank God for the extra MS unit that Al Levy recently provided me Sincerely J Earl Gilbreath Jr Savannah GA Earl SORT GO is different from Hsrt OV and Qsrt OV SORT GO reads variable length lines of text from a text file and writes them out in sorted PolyLetter 8705 Page order It doesn t actually sort because it reads one line at a time and inserts a pointer in its proper place This way the data in memory is kept sorted from the beginning and when it writes the data out it is already sorted It works with li
73. SIC Having problems merging new names into the old list which resides on about 30 5 SSSD disks On THIS disk BEGIN is a list maintenance program I wrote Anyone with some understanding of BASIC can see what to change so it would handle any list with fixed length records If you re interested I would gladly add comments The record editor section of the program took several weekends to evolve I was proud of myself I suppose it would have been better if I had been able to do it in Assembly Lang I got Poly s Assembly Language Manual but I have not done any thing with Assembly Lang No time Since I now have an Equity I MS DOS 2 1 IBM PC clone and have acquired PASCAL with tits assembler I will probably go more deeply into that l realty like the Poly Exec Editor etc Don t care for FORMAT So I wrote my own FORMAT to give me justified columns It s also on this disk Wish I could take advantage of DWP II proportional spacing with Poly but I guess that will come with my Volkswriter 3 program in Equity I when my eventual conversion to PC clones evolves Also is a program I call SHUFFLER When you only have 2 drives which once had it would sometimes help to have your list in zip code or alpha order Adding names to a list is often most easily done in random order names gotten from reply cards Even with the mat array sort in the first part of SHUFFLER printing out a sorted list from a random file is sl
74. The UnSys command allows one to designate all files in a directory as non system files Like SetSys it prompts for the directory name which may be a drive number UnSys then clears the system bit on all files in the specified directory The system must be in the ENABLEd mode The ReStart command re starts a command file which has been interrupted or aborted In restores the command file mode flag and allows continuing the command file with the next command ReStart cannot restore programs which take control of the CTRL Y interrupt 4 MAY JUN 1987 WRITE sends text direct to the printer This command affects only the printer which is selected WRITE text prints text and a carriage return on the selected printer SQUEAL sets a flag which tells Exec to report single density 5 inch disk errors Whenever Exec is invoked any previously unreported disk errors are displayed Error 102 0002 Error 103 0004 Error 104 0001 DONT resets a flag which tell Exec not to display disk errors DONT cancels the action of SQUEAL HELP searches for a text file of help information and displays it on the screen The help files may be on any drive HELP name displays the help file information in file lt lt HF lt name HF Example HELP COMMANDS DEFPATH is not changed by HELP HELP dir name displays the help file information in the file lt lt HF lt dir lt name HF Example HELP COMMAND LIST Cu
75. The Stack the organ of the Long Island Computer Association LICA He started 8 years ago swapping files to a Commodore Pet and has since swapped with a host of different CP M machines the Apple and IBM PC clone machines as well as the Macintosh Al regularly transfers files from a PC clone to the Poly for EDiting and then transfers them back I usually send Clone files to the Poly for editing and printing rather than using the Clone directly As you say the secret is having the correct cable connections and appropriate software on both ends Ed Hi Ralph October 10 1987 7 SEP OCT 1987 I still have not got my Poly to interface to a printer I think that my interface in the Poly is not working How can I test it If I was to send it to you can you test it I m using a VIC 20 to print this letter I also have 2 8K RAMs that I can t get to work My top of memory is 9FFF The settings for these RAM s were wrong Would you know the settings for these boards Here is the info from the boards Copyright 1977 G Morrow Synchrofresh TM VIII ECONORAM TM II from Thinker Toys 2F 01 78 I have two of these boards and if you know the settings I would be very grateful for the info Enclosed is 6 00 for PGL V 10 What is the market value for a Poly now As I am considering selling or trading my Poly unless am able to get a printer to interface as I have started a business and need the printer badly Len Thomsen Delta
76. Twin System Dieense vies 25 00 14 Plan 35 00 15 Mailist 35 00 16 Assembler 25 00 17 Basic gt 40 00 18 WordMaster II 40 00 19 User s Manual 40 00 20 System Programmer s Guide 50 00 Theory of operation manuals for the following boards including schematics 1 5 DSDD Controller 20 00 2 8 Controller 20 00 3 SSSD Controller 15 00 4 Video Board 20 00 5 CPU Board 20 00 6 4 0 Monitor ROM 20 00 7 48K amp 16K RAM 15 00 Add 5 00 for shipping and handling CP M hardware conversion CP M license manuals and software 100 plus parts 200 16K to 64K memory card conversion 125 00 plus parts The 16K board has to be a Poly board and in good working condition Eight inch MAXALL 32 hard sectored diskettes for your MS 15 00 per box or 115 00 per ten boxes Al Levy Post Office Bo ti Heeksevir1ve MY eso CS 163 293 8368 9 JAN FEB 1987 For Sale Multiple 8813 systems each with 3 drives 64K Monitor and Keyboard Make offer Robert Schwartz 906 Main St reei Cincinnati wO8 5202 E5 E33 241 3447 For Sale 64K 8813 with 3 drives Make offer Vince Greenen 445 Buckeye Naperville IL 60540 312 961 2511 For Sale 8813 with 3 SSSD drives 20 Meg hard disk Make offer Bruce Buckley McCormic Equipment Co Inc 11591 Grooms Road Cincinnati OH 45242 GI 489 0100 For Sale Assortment of Poly items including a System 88 keyboards interfaces CPU memory etc List available on requ
77. ad lusted in his heart but that was okay because he hadn t done anything wrong Richard Nixon told us he was not a crook but the judgment of history was otherwise Clearly there are different interpretations of right and wrong and since you are a person who has studied philosophy and knowledge I would expect you to agree that the grey areas are often larger than the black and white endpoints In our small community of Poly users we have all learned a great deal from each other Our tricks procedures methods and shared ideas have formed the basis for eight years of PolyLetter and have enabled us to continue using our systems even to this day But where does one draw the line between sharing an idea and stealing intellectual property The issue of Frank Stearns SPELL program has provided some food for thought I would like to add my views to the forum by citing some more examples In the very early days of PolyLetter April 1980 you offered a disassembler program written in BASIC It was extremely popular and was widely used by Poly owners with an interest in machine language programming including myself I learned much about programming and about the internals of the Poly from using your DisAsmb BS program But it was a slow program running in BASIC with lots of disk file accesses and I wanted something faster that would allow me to disassemble large programs like the ROMs I studied your program to try and find a wa
78. ake the job much easier I took piece of stff wire about 6 inches long and bent the Paper clip around the wire I also bent small round rings in the end of the wire so there wouldn t be any sharp ends The Paner ctp now looks like a pair of old ashione ice tongs I slip the hooks around the side of the key cap slide the stiff wire through the bent paper clip until one end is on the next key Cor the case and then lift up on the other end of the wire The key cap comes straight and smoothly up Be careful when putting the key cap back on too It must be placed on straight or the square column can be cracked When it is oriented right it will slide part way on by itself Simply depressing the key will push the cap the rest of the way on If someone has a dead Keyboard II perhaps they would be willing to donate it as a supply of replacement square posts don t know if Keyboard III has a AEE problem Anyone had a problem wi it BugNotes Abstract Systems BugMote 010 0 Edit 3 3 6 10 81 Edit 3 3 has a bug in the exit routine If the output directory is full the Edit asks for a new output file name If there is no subdirectory in which to enter the output file name there is no room for another subdirectory either Edit will not let the output file name be on another disk presumably the data has been written to the output disk and will not accept a RETURN to exit the editor without entering the file name in the directory
79. ar Ralph February i 1987 I see you ve about caught up on the lost issues of PL Congratulations that took a lot of effort For several issues now you ve been noting that I have an upcoming article on hardware problems If you ve been holding out because you re missing the article please let me know and I ll forward you another copy Otherwise I ll hope to see it in print soon I believe that s the last one I ve written for PL so after it appears I ll work on some new ones your suggestions My latest version of PCALC the Poly spreadsheet program version 1 1 has just been released Updates are being sent automatically to purchasers of version 1 0 who have let me know they re using the program Any users who haven t contacted me please do so to be sure you receive your free update For new users PCALC is available on 5 SSSD diskette for 150 For more details on PCALC see ads in previous issues of PL or call me for more information I m slowly moving to the PC world Got a 20 meg hard drive on my IBM now and I m using the shareware program PROCOMM for terminal emulation on the PC It s fairly easy to transfer files from the Poly to the PC and I ve done this for several Poly users Converting BASIC programs so that they run on the PC is a little more time consuming but 5 MRR APR 1987 mostly possible I m still looking for Poly related projects both hardware and software to help Poly owners keep their
80. aras 6705 04 Letter Michell Lippman 0702 61 Spell thiS comments Ralph Kenyon 0705 05 Letter Horm Shimael 6702 02 STARS DS Program Description 8704 07 Letter Richard Rodman 6703 03 STOCKS49 BS Program Description 4705 08 Letter Robert Schwartz 8702 01 Stereological analysis Dr Briarty 8701 02 Letter Robert Schwartz 4702 02 Stereology Program description 6702 08 Letter Robert Schwartz o704 01 Sticking Keys Ralph Kenyon 6701 07 Letter Ron Moffatt 8703 03 SUMIT Ralph Leayoa 4706 02 better Roa Moffatt 8704 04 SUNWAR BS Program Description 6704 07 better Ron Moffatt 4706 03 SUPERMAN 3S 8702 08 Letter Wayne Dewey 8704 04 T TEST BS Program Description 4705 08 LINEAR BS Program Description 4705 08 Terminal programs PGL V 12 8701 08 Lomas 80386 5 100 boards Al Levy 8701 05 The Essence of VaperWear Charles Steinhauser 8704 06 LREGRS BS Program Description 6705 08 The Other Guys 19M Ralph Kenyon 9703 08 MAKEREL Bob Bybee 4706 03 The Straight Wire Ralph Cenyon 6702 06 Macintosh Michael Aquino 4705 06 TIMEROMD BS Program Description 8704 07 Makere Ralph Kenyon 6706 04 Twin System Ralph Kenyon 8701 02 MDIR BS Program Description 8705 08 What to do with a New Disk Al Levy 4704 09 Memory Resideat Ralph Kenyon 4706 01 Windows fer the Poly 6702 08 Okidata 192 Printer Earl Gilbreadth 6762 07 Wooden Keyboard 8703 08 OREGON BS Program Description 6704 07 YPS 42 3S program description 8702 08 OTHELLO BS Program Description 6704 07 7 00 Cross assembler
81. at eager for the source Second fitting a comprehensive SPELL program into the hardware limits of Poly was a feat in and of itself In my version of SPELL many tricks in dictionary breakdowns built in suffixes and prefixes intentional special spellings of less than a dozen words in the dictionary and so on were all done to live and live reasonably within the confines of the Poly hardware The hierarchical content editing of the dictionaries done to accommodate limited Poly memory s itself worth a considerable amount of money Many of the fixes you cite are those that I abandoned from the standpoint of a professional writer By the time I d settled on the general design of SPELL the 1 x and early 2 x versions never saw daylight I d written over 2 million words and had edited some i5 million words I had Cand still do have a good idea of the kinds of spelling errors we frail humans are inclined to make Your large prefix and suffix dictionary which demands a MISSPELL file would require the user to be adding to it for a long time and in the meantime pass many improperly spelled words On the other hand my approach was to set practical and known limits tq what the program would and would not pass A large prefix and suffix dictionary scares me MISSPELL file or not I remember the development stages of SPELL whenI had numerous prefixes and suffixes Many of these were not really suffixes or prefixes but rather co
82. at the computer does not over run the printer buffer Lowering the baud rate to 300 may help If you send me a copy of the documentation on the RS 232 interface for the Diablo I can better tell what you should have Ed Dear Ralph April 1987 This is supposed to be an order but I found some time to think about desirable hardware upgrades to the old Poly and thought I d share the daydreams with you An obvious one which we discussed on the phone would be a Centronics compatible parallel printer port There are many parallel I O S 100 boards on the market the question is how to get the Poly to talk to them As I understand it the Poly is not geared to recognize anything but the CPU board USART and the parallel keyboard port as its interface to the outside world What if anything can be done to make it talk to a PIO board running on the bus I m not sure you ll consider this an upgrade exactly but I would welcome a means of storing archival files on audio cassette The medium is cheaper and far more robust than diskettes It galls me to see the money and valuable storage space I have tied up in things like back issues of newsletters which must be preserved in machine readable form just in case but are consulted at most once a year Ideally the cassette interface have in mind would use Poly hardware and special software that would move files from diskette or hard disc to tape in disc image format and the rev
83. based upon the standards set up y the IEEE committee Starting at the top HERE ARE WIRES NUMBERED 1 F 1 2 3 a8 T B9 C DEE Imagine these wires as being slots The slots now form a mother board into which you will place computer boards Each wire or slot carries an electrical signal or impulse Each board that is placed into the mother board must recognize amp act in accordance with the wiring on the mother board If we have one hundred different signals amp each of the signals has a specific meaning as defined by the IEEE we are using the S 100 bus M Apple Commodore TI Heath and Tandy Corp for example have propriatary bus structures The intent of a proprietry structure is to lock in the consumer When a company owns all of the patents copyrights etc they want you to buy original equipment parts only The history of Main Frames left a trail of LEASED programs 700 cables 4000 disk drives and price pay more for suburban home Until recent years the micro companies tried to emulate the MAINFRAME business and with some success The price of a new DS DD 5 4 inch drive for an APPLE is about 500 A similar drive for other machines rs 85 125 Clone makers devised methods of skooting around bus structures The Tandy 1000 for instance IBM COMPATIBLE uses a mirror lists that would have you support than for a fine image of the IBM mother board In addition they left the DMA line out of the syste
84. ble to handle Sincerely Glenn Andre McComb McComb Research Laboratories Post Office Drawer 90609 Santa Barbara CA 93190 0609 Glen there are probably a half a dozen hackers who might be interested in the source code Sirous has been approached but so far has asked too high a price for the few of us who may be interested I would like to correct some of the bugs have found Most of the software I use now is upgrades I have done myself There are also some minor enhancements I would like to make It would also be useful to have the source code if I ever get around to writing an emulator for MSDOS But mostly I would just like to see how they did that about everything When we talked you spoke about hardware possibilities such as a single ROM RAM board with the operating system in ROM etc Perhaps you could take the time to briefly outline the possibilities you see for our readers there may be some interest Since you have been with the Poly since Day One perhaps you have some software which you would be willing to contribute to our public domain library I m sure there were demo disks put together at various times I ve seen one with some snappy graphics but there aren t any in the PolyGlot Library yet I hope you decide to keep at least one Poly for a while and stick it out with the rest of us I hereby raise and lead three cheers for you as the author of the Editor which I am sure most all P
85. ce above followed by ESC ESC RETURN Now the entire sequence could be executed with the two key sequence ESC G Hot key memory resident programs became popular with the IBM PC and its clones I never heard of such a program for CP M has anyone else Poly had NOV DEC 1987 the capability in 1977 How come it was never released Could it have made the difference in market share Of course Poly couldn t have called it Gnomus and still marketed it They d have to have called it the Poly Commander or something like that But no they had to keep it a secret all to themselves I have completely revamped mine to be relocatable and to use minimum disk space as well as making several other changes to suite myself I use the BACK SPACE key since no one else uses that key to prevent conflict with the Editor s built in Gnome as Poly referred to it and I have added my memory management conventions for relocatable files If anyone is interested in my enhancements rather than in the public domain Poly original give me a call at 413 458 3597 More on edit Since I bit the bullet and wrote edit I don t know how I got along without it I type a file of remarks with commands imbedded call up edit and move up to the desired command and hit return Zowie I sure get a lot of use out of the CTRL DELETE ESC and arrow keys PramKey How many times have you put a favorite program in a command file and then realized that yo
86. ce paid for a Poly in the last year was 500 00 The bottom price paid was 0 The most common price paid was 100 to the best of my knowledge You should be able to get your printer interface working with any serial printer PolyLetter 8705 Page Feel free to call me at area code 413 458 3597 for additional info Ed Public Domain Disk PGL 24 has 27 files on it 27 free entries 334 sectors im use sectors deleted 12 sectors free Size Mame 31 MDIR BS 27 RPE CALCULATOR 3S 32 PAYROLL 8S 10 LREGRS BS 4 PEEKER 3S T TEST 3S 3 OBV ADDER BS 6 OBV VPT MA CORRECTOR BS 4 OTHS MA CORRECTOR BS 24 TELED 11 13 0T 3 MDIR DC 11 RPE CALCULATOR DC 12 LIWEAR 8S 45 STOCKS4S9 85 5 STOCKSS DC 36 GOLDS 8S 3 CTEST DT 1 COLDSPOTS TI 2 DISE TI 9 COMPRESS BS 19 EXPAND 3S COMP EXP EXAMPLE TX FRACTION METRIC CONY BS 7 BASE BS 6 COMPARE TWO BS 5 REMS LINES OUT 8S 4 HOURS DEMO 5S MDIR BS generates a sorted listing of file names and disk names The output from the program may be put into a new file or listed directly to the printer The output also includes disk names the number of programs and the number of sectors in use RPN CALCULATOR BS was Written by Scott A Loomer of Ft Belvoir VA and simulates a Reverse Polish Notation calculator such as many Hewlett Packard models PAYROLL BS is an early and rather simple program to perform some simple payroll functions including print paychecks tabulate pay
87. cember 31 1987 Readers Requests Readers have asked for articles about the following Assembly language article governing the use of WHO WHi Ckdr Msg etc What happens when a BASIC program is saved with SAVEF or SAVEP How to UNSAVEP How would CP M be of use An explanation of the Front Panel How does CP M work Where to get Drive Service Keyboard Service etc Hardware update recommendations Sorce lists Communication software articles File transfer to other computers More on PClones More articles on Hardware Boards etc More articles on languages An explanation of relocatable files As time and space permits I will try to answer all these questions However our readers are encouraged to submit their own articles on these and any subjects Articles should be submitted on Poly 5 SSSD disk PC disk format is also acceptable PolyLetter 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 3597 Address Correction Requested Polybetter Editor and Publisher Ralph Kenyon Subscriptions US 15 00 yr Canada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Editorial Contributions Your contributions to this newsletter are always welcome Articles suggestions for articles or questions you d like answered are readily accepted This is your newsletter please help support it Advertisements by subscribers are free of charge Polybetter is not affiliated with PolyMorphic Systems 10 SEP OCT
88. comments Ron Moffatt 8704 04 PAYROLL BS Program Description 6705 08 180 Cross Assembler 8701 08 Parallel 8251 Schematic Joha Warkentin 6706 07 Parallel 825 UART Joha Warkentin 6706 06 Readers Requests Parity Ralph Keayon 6701 83 PEEKER BS Program Description 6705 08 HELP I have double sided REMEX 8 drives for my PGL V 10 Listing 8701 08 MS but I don t know how to strap the shunts PGL V 11 Listing 6701 08 Anyone who knows how to configure these drives for PGL 12 Listing 4701 08 the Poly MS please write Karl Thomas 145 Bond PolyLetter 8706 Page Street Elk Grove IL 60007 1218 Other readers have asked for articles about the following Assembly language article governing the use of WHO WHi Ckdr Msg etc What happens when a BASIC program is saved with SAVEF or SAVEP How to UNSAVEP How would CP M be of use An explanation of the Front Panel How does CP M work Where to get Drive Service Keyboard Service etc Hardware update recommendations Source lists Communication software articles File transfer to other computers More on PClones More articles on Hardware Boards etc More articles on languages An explanation of relocatable files As time and space permits will try to answer all these questions However our readers are encouraged to submit their own articles on these and any subjects Articles should be submitted on Poly 5 SSSD disk PC disk format is also acceptable Bit Bucket Congratulations to Ron
89. cond one comes apart while undoing ite Ah ha I check and find that this diode is one in the 16V supply Sure enough the other one is dead too Luckily I have some of these diodes around I solder the two replacements in place and plug the board back in Lo The power is back I plug in my good CPU and yea verily everything works fine Whew That was a close one I thought I had lost my lugable 8810 for good Ok lets look at that bad CPU I check the resistance between the 16V line and ground its a big fat zero a dead short It s no wonder the power supply gave up the ghost I look over the circuit and see that it goes to the regulator and to a tantalum capacitor Well something is shorted maybe the capacitor I ll check it out later Let s see if that other 8810 has the same problem My first check of the diodes says they re okay Okay what gives Plug the power supply back in and measure voltages at the source Hey They re okay Wait a minute I just measured 0 voltes on the backplane Okay let s check it out again Let s see I ll follow the circuit up to the 100 plug It s ok there So I check the power supply on the other S 100 plugs Nothing there That s fishy We should have the same voltage everywhere on the back plane Okay I disconnect the power supply and start measuring resistances between the different S 100 plugs at the 16V line Whoops there s an open circuit In fact a quick test
90. ct spellings in the form of double letter endings I decided that the dictionary files should only have correctly spelled words in them I added large files of prefixes and suffixes Spell GO looks for prefixes and suffixes to chop off if it cannot find the word By having larger files of prefixes and suffixes smaller dictionary files of root words can cover many more words There is also a file of misspelled words which could otherwise get by the spelling checker To give an example the prefix PRE and the word MICE combine to form PREMICE which is an incorrect spelling of PREMISE so PREMICE goes in the MISPELL file To make the system more flexible I have placed the names of the main dictionaries in a file called DICTIONARIES Spell GO looks in this file to get the names of dictionary files to use A user can customize his version by adding new dictionaries for example a dictionary of medical terms to the list of names in DICTIONARIES To use Spell one types in the program name followed by the input file names and the output file name For example Spell Input file input files output file If no output file is specified the first input file name with a question mark appended is used Input file names must be separated by commas the output file name is set off by a space Spell can be run on a system with only 2 small drives It saves a copy of the checkbyte on the output file disk and checks to make sure this disk i
91. d Two programs could be created one for the parallel card and one to revert back to standard Poly They would be minor compared to writing a complete driver with the same features as we ve grown accustomed to Sorry but no good guesses on K 9 s food Not having owned a dog I m not up on all the brand names of food but isn t there one called K njibbles amp Bits I think it s a byte size serial Ron Keep up the good work Moffatt Rochester NY Ron a flippy is a floppy which has holes punched in both sides so that it can be turned over and the other side used however no less than Frank Sterns found the word damage spelled wrong dammage in another area See his letter and my reply about Spell I don t know anything about the Z 80 and 8048 4 JUL AUG 1987 cross assemblers They are identical to the software submitted for inclusion except that have changed the extensions to AS to conform to PolyLetter standard extensions for assembly language files In regard to the serial parallel processor idea I had in mind finding out what chips including the 8251 needed to be removed and designing a piggy back card which plugs into those more than one chip sockets and which will give a parallel interface without changing the serial driver software I have already written a parallel device driver which interfaces with the system as a custom device driver This runs the WW Components VIO X2 video board in a t
92. d binary search techniques The search routine is EXTREMELY fast and efficiently uses registers only It is hand optimized for speed Although my dictionaries are arranged in word size order I hope to eventually put them in frequency order by using the Brown Corpus If use the Poly that long Unfortunately my disk 1 o routines do only one sector at a time and could be enhanced to reduce the clickity clack I just haven t gotten around to implementing a larger block size I should think a whole track 10 sectors would be ideal but that correspondingly shrinks the maximum allowable dictionary size As you point out dammage result from the suffix age and the word dam with the double consonant elimination rule and needs to be added to the misspell file Moreover my release of my version of Spell is to fill the vacancy you left when you got out of the Poly business not to denigrate those who already have your version After all your version is no longer available The point is Frank there are major differences between our versions of Spell with advantages and disadvantages to each Mine s not a modification of yours although it is designed to have a similar user interface The biggest difference right now is that yours 1s unavailable and un supported while mine is both available and supported Unless PolyLetter 8704 Page you ve got a copy left around and would like to put it into the public domain librar
93. did not fulfill my wishes or desires In short it didn t do what would have liked it to You were dissatisfied with Autopath for exactly the same reason Although it did exactly what you SAID it should do what you SAID it should do turned out not be what you WISHED it to do You really wished it to change the default path selectively rather than with every lookup as you said However since meaning is not in words but in persons and the customer is always right I defer to your professional editorial experience I profusely apologize to you for saying anything that might have been misconstrued to mean what had not intended It seems that your idea of what an algorithm is differs from that which I learned while aquiring my M S in Computer Science An algorithm is simply an effective procedure A procedure is effective only if it is guaranteed to terminate No efficiency criteria is included in the definition The arrangement of data however will affect the efficiency of any particular algorithm For example in sorting data the quick sort algorithm sorts random data much faster than it sorts nearly sorted data while the heap sort algorithm takes about the same time regardless of the arangement of the data A simple spell checking algorithm is nothing more than computing the set difference between the dictionary file s and the document file s Expressed logically Output file Document files Dictionary files One of t
94. e Send your answers and requests in FIRST CLASS MAIL Back volumes of PolyLetter are available at the same prca as the current subscription rate U 15 00 yr Canada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Individual issues are also available 3 00 3 50 4 00 Pol The Newsletter for PolyMorphic Systems Owners and Users PolyLetter 8702 Page Editorial This issue is chock full of letters The response has been very gratifying We heard from one of the original design team members Glenn McComb See his letter But don t let that stop YOU from writing Let s hear from everyone the more we share the better off we all are The next issue is due off the press by the end of May so there will be more time for responses to recent issues to be received I hope the return to a normal schedule doesn t disappoint those who have gotten used to getting a fresh PolyLetter every month Playing catch up has taken some of my time and energy but it seems to have been worth it Last time I tried a small change in the format A couple of readers have complained that the condensed mode print such as is used in the HELP column and in the Public Domain listings is hard to read My printer gives a little bit too much fill in when in both letter quality and condensed mode so tried shifting to correspondence quality for those sections The result was a bit on the light side but t seemed more r
95. e even written two MS DOS software look alike programs for the Poly One is VOL GO which reads and displays the disk volume name just like S DOS s internal VOL command I usually in the drive when I shut off listing each drive leave my disks my system and tired of to see what I have in it when I boot ip I added VOL 1 VOL 2 and VOL 3 to my INITIAL file and it shows me the names the disks on line when I boot up The other program is SORT GO which reads an input file of lines into memory sorts them and writes out the sorted list to the output file As in MS DOS you can specify switches to reverse the order R or to select the column to sort by nl SORT GO was written to produce the annual index published in the last issue of PL but it could be used to alphabetize any file Someone once wanted to alphabetize a list of quotations but I don t remember who Poly Problems by Bob Bybee Ever had one of those months when your system just wouldn t behave A few weeks ago I started seeing a glitch in the video from my Poly Thinking it was the video board s fault I opened up the system I wiggled the video cable checked for loose connections and so on While I was doing this the Poly s power was off but I had left my video monitor turned on And a short time later smoke was rolling out of my trusty Leedex now Amdek 12 Video 100 monitor Well good At least it s not the Poly I went to the clo
96. e from each socket to the power distribution point HYPERBOLE With a relatively minor modification the parallel printer and serial printer functions can be made switch selectable Place a socket for the 8251 on the black board board and extend all 28 lines from the socket on the CPU card Place a double throw single pole switch in line 11 so that the 7 NOV DEC 1987 signal is routed to either the 8251 on the black board or else to our circuit Tie each of the 2 lines to 5 volts through a 2 7K resistor one resistor for the 8251 one for the black board CONCLUSION It IS possible to build a circuit that emulates the computer interface of the 8251 It is not overly complicated all that is needed is the motivation Schematic 8251 Socket Printer Cable 74LE374 27 data bit o as 19 _ DO 2 ET Ee G rer i are ee 2 _ 3 iri ia D3 5 CEL aE A ESRA 6 3 A e s ps 7 AEO iti gt uz Le pe 8 8 7 PER TE D7 9 74Leae4 BUSY ES r itr Pe U3 z PE ti a L912 10 fs 74L581i38 S 2 7K EE y 74LS138 ile JaA LONE is INIT 16 13 RD 2 12 22 p3 ii_ s l a 18 a Ds s D 25 14 15 TXRDY i s ACK 10 STB 1 24LS00 7418138 7418374 7415244 26 5V 24 16 2o 2o 4 GND 2 g 10 10 PolyLetter 8706 Page Public Domain Disk PGL 25 has 48 files on it 9 free entries 348 sectors in use O sectors deleted 2 sectors free Size Name Size Hane Size Name
97. e in that direction In past editorial I urged Poly to assemble and sell clones to Poly Users who needed more sheer computing power We must face the fact that there is a limit to Poly s computing power In education there is a distinction between potential and achievement person s achievement is compared to their potential such as is measured by IQ and other tests The normal result is to have achievement roughly match potential However there are two groups which do not follow this pattern Those whose achievments seem far ahead of their potential are called over achievers Those whose achievements seem far behind their potential are called learning disabled I we apply this distinction to computers we see that Z 80 CP M systems are about normal but the Poly is clearly an over achiever it gets a LOT out of its limited 8080 potential The clones are probably functioning below their potential and could be classified as learning disabled The point of this discussion is that Poly has achieved a near maximum realization of its potential It just doesn t have the hardware to go much further while the clones with their 1 JAN FEB 1987 cludgy software has enough hardware to support a great deal of potential growth That doesn t mean that there 1s no room for Poly to grow and it doesn t mean that the Poly is no good On the contrary the Poly can continue to do what it has done just as well as it has Why I hav
98. e invented a new script 2 MAY JUN 1987 For professional work a daisy wheel is the only way to go I have an Epson FX 100 for other than professional presentation and it makes good draft copy Back when printers cost as much as a new automobile I bought a Diablo 1620 and 1640 They have served me well Have never needed a repair All they do is run and eat up multistrike ribbons like spaghetti I doubt if there is a printer on the market today that can beat them for endurance and quality performance They are still available A 1640 rebuilt by Diablo sells for 600 00 plus shipping I bought one recently for my son and it s really a new printer that refuses to wear out The Printer Works in Hayward also specializes in DIABLO printers and are knowledgable I m trying to find time to get a few programs together and include on this disk Someone was wanting financial programs Maybe what I can offer will be of some help Don t know if they re crude but they serve the purpose These are some ramblings about my love affair with my Polys When they reach retirement age I plan to let them out to pasture They are old friends now and have served me well Without them it would have been a different story He who hasn t talked to a computer at some time or other has missed something Saw an interview on TV with children concerning computers and one young lad when asked what he liked about computers said that a computer was BETTER than a
99. e off to the races Keeping two Polys operating over the years has been an interesting experience Being able to substitute between the two was no small advantage With the modern systems today have two IBM PC s that do nothing but run the newcomer will miss out on a lot of down time fun The real fun was the TRS 80 Model 1 Now there was a chance for real experience While I have had to replace a few defective chips over the years the main cause of problems is poor contacts due to whatever they do to bend pins and coat them with excellent dielectric material I found that denatured alcohol 190 proof obtainable from behind the counter at your favorite drug counter is the best contact cleaning agent It will take the hide right off on liberal skin contact and is flammable Used with a cotton tipped swab Q Tip and soft cotton cloth all board contacts can be cleaned easily To give a board a good treatment I liberally swab the pin row with alcohol and then rock the chips while they re swimming in alcohol I have found nothing that the alcohol bothers Do recommend that the board be allowed to dry for a few minutes before firing up to avoid a meltdown For detecting bad memory chips the first two minutes of the Extensive Memory Test will generally disclose a problem It is better and faster than running through the regular confidence test Running the whole Extensive test gives chips the acid test but most generally if
100. e program starts writing sectors of 00 bytes on the un used tail portion of the disk and continues until the end of the disk is reached I don t know if this works on DD 5 systems or on 8 systems but it sure works for SD 5 systems It is a bit on the slow side though Quick Reference Card PolyLetter has just received a supply of PolyMorphic Systems Quick Reference cards Just mention that you want one with any order or renewal or send in a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope K 93 K 9 is getting hungry no one has figured out what to feed him I ll give you a hint he eats them one PolyLetter 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 8421 Address Correction Requested PolyLetter Editor and Publisher Ralph Kenyon Subscriptions US 15 00 yr Canada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Lenyon Edstorial Contributions Your contributions to this newsletter are always welcome Articles suggestions for articles or questions you d like answered are readily accepted This is your newsletter please help support it Advertisements by subscribers are free of charge Polybetter is not affiliated with PolyMerphic Systems 10 MAR APR 1987 byte at a time In This Issue Editorial 3 1 z 1 Letters To amp from The Editor 1 The Straight Wire 6 Okidata 192 Printer Revie 7 In The Public Domain 8 Ads 3 TSR Bit Bucket F P k 3 0 Coming Soon Assembly Language
101. eadable Al Levy s complaint that the words are too spread out and the lines too close together pose another problem I am trying out a new format to satisfy that complaint With this issue I have shifted from 10 pitch to 12 pitch for the text and have changed the lines per inch from 8 to 7 This actually allows packing in more information I used 43 characters per line at 82 lines per page which gave 7053 characters per page in the old format The new format gives 55 characters at 71 lines for 7810 characters per page for a 10 percent increase in content Al is the editor of The Stack the monthly newsletter of the Long Island Computer Association Since there are so many letters in this issue I ll keep this short to save room for other stuff Poly Letters I used my Poly for data aquisition and analysis I still have it but use it very little We are mostly using IBM PC XT amp AT s now I would sell the system if there is any market for them now but have never actively tried to C Barkley Gilpin Costa Mesa CA See Ads Ed I love my Poly but it s been sick for a long time The last time I got it fixed they took me for a ride They are out of business now Is PolyMorphic Systems still in business Maybe they can fix it Jose G Lipana Long Beach CA Jose Poly is still in business see their ad Letter 1 MAR APR 1987 elsewhere in this issue I hope your Poly is soon well again The few times my
102. ear old technology the people in the S 100 camp just look for their market in the right places where speed reliability gobs of memory and multi user systems are sorely needed they should have no reason to view Big Blue Amiga Commodore or MacIntosh as competition The above article first appeared in the October 1986 issue of The Stack the newsletter of the Lon tiai d Computer Association Ob PC PolyLetter gratefully acknowledges ae kind permission of the editor to reprint this article here Sticking Keys by Ralph Kenyon Do some of your keys stick and you haven t spilled soda on the keyboard Believe it or not the Poly Keyboard II can wear out I had the opportunity to examine some sticking keys the other day and I figured out what made them stick On Keyboard II the keys have a cap a hollow square post and a spring Two smal brass contacts stick up in the center of the key WARNING In the last issue I suggested gently prying off key caps to clean out the keys If the caps are not pulled straight up the key can be damaged To avoid damaging the keys I suggest making a key cap puller I tried to use and IC removal tool but it was too awkward and wouldn t fit between the keys To make a key cap puller take a medium sized paper clip and straighten it out Then bend it in half so that the two ends are the same length With a pair of pliers make a small hook facing inward on each end about 1 8 inch wide S
103. ed and presented as status bit 0 Transmit Buffer Empty Whenever this bit is HIGH the software knows that the 8251 is ready to output another byte We can use the inverted Printer Error line to emulate Data Set Ready on status bit 7 This bit should be HIGH to permit output Bit 0 should be tied to bit 2 and bits 1 3 4 5 and 6 should be tied low A 74LS244 U3 is used to gate the status byte to computer when the STATUS strobe goes low Now let s provide a means for executing a PolyLetter 8706 Page software initiated reset of the printer We do this with another 74LS138 U4 which is connected to the data bus and enabled by the CONTROL strobe Not all the bits are decoded but enough to recognize when OCEH is output to the 8251 control port The final portion of the black board we need to implement is some sort of an interrupt circuit The signal ACK is used to set a flip flop USA U5B whose output is called TxRdy When the status port is read the flip flop is reset That takes care of emulating the 8251 Now for a discussion of the printer port connections I chose to build the printer interface to follow the IBM parallel printer convention The pinouts in the schematic are for such a convention Use a DB25S connector Certain other signals need to be satisfied this is done with the pull up resistor SOFTWARE The Poly uses interrupts which is why the HALT light is on much of the time even while outputting data to
104. ed word This user unfriendlyness makes it difficult to find the misspelled words in the original text I was not the only one who suggested this change Others have told me that they recommended this change to you as well You did not give me Spell 3 0 You exchanged Spell for some of my software including AutoPath which was written especially to your specifications As far as a the gentleman s agreement is concerned I agreed not to distribute your source list or the modified version of your Spell However you seem to have forgotten that stated that I was unable to modify it and that I would write my own version I even sent you some suggestions for improvements This took place back in 1984 I was even kind enough to not tell you why I couldn t modify your program You failed to conform to structured programming techniques making your program extremely difficult to follow even with the documentation let alone prove it correct I also sent you an early copy of my own version Had you taken a moment to look over that source list you would have see that there was no similarity to yours at all I did try to make mine operate like 3 JUL AUG 1987 yours in its user interface and display but there the similarities ended I never used any of your code however refrained from competing with you as a professional courtesy out of consideration for your providing me with your source list My early version of Spell did al
105. ent The sales claims were un believable Everyone else had a DOS Poly had an Operating System Poly had overlays whatever THEY were Poly 8813 was also much more expensive I paid 3100 for a 16K system with 2 drives in 1979 and that was marked down by the dealer who wanted to get out of the Poly business It wouldn t run CP M either I bought the CP M mod later At the time the industry also had a bad reputation for promising the moon and developing the advertised product with the up front sales income Poly with its super claims sure must have seemed like another one of those fly by night companies which was promising un developed products It was my hands on use of the editor on last dealer demo model that sold me Edit and PRINT were all I needed at the time Poly beat hell out of North Star Vector Graphics Apple Sol and even the Alpha Micro at the time The simple addition of file size in the directory list impressed me as more meaningful than the various CP M system DIR listings But 1 ramble The Poly wasn t marketed the owners were engineers ED Dear Ralph May 6 1987 I received the issue of PolyLetter with my last letter in it I appreciate your intent to do a good job for everyone involved in the preservation of the Poly systems yet I was disturbed by your comments following the letter and their implications We do not have the legal right to provide the Poly s source code As I indicated in my
106. eparate the two hooks until they are about a key width apart With this device you can insert the hooks between the keys and slide them around the key cap to be removed Make sure the hooks are positioned in the center of the side of the key cap before pulling straight up When the key cap comes out it can come out in two ways with the square column attached or without it The key cap fits in the square column snugly and is only hela tn place by a friction ETAS The square column is thin and can be cracked if the key is pried toward any one of the four sides rather than straight up I found cracks n the corners of the square column on sticking keys The key doesn t stick when I push it down without the key cap but when I put the key cap back on it sticks The reason is that the column is pushed apart at the crack when the cap s inserted This makes this part wider and it sticks inside the base of the key pad when pushed down I would guess that in an emergency one could cut back or file down the base of the key not the cap about 1i 8th or 3 16th of an inch so that the top cracked part of help system files I last few years Minimum size 7 JAN FEB 1987 the square column won t get pushed all the way down into the base of the key pad I haven t tried it Improving the Puller The times I have used my key cap puller it took quite a bit of pull before the key cap let go Some kind of leverage device would m
107. er PA PolyLetter 8702 Page Welcome back to the fold Norm and good luck with finding your next job I m sure the Poly will help there I have picked up a second hand Poly to use for spare parts But I didn t have the heart to cannibalize it so I set my nephew up with it to use with his school work until the day if ever mine needs parts Since there aren t many local Poly repair shops it behoves us all to acquire a rudimentary hardware savvy to help this along I think we should all share any hardware experiences we have had I shall encourage our readers to send in their experiences Also if anyone knows of a service facility which handles Poly s lets share that info too We do have some hardware hackers among our readers who could be called in times of emergency Thanks again for rewewing your subscription Ed Dear Ralph January 20 1987 To me you re another James A Michiner He can research and write meaningful novels faster than can read them Have been accumulating a number of items ACCOLADES You re doing a really magnificent job and this is especially notable with so little response as you appear to be getting I think more than let on appreciate what you and your predecessors are doing I hope this will encourage you to continue as you have been PolyLetter ARTICLES This is really difficult to address and especially on a post card First of all let s categorize the Poly owners by 1 Non E
108. erial ports MPI 9448 Phoenix 96MB disk and Oasis multiuser OS make offer Corvus 20MB and H_MUX hardly used make offer 3 TRS 80 model II s make offer TI 810 with bad print head 125 2 Soroc IQ 120 terminals for parts 20 2 Shugart SA800 2 Memorex model 651 8 30 each Pertec 9 track tape drive model T8640 9 800 1600 bpi with Wespercorp model TC 113 controller for DEC Unibus manuals for both like new 300 Doug Reaser 205 277 3167 One of a Kind I have acquired a unique item Would you believe a wooden keyboard This keyboard well ya gotta see it to believe it It s beautiful A nice hardwood finish that matches the Poly The keyboard is not a Poly keyboard but it works with the Poly PROVIDED the jumper on the Poly VTI card is switched from the raw 8 volt to the i gulated 5 volt supply It has extra function keys that the Poly doesn t use and a separate numeric pad but lacks the cursor control keys on Poly keyboards II and III It would be easy to add a memory resident keyboard filter program which converted the function key inputs to the Poly PolyLetter 8705 Page Keyboard III function key and cursor control key inputs This is the perfect keyboard for that Polished Display Poly in your Den which some of our more nostalgic letter writers have spoken of I am auctioning this keyboard off to the highest bidder subject to a minimum bid requirement of 35 00 Send in your bids postmarked no later than De
109. erse of course Any ideas Another upgrade that I was considering was a different keyboard I bought one ages ago but did not know how to get the right voltages out to make it run While looking up some poop on the VTI board I happened to run into the info needed to get 5 and 12 volts for the keyboard but I m comfortable with the Poly keyboard now and probably won t make the change even though my new keyboard has a numeric pad Thanks incidentally for publishing the info on the ESCAPE and CONTROL sequence equivalents of the Keyboard III function keys It took your efforts to get me to subscribe to Polyletter and as long as you are willing to carry the ball you can count on my renewals How about a modification to the 8 disk 3 MAY JUN 1987 controller to allow reading standard CP M IBM format disks That plus a switch to port mapped video allowing a 24 x 80 screen would make the Poly a usable CP M machine since for practical purposes North Star single density doesn t exist any more And speaking of disk drives your other readers might be as interested as am in your trick for using 96 tpi drives with the 5 SD controller reading both single and double density A list of compatible drives would be helpful Reading Bob Bybee s report on his bid to acquire the source code for the Poly Exec set me thinking If Poly will even consider selling something that will retain commercial value as long as there is a single wor
110. ersion 75 but removed from later PROMS to make room for the MS Dio code FILMS does use a system location which is called by the Dio code so there might possibly be a conflict although I didn t have any trouble reading a short tape and saving the file to disk The slow speed is in my opinion the worst disadvantage Ed Dear Ralph September 11 1987 Just finished looking through PolyLetter 8704 and am respondring to your offer of 10 for SORT GO check enclosed I note that the fAiS price list offers two 2 sort programs Qsrt and Hsrt that are overlays Al Levy in a recent conversation and without distinguishing which program he was referring to commented on Ralph Kenyon s fast sort He seemed to be impressed How does SORT GO relate to Qsrt or Hsrt in speed or concept I assume that in sorting large files with long fixed length records 1 would have to create a special file of shorter index records imbed the record number at the tail end use SORT to resequence the index records and then use the imbedded record numbers in the resequencing index records to randomly access and copy the host file records Do you have any timing comparisons on the three programs for or would you estimate the timess for say 500 50 character records under two conditions first of the host file being fully random versus two having only 2 randomly out of sequence In the latest PolyLetter I especially appreciated your article CRA
111. est Rusty Callihan 9708 Chatham Oaks Trail Charlotte NC 28210 704 541 1604 or 542 8174 For Sale 8813 Twin system with MS 1 5 drive Best offer Larry Isaacson P O Box 93887 Atlanta GA 30377 404 351 3652 9 5 EST For Sale Video Board 95 8 Disk Controler 150 Printer Interface 50 Poly CPU 125 Priam Hard Disk with Poly Interface card and Power Supply 400 Poly Keyboard Screen enclosure 175 Charles Trayser 415 651 5931 Bit Bucket uter store long gone now where oly was giving out bumper stickers which read BYTE MY ASCII I had one on the side of my Poly for years but it s gone now The com got my How much wood would a woodchuck chuck When 1s 64K 56K In the Poly the usable memory starts at 2000H and goes up to FFFFH this amounts to 56K of usable RAM In CP M machines where RAM starts at 0000 1s common to equate the highest usable mory location with that amount of RAM 00 to FEFF Js 64K s0 RPEF rs OERA En ee 0000 to 1FFFH is not usable so lower 8K must be subtracted The sidered Poly has one 48K memory card dressed at 2000H which give a TOP of RAM OFEF If you think that s confusing en try this In a Poly modified to run M which has memory out to FFFF there is 64K but the Poly s version of CP M only knows about memory up to DFFF a 48K Qrw gaa rog Sete ji Poly so only operates as a 56K CP M system Poly s 48K CP M is really 56K Confused
112. et of ROMs a BIOS written by an independent bonded organization which developed the code from an external description of the entry exit points without any knowledge of the internals of the IBM ROMs and without ever having seen the listing The Phoenix BIOS is one example of this You also disassembled and enhanced Exec OV and other parts of the operating system offering them for sale as Exec A S Your sales literature contains a disclaimer that reads something like Abstract Systems produces upgrades for the 8813 because PolyMorphic Systems chooses not to do so and we feel it s needed That statement may be true and may ease your conscience but doesn t change my feelings about who owns the rights to these items Now in the latest PolyLetter September 1987 I find that you are selling a program called edit GO This program looks surprisingly like the BASIC Editor which I wrote and sold in the July 1982 PolyLetter Did you use my code I don t really care since I know you have the ability to write such a program without ever having seen mine But as a reader of PolyLetter you were certainly aware of my program and might have at least acknowledged it Incidentally I wrote the BASIC Editor after seeing the last line recall feature built into a Chromatics color graphics computer If memory serves you also incorporated this feature into the ASroms So now we have returned to the present and to the issue of the
113. friend Asked why he said A computer will WAIT for you By now you can guess which side of 30 that I am on Computers are a quantum leap for man they are the essence of man and his quest A natural evolution of his creativity They wait and who can deny that they who wait also serve The following is why I have a facination for computers in general and Poly s in particular Turn the clock well back I never had my hands on a typewriter until I was over eighteen years old such was the environment 1937 As a result I have a profound appreciation for any of the mechanical contrivances that provide capabilities sometime beyond our comprehension Retiring from the Navy in 1957 I ventured into general real estate and loan business This brought on the need to compute as a large part of the business was making or purchasing and selling at discounts loans of various configurations The handiest thing at that time was a book of annuity tables and later a book of yield graphs requiring a lot of interpolation Then came the Olivetti Divasumma 24 a mechanical monster costing 625 00 and noisy but it could do amp X plus it did have a memory I wore two of them out before Hewlett Packard came out with the HP 80 also the HP 55 HP 67 and HP 97 a shirt pocket financial calculator that cost 395 00 but it has the bond formula hard wired into it With it we declared our independence from the two Mathematical PhD s at Delphi Science
114. gestions have been incorporated and have resulted in significant differences to every system overlay except Pack Comparing B EDIT GO with edit GO is like comparing an apple to the cornucopia edit GO does what B EDIT GO does and much more However my reason for developing it was that I was dissatisfied with using only the GetBack feature of the ASROM proms Which Lennie araki told me he implemented at Poly right after I submitted the source code to Poly I had originally implemented it as a CTRL DELETE feature but Lennie changed it to CTRL U PolyLetter 8706 Page to agree with Edit GO To maintain consistency this forced me to change mine to CTRL U also A B EDIT user discribed its capabilities and limitations to me over the telephone It only does one line and doesn t understand TABS Try editing a BASIC program line which has a TAB character in it he said it stopped before the tab Anyway I wanted to be able to edit other lines than the last one typed The fact of the matter is that I wrote my own version BEDIT sometime after reading about yours but had used it only occasionally I was doing a lot of custom work in BASIC and finally had the need for it In writing edit GO I started with that code so it is true to say that your product served as the stimulus for mine My first version used UCHR and UVEC and was modeled on a screen dump to printer program However I was leery of all this editing being done at the interrup
115. h a Poly Am I right or wrong Do you or anybody know how I can do this Chris Bagley Tuscon AZ Glad to hear you have a Poly working In regard to the sporadic TOP of RAM Try rocking each chip in its socket press down on one end and then press down on the other end the old anti static foam was corrosive and tended to make the chip legs form a film Also I suggest cleaning the 100 fingers of the memory card with a soft pink eraser gently to rub off any film Do not touch the cleaned fingers with your hands as the skin oil and acids starts the corrosion process again In regard to the heat problem I covered all the openings on the back of the computer so as to force the air to be drawn between the boards The flow is from side to side instead of from the back to the side Space the boards so that any 8K static RAM cards are not all together I _the work I 2 JAN FEB 1987 also ran the machine with the cover off I had one Poly that worked fine until I bolted the cover on then it went flakey As a matter of fact the 16K memory board is dynamic RAM and doesn t generate near as much heat as one of the 8K static RAM cards Making a Twin system is a hellofa lot of work There are 20 30 modifications on each CPU and Video card Each Twin system requires 2 modified Poly 48K memory cards one for each user and one 8K memory card Besides a twin works slower and requires special system disks The CPU runs at
116. he board to allow putting in another voltage There are three ground lines so two additional voltages could be provided The VTI board also has the provision for a negative as well as a positive strobe line With the proper cable configuration and a little work on the VTI card almost any parallel keyboard could be used Lennie Araki worked for a long time getting the MS controller to read standard CP M disks all in software It wasn t fully reliable It would be better to get yourself a cheap flea market disk controler which does not use DMA and write a driver for it Switching to port mapped video is simply a matter of installing the hardware and redirecting the WHi output to the appropriate code I did it with the WW Components VIO X2 board for test purposes The board was used as an auxiliary display by a custom software client My 96 tpi drives do not read double density They read both 96 tpi and 48 tpi in single density format The 48 tpi trick is accomplished by skipping every other track So far I have used SHUGART SA 460 s World Storage Technology FDD 221 5 MPI 92 and the SHUGART SA 465 Half height The electrical interface requirements differ slightly from drive to drive 96tpi PROMS 35 Conversion Software which Reads 35 or 40 track SS or DS 35 See PolyMorphic Systems Ad in previous issues for documents PolyLetter Multiple Back Volume Pricing 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 of volumes dif
117. he first problems we dealt with in the first graduate computer science course I took CS 655 was determining the most efficient method for implementing a procedure to compute the join intersection and set difference between two files To insure that the process is completed correctly one must read in as much of one file as will fit in memory and still allow some working space and then process the entire other file one record at a time with subsequent passes for the remaining sections of the first file Join and intersection process the original file again each pass while set difference processes the output file each pass A spelling checker is simply an application of this basic construct Theory C A B Application MISSPELL DOCUMENTS DICTIONARIES We even discussed this particular application in the course Expressing the algorithm so as to make PolyLetter 8705 Page explicit the memory limitation yields FILES A B C FLAG 0 WHILE NOT END OF FILE READ BLOCK CASE FLAG OF y9 A WHEN 0 gt C B BLOCK FLAG 1 WHEN 1 gt C C BLOCK END CASE END WHILE Of course each block must be sorted and a binary lookup used to insure speed Since the blocks are used again and again it is better to have each block presorted Disk storage limitations determine how many blocks to a file the simplest arrangement being one block per file While it is com
118. hen looked at my last PolyLetter see my subscription expired in June 87 I am enclosing a check for another year Thanks for PolyLetter Ralph I have one question that you may be able to help me with I now have a Radio Shack DWP 230 printer and need to know what printer cable connections I need to get it to work with my Poly 8813 3D SSSD 5 1 4 l hope I can get the issue I have missed Thanks Chuck Gross Mariette GA Chuck I have spoken with Trevor Young at Radio Shack here in Pittsfield MA He says that Radio Shack has a printer cable for that printer part number 26 1361 That cable connects to the 4 pin din connector on the printer The cable has pins 1 3 7 and 20 connected 1 and 7 are grounds 3 is the data line and 20 is the status handshaking line The 4 Pin connector on the DWP 230 is configured as follows 1 is not connected 2 is the status line 3 is the ground line 4 is the data line If you make up a cable for this printer you should connect it as follows CABLE POLY HEADER DWP 230 RS 232 RS 232 CPU i 1 1 AS 2 eA 6 2 3 12 e AR 4 3 9 O For more information on the RS 232 interface see the article The Straight Wire in PolyLetter 8702 By now you should have gotten the missing issue If not let me know and I ll fire off another copy The 8706 is the issue number vice month so you re good through 1988 now Ed Dear Ralph September 23 1987 I m disappointed in your
119. icksville NY 11802 516 293 8368 l also sell XT AT Clones Printers amp supplies for all computers Software for IBM 9 SEP OCT 1987 For Sale Multiple 8813 systems each with 3 drives 64K Monitor and Keyboard Make offer Robert L Schwartz 906 Main Street Cincinnati OH 45202 513 241 3447 For Sale Video Board 95 8 Disk Controler 150 Printer Interface 50 Poly CPU 125 Priam Hard Disk with Poly Interface card and Power Supply 400 Poly Keyboard Screen enclosure 175 Charles Trayser 415 651 5931 FOR SALE Two 5 SSSD SA400 drives 25 each Ken Lowe 5936 W Zina Circle West Valley City UT 84120 801 969 7736 Charles A Thompson PolyCom Associates 2909 Rosedale Avenue Dallas Texas 75205 1532 Phone 214 368 8223 PolyCom General Ledger 125 Version 4 is the original form where you keep each separate set of books on separate diskettes Version 5 is menu driven and allows you to keep a number of different sets of books on line Version 5 requires a hard disk preferably or at least DSDD floppies Either version is 125 00 including the operations manual FOR SALE Poly 8810 box with power supply and mother board 50 plus shipping Non Poly equipment for sale 2 Digital LA 180 printers w parallel I face 70 each 3 Durango computers model F85 for parts make offer ADDS Viewpoint model 60 dump terminal 60 SDSystems model 700 computer w 512K 2SSSD 8 8 s
120. in the latest issue 8605 I was very happy with his programs on checking account spelling corrections and time billing Also had a circulation and mailing program out of Idaho for newspapers I m retired now spending about half the year in Minnesota and half in Arizona Keep up the good work with PolyLetter I enjoy it even if I m not using my Poly equipment Best Regards Bob Johnson Scottsdale AZ Wadena MN Dear Ralph January 7 1987 It is delightful to see the frequent issues of PolyLetter even though half of the things are difficult to understand I am probably one of the most avid PolyMorphic fans and customers I was one of the first think to obtain a Poly 88 and graduated with its use until I finally accumulated no less than six 6 such machines consisting of five 5 8813 s each with three 3 drives and 64K and one 8810 with 64K and which by its nature has only one drive PolyLetter 8702 Page I have been using the old Word Processing System not the new one for perhaps ten years or more and I have been so satisfied with it I would find it difficult to prepare a Will or a Corporation Agreement without its use I have some specific programs that in my law practice find invaluable I programmed it myself so that if I enter the name of a client the date of their accident and a few other items it pops out letters to the police department for an accident report to the doctors requesting medical re
121. ing one fine job in bringing a lot of Poly lovers together The PolyLetter lives again About 5 inch drives in the Poly When I purchased my first Poly the dealer managed to pawn off two used Shugart SA400 drives and before long I began my education A letter to Shugart resulted in a OEM and Service Manual for free along with about ten new head load buttons With complete servicing information my future drive troubles were short lived Later after purchasing a Shugart SA400L drive I got a free Service Manual for it Shugart address was SHUGART ASSOCIATES 1503 South Coast Drive Suite 310 Costa Mesa CA 92626 and the main office was SHUGART ASSOCIATES 435 Oakmead Parkway Sunnyvale CA 94806 Seems there has been news of their selling out to someone If someone is interested in adjusting or repairing a drive the manuals are invaluable plus easy to understand I could go into a lot of detail about adjusting and cleaning for whatever it is worth Head alignment disk speed zero track and head load bail adjustment but access to the manual would accomplish more toward solving a problem than an essay One PolyLetter 8703 Page important item is to not lubricate the rails that the head travels on Clean those with denatured alcohol and leave dry and mechanically free Frank Stearns wrote a program to exercise a disk called it ALIGN and was kind enought to send me a copy That along with a SHUGART ASSOCIATES SAi24 ALIGNMENT diskette you r
122. ions manual Both versions have been extensively used I use Version 5 constantly and there are no known bugs though only a fool would guarantee a bug free computer program DEMISE OF THE TAX PROGRAM The PolyCom 1040 Federal Income Tax Program will not be offered this year There was insufficient interest to justify the many hours a formal revision takes I may do a crude revision for my own use and if you would be interested in that let me know Price would be 20 and your blank diskette sent to me Drop me a note if you re interested and I ll let you know when and if FOR SALE Several Poly 8810 boxes complete with power supply and 5 slot S 100 mother board but no plug in boards These would be great for converting to Ralph Kenyon s enhanced operating system with half hight drives 50 plus cost of shipping PolyLetter 8702 Page Bit Bucket How often have you made a copy of a disk and then realized that you had used an un initialized disk So you get out another disk INItialize it then IMAGe from the disk to the newly INITialized disk and finally INITialize the offending disk Want an easier way First set to the drive number which has the offending disk Then try this BASIC program CLEAN TAIL BS 10 DIM AS 1 256 AS CHRS 0 FOR I TO 8 SASsAS A NEXT 20 FILE 4 OPEN CLEAN TX OUT ON ERROR GOTO 40 30 PRINT 4 A GOTO 30 40 IF 2R 1285 THEN Z CALL Berr 5 0 E8R 0 PRINT 50 T CALL 1027 Th
123. k You still have the original on the original disk You are then free to erase them from the disk Note If you have the utility program SDIR Super Directory it will list all directories and sub directories in one shot Use continuous form for this one PolyLetter 3704 Page BUGNOTES Abstract Systems BugNote 012 0 December 26 1982 boot Exec 95 Dfn2 has a bug in the boot function The boot command checks to insure the destination drive has a disk in it but does NOT check to see if that disk 1s a system disk Readers Responses Would like info on graphics programming for screen amp printer Jim Clay Los Gatos CA Bit Bucket Congratulations and a free disk of Public Domain Software goes out to Norm Shimmel who submitted the first correct food for K 9 Norm called me up on July fifth to say that I should feed K 93 some nibbles and bits one byte at a time before he gets any weaker Let us know which free disk you want Norm Extra credit goes to Ron Moffatt who submitted the second correct entry Ron however went one step further and identified the food as a Byte Sized Serial For that extra effort you get a free disk too Let us know which one you want Now then for our next contest what kind of soup PolyLetter 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 8421 Address Correction Requested Polybetter Editor and Publisher Ralph Kenyon Subscriptions US 15 00 yr Canada 18
124. king Poly would they consider selling rights and info on projects that they ve abandoned I d sure like to see their 16 bit single board computer their abandoned Z800 project their 16 bit Exec So would we all about 5 years ago Ed In contrast to several of your correspondents I have no intention of deserting my Poly anytime soon it s still serving the purpose for which I originally purchased it three years ago learning how computers work I also have an instinctive distaste for conformity and the more companies join the indecent disgusting rush to produce IBM look alikes the less attracted I am to the current generation of microcomputers I like the S 100 bus because of the sheer diversity of systems that can use the same sturdy support hardware When I do drop the Poly I will almost certainly plug another S 100 board set into that bulletproof backplane and power supply Which reminds me I am looking for all the info I can get on S 100 hardware so that I can shop intelligently on the used market and at swap meets Schematics specs service info even sales literature I ll pay repro costs and postage and offer reprints of material I have that the manufacturer no longer offers Info on other obsolete micro mini and mainframe hardware is also of interest Please publish my address and phone Oh yes I need service manuals for the DECwriter II KSR terminal and I m in the market for used Poly Wordmaster 3 DD controller
125. last letter we can only perhaps answer written questions from your readers based upon the knowledge of the code contained in the Poly System I hadn t yet received my copy of the PolyLetter when got a phone call from Sirous pointing out your comments in the letter Please set everyone straight Sincerely Glenn Andre McComb P O Drawer 90609 Santa Barbara CA 93190 0609 Sirous tells me that he is negotiating to license the source code to one person who would NOT be permitted to distribute it He said however that if enough people came forward with a little more cash he might be willing to consider a less restrictive licensing arrangement Anyone interested should contact Sirous at PolyMorphic Systems Ed Asmb GO Housekeeping PolyLetter has received requests for beginning articles on Assembly Language Programming Let me begin by discussing some of the house keeping PolyLetter 8703 Page requirements for Asmb Assembly language programs require a certain amount of housekeeping for the assembler In Poly s assembler this housekeeping is an absolute minimum We must tell the assembler where the program is to be loaded into memory and where the loader is to start the program We must also tell Asmb where the end of the program is There is one other thing all assemblers must be told where the program starts generating code for Normally the assembler expects each line to contain a label optional
126. liability whereas the Poly itself is rock solid I d appreciate any info you can share Richard Rodman Falls Church VA Richard PolyLetter is published every two months It has been primarily oriented toward Poly Disk system users 8813 8810 and Poly 88 with add on Poly Disk Systems It was unclear from your letter whether you have a disk system or the old tape system For Poly disk system users there is a hardware modification which allows running CP M See Poly s ad in the sample PolyLetter You could put in a set of PROMS for some other CP M system but that would require disabling the single step interrupt logic on the CPU card and might require other modifications as well You would simply be converting the Poly CPU into a generic 8080 CPU card The VTI is memory mapped so would require a BIOS which could take advantage of that Ed Hi Ralph I got the diskette PGL V 09 and your note z The disk you sent is really good I had to rewrite most as my BASIC would not accept some of the commands My BASIC is BO8C and Exec 76 It would not accept the command PAGE or FNEND How many BASIC versions are there I see that there are two other versions A01 and C02 How do I get these and how much The disk I got has convinced my wife that I didn t buy a pile of junk How large of big can the Poly be expanded now have 32K and George Little has let me two 8K boards but I have not been able to get them to work When
127. low true recursion on the prefix and suffix files but soon found out that many illegal combinations resulted I even tried limiting recursion to a fixed number of levels at first trying three and then two levels However instead of staying with recursion to two levels I finally opted to put combined prefixes and suffixes into the appropriate files eliminated recursion entirely Obviously have undergone the same kind of developmental process you did which ts further testimony to my having written my version separately I encode the usual suffix spelling rule transformations into the routine which strips a suffix off For example if the suffix begins with I and a match fails the routine changes the I to a Y and tries again It also looks for double consonants stripping one Other rules in my english grammar book have also been incorporated but not all are fool proof hence the MISSPELL file Since double keying s a common problem with Poly keyboards having double consonant endings in the dictionary is undesirable to my way of thinking Hundreds of such words were in your dictionaries The concept of loading as much of the dictionary into memory as possible and then doing a serial comparison with the data file was covered in a course I took back in 1979 as part of my Masters in computer science As for the other main tricks I simply used a highly optimized search routine which combines both hashing an
128. ly by pressing RETURN When proofing this letter the Microsoft WORD speller also threw up on unfriendlyness It too offered unfriendliness as the correct spelling Of course whenI would be caught immediately by the spellers on my DOS machine Because of the tight suffix and prefix definitions SPELL 3 0 would also have caught whenl but I see how A S Spell might not Alas SPELL 3 0 like AS Spell would have erroneously passed unfriendlyness As you say some things just get through That s why I m glad now in a melancholy sort of way that I m on a DOS machine They re okay once you define a half dozen operating system commands and a dozen editing commands that make the thing similar to a Poly There s still the question of DOS machine hardware reliability but you can now get a set of basic AT 80286 boards for less than 700 and a 5 SEP OCT 1987 whole AT system for under 1200 keep on hand Spares are easy to Frank I couldn t find your definitions for dissatisfied in any of my dictionaries including Websters unabridged and the Oxford English According to the Oxford English Dictionary dissatisfy means to fail to satisfy or fulfill the wishes of I never claimed nor intended to claim that SPELL 3 0 failed to meet any of your advertised claims I did however claim that it did not do something that I wished that it had done As I understand dissatisfaction to mean SPELL 3 0
129. ly was hot Those programs are COMPARE GO CLEAN GO DLIST GO ARISE GO COPYALL GO TBASIC GO Tb n OV CHECKSUM GO SZAP GO DUMP GO USINGDUMP TX and WORMS GO some of which have been upgraded since BREAKOUT GO Chase GO and MIRROR MAZE BS are games FILMS GO operates the Poly 88 CASSETTE interface from the disk system Abstract Systems etc 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 3597 DISKS MODEMS PROMS SOFTWARE SPELL 1 MAXALL diskettes 5 10 hard sector 12 per box of 10 2 Hayes Micremodem 100 for only 25 300 baud im bus direct connect modem Limited quantity HayesSys modem software for the Micremodem 100 25 UbiS Spell a goed spelling checker fer 35 Abstract Systems Exec Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 Abstract Systems Proms Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 PolyGlot Library Volumes 1 thru 25 6 each Send 1 00 for a complete cataleg free with any order Make checks payable te Ralph Kenyon wee ew PolyMorphic Systems 7334 H Hollister Avenue Santa Barbara CA 93117 One source for new and reconditioned systems hard disk sub systems parts conversions manuals and service We ve got it all CALL 805 685 6238 For Sale Multiple 8813 systems each with 3 drives 64K Monitor and Keyboard Make offer Robert L Schwartz 906 Main Street Cincinnati OH 45202 513 241 3447 00386 S 100 boards by Lomas Al Levy 6701 05 048 Cross As
130. m If you want to upgrade you must go to Radio Shack Clone boards don t work 100 was an attempt at hardware compatibilty If you owned and IMSAI an ALTAIR a NorthStar or any of the boxes that conformed to the 100 standard it was possible to buy memory boards CPU s disk controllers or any other 5 100 product from a wide variety of manufacturers CP M was the software attempt at compatibility Any member of LICA with an S 100 system could trade boards with any other member Any member using standard CP M can trade disks WHA HAPPENED Big Blue introduced it s PC and the public at large accepted computers as a way of life PC DOS and MS DOS became the new standards To me personal feeling MS DOS is a nice superset of CP M It retains many of the features that I still find objectionable In fact it lacks many features that I have on my twelve year old 5 100 system THE GOOD THE BAD THE UGLY and the pretty I mentioned NEGATIVE COMPENSATING FACTORS earlier Let s take a look at some os the data that helps us to make 6 JAN FEB 1987 decisions It was Dr William Godbout from whom I first heard the phrase PRETTY FACE used to describe the new varieties of computers New means 1984 and later THE GOOD and BAD Today s computers are lightweight You could develop a hernia lifting my S i00 system without the eight inch disk drive cabinet I can tuck the XT clone under my arm and carry it without too m
131. machines useful Please encourage readers to get in touch with me when they have a need for such services Best regards Bob Bybee Stone Mountain GA Bob its always good to hear from a past PolyLetter editor You know from first hand experience about the problem of getting things into the PolyLetter Your hardware problems article went into the last issue 8701 so you can start working on another at any time I ll tell our readers that they can reach you at 5011 Brougham Court Stone Mountain GA 30087 or phone you at 404 498 3556 Ed Dear Ralph March 16 1987 I am one of the original members of the Poly 88 8813 development team having been the original author of the Editor and Printed Driver modules as well as other DOS internals I have a 3 drive 8813 system available for sale with 56K keyboard and 9 monitor as well as an 8810 single dive system Although these systems appear to be not much more than a curiosity in this age of mega 386 machines I offer these machines for sale to anyone who might have a use for them Please mention this in your PolyLetter and add my name to your mailing list I am in contact with Lennie Araki and Mark MacLin two of the early days Poly people who stuck it out to the bitter end Between us we have full access to system source code to the Poly machines and can answer written questions etc Also please DO NOT publish my phone number Written queries are all that we are a
132. me the 12106 decimal address which shows C2 Changing that to C3 disables the autoLF From BASIC I always add POKE 12106 195 to disable the autoLF If I want to PRINT to the screen to test a printout I have ET 12106 194 changing the C3 back to a Z I compared my front panel display to the sectors shown on page 7 Each byte is identical in sequence to the ones shown Where the article shows to change the CD byte I am changing the C2 byte the fourth byte I don t have Szap GO so can t permanently change that byte Also I am not programmer enough to do it with Assembly Language or anything else I would prefer changing the DWP II printer I have tried to find the DIP switches which some have told me would be there someplace Did not have the guts to disassemble any more than I had so I backed off My ONLY other preference would be to fix things so that when I invoke Printer DWP II the AutoLF is disabled and when I invoke Printer Screen it is enabled I also have Printer 3510 which feeds text with typesetting codes directly into my A M Comp Set 3510 typesetter through a special interface modem I purchased Now that I have responded to the article in 86105 a brtthe about Me I m an artist adman printer Use my 3 SSSD drive 8813 w 64K to maintain a 20 000 name address list for a client We print out the addresses on envelopes with the TRS 80 envelope feeder Did all my own Programming in Poly s extended BA
133. mendable that you hit upon the idea on your own accord you were re inventing the wheel and cannot claim any rights to such a public idea The arrangement of words in your dictionaries as you say based on your frequency experience would affect the speed of any such algorithm Since your dictionaries are arranged in your frequency experience order A S Spell would probably run faster if it did use the SPELL 3 0 dictionaries However A S Spell uses different dictionaries Its dictionaries are not presently arranged in frequency order They are arranged by word size only I am also sympathetic to your 100 hours editing dictionaries I too over the period since 1984 have spent a hundred or more hours editing dictionaries I however failed to incorporate frequency experience BUT I have ordered the Brown Standard Corpus which contains standards of English text I refer you to Computational Analysis of Present Day American English by Kucera and Francis Brown University Press Providence 1967 I will subject the corpus to a frequency analysis and issue revised dictionaries which do take frequency into account A S Spell does works on SSSD systems with 48K What s more if anyone comes up with a configuration where it doesn t work I ll fix it for them Well Frank publishing your letters here has given SPELL 3 0 more exposure and positive praise than it ever had before I am sure that many people out there would like
134. mposed on my POLY using EDIT and then printed with the OKIDATA under direction of a general purpose program I wrote in BASIC Sorry but this article 1s not printed here with the OKIDATA but the sample Earl sent did look good Ed Note that the print is not only proportionally spaced for different letters iiii wwww but can also be space controlled between each letter to generate a straight right margin Spacing print mode etc can all be regulated by BASIC within each line There also is a special feature which permits the design and storage of some 160 special 7x11 matrix characters It has an 8K buffer There also are NO IMBEDDED PRINTER signals within the text file I can print any conventional text file with lt 90 characters between CRs I ve got POLY WORDMASTER but have not used it enough to really make a comparison I have had the 192 actually a 193 wide carriage for about a year and recently ordered a 192 PLUS The salesman on the phone assured me there was no difference between the PLUS and its predecessor that the PLUS was improved somehow Well it is faster up from 160 to 200 cps maximum rate However the various controls structure has also been expanded and all the BASIC control signals were changed too The revised signalling structure makes a straight translation of my original BASIC signals somewhat complex but still not impossible This revised letter was done on the new 192 after less than 5 minutes modification
135. n actual computer a real one that could do things that only the big IBM 650 s were supposed to be able to do I saved my pennies and got one of the first 8813 s shipped by Poly with minimum RAM and only one drive Over the next few years I laboriously upgraded ROM by ROM board by board to a full house 8813 And what great people I met along the way in basements garages and studies overflowing with Frankenstein lab gear You could always tell a Poly freak as he always had the 8813 going with the wooden cover off so he could mess with it O K so the real point of this letter is to give you a good report on the software and hardware combination Bob Bybee put together for me You ll PolyLetter 8705 Page recall that I spoke with you a bit about my desire to get my Macintosh Plus to talk to the Poly You had a software package but no hardware Bybee had a communications software package for the Poly and offered to make me the necessary cables too I thought the entire package was extremely reasonably priced would rather other clients get prices directly rather than my stating it here It arrived very quickly carefully packaged and with complete and readable documentation I should add that I am not a tech person and that the non tech language of the documentation was thus important to me The result was a Poly to Mac cable connection that worked perfectly the first time Using Bybee s Poly communications soft
136. n of each one This housekeeping is summarized in the following example sOpen the library file sGet the label fer user memory REFS SYSTEM SY Open the library file REF USER Get the label for user memory ORG USER Where we live IDET shoad amp Start addresses 7 MAY JUN 1987 Our program goes here EED Tell Asab we re done Complete discriptions of all POPs are included in the MACRO 88 Assembler User s Guide from PolyMorphic Systems Smoke Test by Ralph Kenyon I received an 8810 the other day which was given to me The donor said it didn t work and I could have it Well I had to go poking around in it to see if I could make it work I re seated all the boards they had come lose in shipping and checked for any obvious faults Nothing was evident so I plugged it in and turned on the power The drive light came on and stayed on The video screen filled with garbage the kind the video interface manual describes as a stable but useless display the kind which indicates that the CPU clock is not running Ok I pulls out me spare CPU and plugs it in same difference Hmmm I get out my trusty field service manual and my pocket multimeter and start checking the voltages no negative i6 volts on the backplane Ok sez me lets test these boards in my other 8810 I lug my other 8810 out from the other room and remove the top cover and the left side After standing the machine up on its side
137. n the Altair IMSAI and Poly88 came out I even built an Altair 8800 for one of my professors I wanted a Poly88 but I never got one I eventually got a Vector Graphics mainframe Ithica Audio cpu card Tarbell disk interface and Poly VTI card I used that for a couple of years then I got an Atari 800 now I mostly use my Macintosh But I stall want a Poly88 it was a remarkable system at the time I ve sometimes thought of building and selling a system similar to the Poly88 A 5 slot toaster size PolyLetter 8704 Page mainframe heck how many slots do you need 68010 cpu card with serial and parallel I O floppy disk interface and 512K memory 2Meq memory card video card hi res monochrome graphics and hard disk interface card Need more slots Plug in another mainframe Need a clever name though could use Poly68 Oh well there s no market for it anyway well maybe a small market Well enough of that Please tell me more about your user group and newsletter and let me know what equipment is for sale I ve enclosed as SASE for your convenience Thank you Dana Gould Boxford MA Dana See the ads for equipment for sale Also you ll have to ask Sirous at PolyMorphic Systems whether you can use Poly 68 as a name but be prepared to pay for the privilege He d probably be willing to sell you Poly 88 s for the purpose Ed CRASH by Ralph Kenyon I use a modified version of Poly s PLAN for my spreadshee
138. ncommercial ads by subscribers continue to be free The rates for commercial ads are 50 for a full page 25 for a half page and 15 for a quarter page Anything smaller is 3 00 per column inch A column is 3 3 4 inches wide by 10 inches tall A full page is 7 5 8 inches wide PolyLetter Gets New Phone I have had to share my phone with teenage girls You know what that means no calls for me Well I have finally broken down and sprung for a phone of my own The new number is 413 458 3597 You should be able to get through on this line now edit GOo This program is a special command line editor which allows editing and executing any line which is already on the screen It is a memory resident 1 SEP OCT 1987 hot key program which comes up whenever the CTRL DELETE key is pressed It can be used in conjunction with BASIC program development or simply to make re entering or correcting commands easier Once you hit CTRL DELETE edit jumps to the line above the cursor and is then ready to edit that line It supports CTRL X which deletes the line to the left CTRL W which deletes the word to the left DELETE and insert The left and right arrow keys work as expected the up and down arrow keys move to the beginning or end of the line being edited ESC up arrow moves up to the previous line while ESC down arrow moves down to the next line ESC right and left arrows move one word right and left respectively You
139. nd Y The data can be inserted into these arrays in three ways 1 From a one dimensional array in a data file of spectrophotometric absorbance data 2 From a two dimensional data array 3 From the keyboard The total number of points is limited by memory to 275 For a concise discussion of linear least squares analyses see Statistical Methods for Chemists by W L Gore Interscience NY 1952 LLSQPLOT BS CHAINS to GUGGENHEIM Arrhenius or Eyring PKA BS calculates pKa values from absorbance and pH KINCHANGE BS takes an x y data set given in Temp C and a rate constant and converts it to In k and 1 T K The new data set is then read out onto a disk file The new data set can then be used in LLSQPLOT to get the activation parameters DISTANCE BS calculates the distance between two atoms bonded to a third RCALK BS calculates the product ratio for complex branching and sequential reactions SPECTRAL ANALYSIS BS plots spectral analysis data and Windows for the Poly PGL V 21 has Norm Shimmel s General Programming Functions which include the tools necessary to put WINDOWS in your BASIC Poly Programs Superman Start with INTRO and then get INSTRUCTIONS You will end up in SUPERMAN a game submitted by Al Levy Superman has some fancy graphics in the introduction PRIME BS computes the prime factors of a number and was submitted by James Goodall Disk PGL 21 has 10 files on it 346 sectors in use 0 WINDOWS
140. nd the up arrow character to get to the beginning of the line See Bit Bucket 8603 MAY JUN 1986 for the details of how to get CTRL characters into Edit Now I insert I since edit GO knows to convert a character preceded by a carrot to a control character and CTRL is an ESCAPE This is followed by the equal character and the character d since I am defining the ESC d sequence for Gnomus to be the date Next I insert an ESCAPE and the down arrow character to send the cursor to the end of the line This is followed by ATA _ Ya dat s right two ESCAPEs Gnomus thinks the first one is for it and we want an actual ESCAPE character as input Gnomus converts two ESCAPE characters into one Ok the next character is a RETURN This will terminate the editing process and cause the sequence ESCAPE d lt the date on the screen gt ESCAPE ESCAPE and RETURN to be put into the keyboard buffer Ok now that the stuff is in the keyboard buffer it will be taken when the command file mode is turned off That s where PramKey comes in It has been watching for Well it s the next character in the file so the sequence in the command buffer gets input and executed First the ESCAPE turns Gnomus on Second the sets Gnomus up for a new definition Third d tells Gnomus what s being defined Forth the date is fed to Gnomus as the definition Fith the first ESCAPE turns Gnomus on again Sixth the second ESCAPE tells Gnomu
141. nding in double letters there are certainly not hundreds and this solution while not perfect does have its benefits Where for example do you put the MISSPELL file when running two SSSD drives in 48K of RAM I know that you have high density floppies and eventually I bought a hard disk for my Poly Nonetheless SPELL 3 0 runs on a standard two SSSD drive system with as little as 48K of RAM Those are were the hardware constraints of more than a third of the SPELL 3 0 users Can A S Spell be used on those systems What happens when the MISSPELL file gets a little rotund As far as some Poly keyboards having a problem with double letters bouncing keys you re right But I called Mark Maclin at Poly in 1982 He came up with a simple solution I can t remember now PolyLetter 8705 Page but I m reasonably sure that I did an article on that fix for PL One only needed to cut two traces and add two jumpers to the keyboard PCB to stop key bounces Regarding SPELL 3 0 input buffering 10 sectors is not ideal you re looking at the problem superficially The idea is to keep the drives spinning and the head pad loaded This is far better than stopping and starting the floppy drives loading and unloading the heads or doing a lot of seeking on a hard disk I tried 10 sectors and several other buffer sizes Eight sectors for the input buffer and one sector for the output buffer proved optimal over many years of use While perha
142. necting Poly s TxD output line which is available at the Plug pin 15 to the RS 232 RxD input line which is available at the Plug pin 1 Remember we are making the cable straight through It may be that our device will be able to send data back to the Poly So we need to connect the RS 232 TxD output line to Poly s RxD input line Plug pins 2 to 16 From here on in we will be dealing with the hand shaking problem The Poly has the Clear To Send CTS line going right to the 8251 USART serial chip The USART does nothing until this line is raised There are two ways to get this signal One is to get it from the external device by connecting RTS The other is to get it from the Poly itself The former case is true hardware handshaking but the latter is fakery The Poly is telling itself that it is ok to send If the external device does not have a RTS line by which it signals that it wants to send data then we must connect the Poly s own RTS line For true hardware handshaking we connect Plug pin 4 to Plug pin 14 For fakery we connect Plug pin 13 to Plug pin 14 Now the external device is just like the Poly and needs to be told that it can send data It looks at the RS 232 CTS line to determine if it is okay to send data We must provide that signal We do so by connecting Poly s RTS line So we connect Plug pin 3 to Plug pin 13 Now there is another set of such signals and the Poly looks at these signals too These a
143. nes of text Even so it takes 25 seconds to do 500 lines of text that are 50 characters long each It takes about another 44 seconds to write out the sorted output file Hsrt OV and Qsrt OV on the other hand assume that the data to be sorted is already read into a BASIC string array Hsrt OV and Qsrt OV are both passed the address of the first element in the array They know how to find out how big the array is and how many elements in it Once called these overlays actually sort the contents of the BASIC string array in memory The performance difference is in the fact that the heap sort algorithm gives a fairly constant result regardless of the degree to which the file is already sorted Quick sort on the other hand does well with random data but poorly with data that is nearly sorted A comparison between them on the data you suggested a file of 500 random 50 character records and the same file only 2 out of order yields the following comparison Qsrt OV Hsrt OV Random 6 7 11 9 2 22 2 12 6 I have a program which is capable of sorting a data file too big to put in memory and having sort keys which are also too big to fit in memory While there are still blocks of keys to be sorted it merges the most recently sorted block with the sorted keys transferring back and forth between two key files Then it copies the records in sorted order into a tempory file and finally copies them back to the main data file now in sorted
144. nly disadvantage to this method which I used for years until I switched to hardware handshaking is that you cannot take advantage of the larger memory buffer often available on printers My Diablo 1650 for example has a 2 000 byte memory and often small printing jobs can be completely dumped to my printer and I can get the computer back while the printer is still plugging away All Diablo printers I ve ever worked with will work with the ETX ACK protocol usually without having to do anything though it s possible a switch will have to be set Most if not all Diablos will also handle the DC1i DC3 Xon Xoff protocol but the Poly printer driver will NOT handle DC1 DC3 Incidentally the older versions of Poly Exec prior to Exec 83 have the ETX ACK protocol but hardware handshaking capability wasn t available until Exec 83 Not true Poly has used CTS for hardware handshaking from day 1 Ed 2 Re Use of a cassette tape for mass storage l have a cassette setup but I can t imagine anyone really fooling with it except to play The PolyPhase system at 1200 baud is reasonably fast especially when compared to the Kansas City Standard 300 baud format but it has its problems too One of the significant problems is that a fairly high grade cassette recorder is required PolyMorphic always recommended the SuperScope Model C103 as it was one of the few which worked consistently in PolyPhase Another problem is that
145. ns out to be quite simple It just watches for its flag the percent character When it sees that character it looks at the next character to see if it is also a percent character If it is it gives back one percent character but if it is not it throws the character away and starts getting characters from the keyboard buffer until a RETURN is processed Then it turns command file mode back on It also checks to see if command file mode is off and disconnects itself if so I mean it s sole purpose is to provide keyboard parameters as input during command file mode so when command file mode is done it s not needed anymore We don t want to waste valuable memory with an inactive resident program I put PramKey 2 NOV DEC 1987 in the command file just before the first program which requires input It has to go in any command file only once Now back to my INITIAL file Remember wanted to used edit to feed the date to Gnomus in a definition So I insert the sequence of commands which does the following I TYPE the date invoke edit add the commands to invoke Gnomus s definition facility and the termination sequence ESC and then the next character which is a RETURN completes edit The very next characters in my command file are which allows the character sequence just put into the command buffer to be input and executed So it s TYPE Date followed by a CTRL DELETE character and a space followed by an ESCAPE a
146. nvenient groupings of letters The error rate was unacceptable as you ve apparently discovered hence your MISSPELL file That s when I said Hold it Let s limit entries in the suffix and prefix dictionary to the genuine item and keep them safely inside the code where no indiscriminate additions can be made The best way to avoid this whole mess is to eliminate suffixes and prefixes from the algorithm That is all proper forms of a word are in the dictionaries as discrete entries That s what most of the DOS spellers do that are nearly 100 accurate On a 80286 DOS machine there s adequate RAM and convenient disk space for just such a huge dictionary This approach is difficult on Poly because of the hardware that s why I used suffixes and prefixes It would appear that you ve used some of the hard won tricks I developed in order to make a comprehensive speller fly on standard Poly floppies and 56K of RAM If you re not going to pay for those tricks at least credit me with them or tell me how you ve done it differently Do you remember how proud you were that you changed my I O buffering My scheme was designed to go easy on the hardware Do you remember my PolyLetter 8704 Page comments that your I O buffer approach while theoretically more streamlined made the floppy drives sound like woodpeckers and that the hard disk spent more time seeking then loading You also thought it strange that I limited the
147. o change the appearance of GEM This is mirrored in my clients versions of GEM DRAW The early GEM DRAW looked exactly like MAC DRAW the latest GEM DRAW looks a lot different and is a little harder to use I m not about start litigation against Abstract Systems but your point is an amusing one Your computer science course sounds interesting but what you describe is NOT the way SPELL 3 0 works My algorithm was ingenious and as far as I know unique On the first pass through a target text file a COMPLETE subset dictionary is loaded into memory This first dictionary contains the most common words one might expect to find Words not found in a very fast binary search are passed to the unknown word file Each successive pass loads the next complete dictionary tier which contains less and less frequently used words The words left over in the unknown file from the previous pass are checked against the current tier Any unknown words left over are considered misspellings One of the dictionary tiers is a user dictionary In building the dictionaries for this system I considered each word in the original dictionary and decided into which one of five tiers each word would be placed This incredibly painstaking dictionary editing process required nearly one hundred hours to complete Forget the program if you re using the bulk of those dictionaries Ralph maybe we ought to duke this out in court Regarding some words e
148. o lets say you found a defective voltage regulator its fried and you found the cause you loaned the computer to your neighbor and being the genius he is used the 12 volt regulated supply to do some light welding on his motorcycle you will now set forth to replace it Here is a typical scenario that should yield favorable results assuming you already have the replacement in hand We start by removing the cover this is accomplished PolyLetter 8704 Page very easily facing the computer reach under the table and remove the four screws securing the rear l replaced the straight headed screws with phillips head because it is easier to guide the screwdriver blind into a phillips head screw Now remove the front four screws and off comes the cover Locate the card CPU card it should be the second card from the front Carefully remove it by pulling with even force on each side while rocking side to side Oh the cable you just destroyed as the card came out was the printer interface We will fix it later Now locate the bad regulator it looks like the only part that was at ground zero at President Reagan s last nuclear barbecue party Nancy pass the U 235 and a bun Continued next issue Charles Steinhauser is a former endeared editor of PolyLetter and part time churl Ed Public Domain PGL V 23 is the first disk I have put together with programs from the Poly 88 users group There are still several disks to go which will appear in future
149. of my BASIC printer program The OKIDATA 192 with serial interface option costs roughly 400 delivered When ordering through COMPUTER SHOPPER be sure to specify that you want the serial RS232 interface otherwise you ll probably get the parallel IBM Compatible model for 80 less Can anyone suggest how to hook up this printer to a POLY in parallel without installing an additional S 100 board There are three 3 methods for specifying cpi print style lpi etc on the OKIDATA they are dip switching on the printer s RS232 interface with BASIC instructions or calling up the printer ROM driven Menu that prints various options in response to operator on off activations of various printer controls The Menu offers LPI CPI baud rate various print modes DP italics quality emphasis and enhancements different language sets proportional spacing and some dozen other features When the printer is powered on it defaults to the last previous Menu entries I have a special BASIC program on the POLY systems disk that allows me to make printer changes on the POLY keyboard rather than switching to the printer Menu and wasting paper The OKIDATA PLUS advances several lines of paper following each response in order to provide 7 MAR APR 1987 better viewing as opposed to the previous model requiring an advance in order to get a better view of those lines upon which reaction is called for Tractor sprockets come on the platen roller f
150. olyLetter 8702 Page of our readers will join in Hip hip Hurrah Hip hip Hurrah Hip hip Hurrah The editor is the single most endearing feature of the entire Poly and virtually every owner I have talked to has nothing but accolades for it In my opinion it has a fine balance between simplicity ease of use and sophisticated features I ve not seen anything like the ESC libraries and the ESC feature but then again I haven t looked at too many other editors You ll not catch me straying from the fold Have you given any thought to adapting a version for MS DOS I heard that Lennie had done some work in that direction Sirous says they haven t decided how far to go with it I d love to beta test a copy of it Do write us and tell about the things that might yet be Ed The Straight Wire by Ralph Kenyon There seems to have been a lot of confusion about connecting serial cables from Polys to printers etc The Poly has a nice little patch plug right on the serial mini card Most other computers do not have any such plug so one must make up a special cable for each device on each computer However Poly s flexibility has lead to some confusion If you cross the lines in the cable then the plug must be straight through and if the cable is straight through then you must cross at the plug To clear up the confusion I recommend the following solution Use the Poly s flexibility make the cable straight
151. olyLetter 8795 Page Al Levy Box 71 Hicksville NY 11802 516 293 8368 Stuff For Sale Or Trade Best Offer Poly CPU Board Poly Video Card I need Poly SS SD Disk Controller PolyMorphic DS DD 5 25 Poly Serial i o cards Poly Cassette Interface Cards Poly 8k Memory Cards Poly lok Memory Cards Poly 48k Memory Cards 5 25 drives Mostly Shugart Poly Orig Equ Other Memory Cards S 100 Work In Poly Complete Systems Note 16k cards can be converted to 64k cards PolyMorphic Manuals amp Disks Field Service Disk Controller Hard Disk Cards User s Manual e WordMaster I MaiList e WordMaster II e PLAN e BASIC amp Assembler Exec 96 System Programmers Guide 1 System Programmers Guide 2 e 5 25 inch diskettes for Poly SS SD 10 00 box 5 25 inch diskettes for Poly DS DD 15 00 box 8 inch diskettes for Poly SS SD used 1 25 each minimum order 25 8 inch diskettes for Poly SS SD new 10 00 box 8 inch diskettes for Poly DS DD new 17 50 box order ten boxes and price is 10 per box DS DD diskettes work with SS SD drives Disk Conversions to from 300 different disk for mats including IBM Apple Macintosh NorthStar CP M 5 25 or 8 inch CUSTOM SOFTWARE Checkbook Program In BASIC Speed up your MaiList Reports PLAN customized for more columns Printer Tricks Learning Programs Demos 5 KISS Form OV Don Moe Preform amp many more available Box 71 H
152. or fan fold paper or pressure rollers against the platen permit single sleet feed from the top rear Print head replacement can be expensive 90 and difficult to order so be careful and keep it clean The original OKIDATA manuals are what first attracted me to this machine they are far superior to any other EDP manuals I ve ever seen Unfortunately they don t offer much help in cabling to a POLY The more recent PLUS manuals for the IBM compatibles are more brief but OKI sends an instructions disk IBM of course to cover more advanced programming situations I have no idea what s on this disk OKIDATA has a toll free telephone line for technical service which I have used with no difficulty recently however I had to give up after some 40 attempts over a week s time They are tied in with XEROX on their service centers and use a separate distributor for replacement parts I still use a couple of old INTEGRAL DATA 440 Tigers and have the OKIDATA set up similarly POLY SERIAL HEADER OKIDATA to POLY CABLE 16 to 02 03 to 03 1S to 64 05 to 20 14 to 03 13 to 04 10 to 09 07 to 07 Pre 40s version POLY Setup GO Oh by the way I have designed a character set using a portion of the 160 special characters which permits me to print unlimited length lines from top to bottom of page s rather than across This is still in the shake down and refinement stage so doubt if I will install a right aligned margin featu
153. orm where you keep each separate set of books on separate diskettes 9 MAY JUN 1987 Version 5 is menu driven and allows you to keep a number of different sets of books on line Version 5 requires a hard disk preferably or at least DSDD floppies Either version is 125 00 including the operations manual FOR SALE Poly 8810 box with power supply and mother board 50 plus shipping Readers Responses The type is too dense and hard to read Good articles however Still got both Polys and a PC clone now Trying to get rid of my 8813 3 drives 56K extra keyboard etc If you know anybody Bob Tripi Westboro MA I d like to hear more about running Poly on the PC I ve thought of building a V20 based machine and downloading the Poly ROMS to the RAM but I m not too sure of how to convert the Poly disk routines Art Norton Fort Worth TX Ralph My Poly has pretty much been superseded by a 4 MHz CP M machine with 30 Meg of Hard Disk and a generic MS DOS Clone It is still operational though and I do have an occasional piece of work for it Let s face it The Poly is pretty much dead not too much more is going to happen with it I plan to install a Z80 in mine will write an article when I do This will open up additional CP M software John Warkentin Citrus Heights CA Keep up the good work I ve seen more reader input in the past six issues than ever before Jim Trahan Oxnard CA Would love to see a disassembly
154. oss Assembler Reifel These disks are all Disk PGL V 10 has 33 files on it 16 free entries 330 sectors in use 0 sectors deleted 0 sectors free S se Name 22 SETLRED PAY FEDERAL BS 3 LIFE CYCLE COSTS BS 7 Sorts BS 5 CAI 808 35 4 ADDITION BS 4 BASIC USER FUNCTIONS 35 3 SORT CEEATIVE COMPUTING BS COPY SUB DIR 1 BS 7 FILESORT 0 BS 3 POWERS OF HANOI 35 2 WONDEROUS NUMBEES B3 2 SEVERSE 35 3 TOWERS OF HANOI GRAPEICS BS 3 PRINTE COMMANDS 38 2 CRYPTOGRAMS D 9 CRYPTOGAME 35 2 BIG LETTERS 85 6 SHUFFLE BS i3 FORMAT BS 3 PR00F 35 5 ADDRESS LiSTS BS 2 ADDRESS LISTS DC 5 SAUCERS ES 4 ASTEROIDS 8S 3 LUNA LANDEE 35 7 Adrhist 36 Month BS TICILER BS 2 MOETSAGE COMPARE 8S 2 ROSES 35 2 SNOOPY BS 2 POLYGRAPH BS gt FLASH 85 SMALL C I have no information concerning exactly what subset of C the compiler supports I suspect the information 1s covered in the May and September 1980 issues of Dr Dobb s Journal If you are a C programmer you should be able to find out by reading the compiler source code While I am not yet a C programmer I have managed to use the originally supplied material to condense it down to one disk However for compiling most C programs smaller than the compiler the contents of this disk are adequate You will need to use Poly s Asmb GO and SYSTEM SY files to complete comptling a C program I have taken some liberties with the compiler to shrink its disk size I have p
155. ow PolyLetter 8701 The DWP II would wait 15 or 20 seconds sometimes while Poly was grieg to a distant record So I wrote SHUFFLER to use the sorted array to move records into their proper position In other words take 40 to pos i1 moving 1 to pos 21 moving 21 to pos 33 etc In effect reshuffling the records into their correct positions Some Ta ead February I ll call Page or Wednesday evening in your number to see what your reaction is As far as I m concerned these programs can go into the public domain I doubt anyone would want to take the time to convert them into a non Poly BASIC You may enjoy the Cryptoquote Game there are some puzzles already loaded The program makes it a little easier to work them and gives you your time You can put in new puzzles from the newspaper or make up your own puzzles I also made a Program to print BIC letters which you can run Don t know what good that would be although I made it because someone once said in PolyLetter that they wanted aE AS like that and that s why I did it Kindest regards you Bob Jones and more power to Columbus OH Bob was kind enough to submit this letter on disk along with the programs he has described here I have included those Posten in the next PolyGlot Library olume of BASIC programs I had never tried to use Printer Screen on a disk in which the driver had been modified for an automatic line feed printer and was su
156. ows about fixed length records from the directory information GW BASIC has to be told in the program I converted my TICKLER BS program over to GW BASIC If anyone is interested I ll share the learning experience here Abstract Systems etc 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 8421 DISKS DRIVES MODEMS PROMS SOFTWARE SPELL 1 MAXALL diskettes 5 10 hard sector 11 per box of 10 2 Two working SSSD SA 400 5 drives 28 each 52 for both Hayes Micromodem 100 for only 25 300 baud in bus direct connect modem Limited quantity HayesSys modem software for the Micromodem 100 25 AIS Spell a good spelling checker for 35 Abstract Systems Exec Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 Abstract Systems Proms Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 PolyGlot Library Volumes 1 thru 22 6 each Send 1 00 for a complete catalog free with any order Make checks payable to Ralph Kenyon o N aw Eight inch MAXALL 32 hard sectored diskettes for PolyLetter 8703 Page your MS 15 00 per box or 115 00 per ten boxes Also many used boards parts and systems CALL Al Levy Post Office Box 71 Hicksville NY 11802 516 293 8368 PolyMorphic Systems 7334 H Hollister Avenue Santa Barbara CA 93117 805 685 6238 1 System Software Exec 96 WordMaster II amp BASIC disks addendum w o manuals Normally 150 Special 95 2 Manuals User WordMaster amp BAS
157. oyalty to me for the idea The amount of code in AUTOPATH was quite small probably less than 5 of the number of lines in SPELL 3 0 Beyond that however your particular rendering of my AUTOPATH idea had a fatal flaw which you shrugged off though perhaps you ve fixed it by now the AUTOPATH you sent me did not understand how overlays and system files were needed by applications such as the editor or BASIC Thus if one edited a file down a path set by AUTOPATH the editor crashed because it attempted to find its OV files in the subdirectory set by AUTOPATH TYPE and other monitor resident Exec commands that did not require overlays worked with AUTOPATH but that was about it Because of these factors I d call AUTOPATH a null trade for the source to SPELL 3 0 I noted your comment I did not compete with you as a professional courtesy out of consideration for your providing me with your source list to SPELL 3 0 This underscores my point that AUTOPATH and SPELL 3 0 were never intended as an even trade The source code of SPELL 3 0 follows conventions that to this day make the code easy for me the author to follow Labels are for the most part mnemonic chunks of code are ordered for my best understanding You must realize that the code was never intended as an academic model of structured programming The code is however a crystal clear representation of SPELL 3 0 for my use You of all people should be the first to
158. petitors ROMS were byte for byte identical The defense produced commented source code and claimed independent parallel development which the prosecution needed to discredit I told the prosecution what elements would be necessary to prove such a source was produced from disassembly and what elements would suggest that it was but not prove it and what could not prove it I never got the final result of the case but this seems a much closer case Try calling that one It was probably settled out of court which would leave the state of the LAW un clear 5 NOV DE 1987 For the record here is the full text of my so called disclaimer regarding custom modifications ABSTRACT SYSTEMS POLICY Abstract Systems etc attempts to fill a felt need for low level software support for PolyMorphic Systems System 8813 and System 8810 microcomputers Our goal is to provide software and consulting at low prices As with any product and company PolyMorphic Systems decides to implement some and not to implement other new desirable features for System 88 Also with each new release System 88 is frozen for an indeterminate period of time The availability of desirable new features is conditional on the implementation policy and time Abstract Systems will attempt to implement new features on a CUSTOM basis Those ALREADY IMPLEMENTED will be made available for a NOMINAL fee To preclude giving away software available from PolyMorphic
159. ph Kenyon 0703 04 edit Ralph Kenyon 8706 01 edit GO Program Description Ralph Leayoa 4705 01 FOOTBALL FORCASTING MODEL Earl Gilbreadth 8702 03 FRACTION METRIC CONV BS Program Description 8705 68 Free Subscriptions Erd Ralph Lenyon 8706 01 Gaones Ralph Lenyon 4706 01 COLD6 BS Program Description 8705 08 PolyLetter 8706 Page 9 NOV DEC 1987 HELP COMMAND COPY Ralph Kenyon 4704 08 PGL V 13 Listing 4701 08 HELP COMMAND ENABLE Ralph Kenyon 4701 07 POL 14 Listing 8701 08 AOURS DEMO BS Program Description 4705 08 PGL V 15 Listing 8701 08 Hot Key Ralph Kenyon 8706 01 PGL 16 Listing 6701 08 How to Fix A Dead Bird Charles Steiahauser 8704 06 PGL V 17 listing 8702 07 Asrt OV information Ralph Kenyon 4705 03 PGL V 18 listing 8702 08 1 BM Al Levy 8701 06 PGL V 19 listing 4702 08 INVENTORY Program 6702 07 PGL 20 listing 6702 08 laveatory Bob Johnson 4702 0 PGL V 21 listing 8702 08 Key Cap Puller Ralph Kenyon 8701 07 PGL V 22 listing 4702 08 Ley Cap Removal Ralph Kenyon 4701 07 PGL V 23 listing 6704 07 Keys Sticking Ralph Kenyon 8701 07 PGL V 24 Listing 8705 08 Letter Barkley Gilpia 6702 01 POL V 25 Listing 8706 08 Letter Bob Bybee 8702 05 POUNCE BS Program Description 0704 07 Letter Bob Bybee 6706 03 Poly Problems Bob Bybee 8701 01 Letter Bob Johanson 8702 61 Poly s Best Kept Secret Ralph Kenyon 6706 01 Letter Hob Johnson 8703 06 PolyLetter Back Issue Prices 4703 06 better bob Jones 8701 04 Pramkey Ralph Lenyon 6706 01 better Chris Bagley
160. ports to the hospitals for records and financial information and of course writes the client and tells him how to make sure that he takes care of himself for not only the benefit of his doctors but for the benefit of his lawsuit I don t think I will ever be able to change the remarkable billing system that have aquired with Poly Indeed while Poly may have misguessed the trend of the market in its early stages there were many guesses that it made that were right useful logical and appropriate While at times I wish that I did not have to see the short screen with wrap around characters to the next line I have learned to live with it I have finally concluded for my own purposes that I don t need five 5 machines I have recently purchased four 4 clones I need to sell some of the unused Poly machines I have got them piled in my conference room and with all the monitors it looks like Cape Kennedy see Ad I have loads of disks and all the software that ever existed including some that no one has ever heard about Please let me know if you are interested I won t ever stop using Poly I just don t need so many of them anymore Thank you for this opportunity and keep up the good work Very Truly Yours Robert L Schwartz Cincinnati OH Edit 4 1 on Exec 96 has a side ways scrolling feature Edit boots up with the default set to wrap around To activate the sideways scrolling feature use the sequence ESC CTRL
161. pression My bumbling attempt to fabricate a collar resulted in half the pins breaking off Even though the pin guide block appeared initiallly to be the only problem the smallest component I could find available was the entire printhead unit through an OKIDATA XEROX service chain for 90 plus freight In the meantime I saw an SnW Distributors ad in COMPUTER SHOPPER for my same or so I thought 193 printer for about 500 and a 192 8 1 2 for 289 I called them on December 22 and they said those prices in the January issue were no longer available and that the 192 PLUS price was now 209 plus shipping and it would go out the same day or by the PolyLetter 8702 Page next day latest After giving them my VISA number and getting their assurances that they d get it off as soon as my order cleared CREDIT and then after a couple more phone calls in early January it finally arrived January 13 The purchase was entered against my VISA on December 22 The next unpleasant surprize was that the OKIDATA was marked IBM Compatible and lacked the serial RS232 interface board The OKIDATA manual listed the board as an option the distributor didn t know the part number I couldn t get a call through to OKIDATA services their Chicago office gave me the number and price at 79 but said they were just then out of stock and finally SnW who had sold me the printer said they d ship me the interface for 79 plus shipping 84 03 COD within 3 days I
162. protected from unauthorized duplication and sale which I am not doing I think my Policy statement Cleared the air on the question of possible Pirating As I understood you from our past conversations your point of view seemed to me to be expressible as what is not expressly permitted is prohibited Since you mentioned my study of Ethics consider the following Article IX of the Bill of Rights states The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people Further PolyLetter 8706 Page article X states The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States are reserved to the States respectively or to the people These amendments along with our legal history is understood by ethical scholars to mean that what is not prohibited is permitted As a military Intelligence Analyst I learned that the fundamental point of view in the Soviet Union despite its wonderful constitution was primarily that what is not permitted is prohibited at least prior to Glasnost It should be noted that it is not the political ideology that produces such an attitude conservativism and a tendency to authoritarianism produces it My military experience gives testimony to the value of discipline But even such a good thing has its limits Rules change The LAW is in a continuous process of evolving through
163. ps not the most efficient or elegant method from a software perspective I d settle for this ugly duckling approach long before placing excessive wear on the customer s disk drives By the way the governing factor in the total dictionary size is really the available disk space not the RAM size As noted SPELL 3 0 supports SSSD users and the dictionaries fit on a single flippy I commend you for having spelling software available for the Poly now and actively supporting it What I did not and do not like was having SPELL 3 0 a widely used and praised program acknowledged in such a negative light You really owe me an apology Ralph Sincerely Frank Stearns Vancouver WA P S More items for the MISSPELL file in the July August issue of PL Page 2 third paragraph whenI In my file it s two words when followed by I Perhaps the whenl is a printer goof but that seems unlikely because you re right justifying If the printer had missed a space the right margin should also be indented by the amount of the missing space Page 3 paragraph 6 unfriendlyness That spelling caught my editor s eye but I wasn t sure For fun I typed unfriendlyness on my 286 DOS machine and then pressed ALT Fi0 The Borland Turbo Lightning speller window popped up indicated that this was not a correct spelling and offered unfriendliness at the top of its list of suggested words The correct spelling was swapped in mere
164. r Beginners Serial Device Driver Explained How to UNSAVEP protected Programs More System Programmers Notes Making your PC work like a Poly More Help BugNotes Public Domain Software etc Questions Can you find and answer the questions asked in this issue Send your answers and requests in FIRST CLASS MAIL Ralph E Kenyon Jr EXP 9999 Abstract Systems etc 184 1 1 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 2256 Back volumes of PolyLetter are available at the same price as the previous subscription rate US 15 00 yr Canada 18 00 yr Overseas 20 00 yr payable in US dollars to Ralph Kenyon Individual issues are also available 3 50 4 00 5 00
165. rd deleted copy of FILE TX DLIST GO lists the deleted files See HELP PROGRAM ARISE in PL 8605 Please send a copy of the documentation for the programs you submitted to PolyLetter A copy of the documentation on disk would be appreciated if available See the adds in the PolyLetter for documentation on the Poly Manuals from PalyMorphic Systems Note their new address I can also supply the information necessary to modify the later printer versions such as is on Exec 83 with PGL Vol 6 f you cannot set the parity on your printer Ed J PolyLetter January 14 1986 Received my copy of 8605 a couple of days ago When I got around to reading it I really got interested in the article on Device Driver Direct Access As soon as I could get to my Poly I tried it out I have my 8813 driving a TRS 80 DWP II The Radio Shack DWP II adds an automatic line feed to each carriage return I had recently purchased the latest at that time version of System Discs Exec95 BasicCO3 Wrdmstr from Polymorphic Since I could not find out from Radio Shack how to disable the AutoLF in the printer the ESC sequence from the printer manual didn t work I called PolySystems This was about 1980 81 I don t remember which technician I 4 JAN FEB 1987 wound up with but he gave me the address to poke in order to disable Poly s auto LF from the printer driver CTRL Z gives me the In Enabled mode front panel siapa L2F4A gives
166. re any time soon This program places text into a memory grid with lines loaded in columns but printed in rows All of this and the right margin Programs are in BASIC and VERY slow I plan eventually to translate portions of these into machine code but will probably need some assistance I welcome questions and assistance Earl 912 385 4415 Public Domain PGL V 17 contains an updated version of the PolyMorphic Inventory Control System This Inventory System has been placed in the Public Domain by PolyMorphic Systems The programs originally ran on BASIC C00 on Exec 79 but should run on any later versions as well I have taken the programs off the original system disk and placed them on a disk with the complete documentation To print out a clean copy of the documentation you need a copy of the FORMAT program from WordMaster 1 Contents Disk PGL V 17 has 19 files on it 330 sectors in use 8 FILECREATE BS 8 INITIAL BS 27 R007 35 21 POST BS 7 ENTER BS 10 STATUS BS 11 CREATE INDEI BS 1 DAT DT 17 DESCRIPTION TI i HEADER TY 22 CHAPTER TX 46 CHAPTER TI 12 CHAPTER3 TX 62 CHAPTERS TX 57 INTRODUCTION TI PolyLetter 8702 Page 10 TITLE TY 2 SETUP TX 1 PRINT MANUAL TI PGL V 18 and PGL V 19 have an OLD demo system on Exec 6E but there are some flashy graphics on it PGL V 18 may be booted to on drive 1 but cannot be booted to on other drives as this early Exec doesn t know about SYSRES Contents Disk PGL V 18 has 47
167. re the DSR DTR pair Exactly the same reasoning involving CTS RTS applies to DSR DTR We must connect Plug pin 6 to Plug pin 12 for true handshaking For fakery we connect Plug pin 11 to Plug pin 12 Similarly we connect Poly s DTR signal to the RS 232 DSR signal by connecting Plug pin 5 to Plug pin 11 In most cases connecting 1 15 2 16 3 13 4 14 11 6 12 and 9 10 will do the job If your printer only provides one of the two signals RTS or DTR then they must be connected together on the Poly plug This will allow the Poly to see both signals when the printer only provides one Connect Plug pin 4 to Plug pin 6 in addition to the connections just mentioned If your printer does not provide either of these signals then fakery must be used as discussed above In this case since the Poly is only held back by itself the baud rate must be limited to prevent the Poly from over running the printer usually no more than 300 baud There will be exceptions My printers provide a PolyLetter 8702 Page Fault line on RS 232 pin 25 but no RTS line so my cable has pin 25 at the printer end connected to pin 4 at the Poly end This gets connected to Poly s CTS at the plug and the Poly stops sending whenever the printer drops the fault line OKIDATA 192 PRINTER by Earl Gilbreadth I think my OKIDATA printer is another computer in itself and in fact it is To wit this analysis of the OKIDATA 092 same as 193 wide carriage was co
168. response to my letter Let s look at your points one by one Dissatisfaction has several synonyms none of which apply to the original Frank Stearns Associates SPELL 3 0 software Nearly all those users who purchased the program at its timely availability price and functionality would agree Two users suggested case preservation but were happy to use SPELL 3 0 without it Case preservation along with numerous other goodies including a comprehensive interactive mode were PolyLetter 8705 Page planned for Version 4 0 but I had to be realistic Nearly 600 hours had gone into the development of SPELL 3 0 up to that point In lieu of the declining market spending additional time on the program was not feasible Keep in mind that SPELL 3 0 offered standard features still not seen in even the best spelling checkers such as parentheses and quote balance checking To most people the word dissatisfied means that a product does not work as advertised or does work at all SPELL 3 0 fulfills every advertising claim made and in many instances goes far beyond You might have acknowledged this and said simply that your version incorporated additional or new features You were excited about my concept of an AUTOPATH program and thanked me for the idea and invited me to tell you of any other ideas I might have had You were free to sell AUTOPATH to anyone wasn t it on an Abstract Systems price list at one time with no r
169. roll record list employee records and summarize employer tax record LINEAR BS solves simultaneous linear equasions numerically LREGRS BS does multiple linear regression PEEKER BS is a memory examining program by David Larry Johnson Prince George VA It dumps memory to the screen T TEST BS does a T test for two independent random samples STOCKS49 came with the Poly 88 user group programs but no authorship is contained in it nor is there any documentations OBV ADDER BS OBV VPT MA CORRECTOR BS and 8THS MA CORRECTOR BS appear to work with STOCKS49 I don t know how this program works but here s what its menus look like If you are into stock market analysis it may provide some useful information STOCK MARKET FUNCTION MERU Initiate data record and calculate indicators Update data record and calculate indicators Print data and indicaters Graph date and indicators Terminate Processing n wwe 8 SEP OCT 1987 GRAPH MENU Price Bar Graph Price Bar Graph with Moving Average Closing Price and Moving Average Line Graph Closing Price Point and Figure OBV Point and Figure VPT Point and Figure Retura to Main Menu ewe YW mE Ml Some of these options print some snazzy graphs using the sample data file TELED 11 13 DT GOLD6 BS GTEST DT and GOLDSPOTS TX appear to be for tracking Gold prices on the stock markets DISK TX is a command file to test disks COMPRESS BS is
170. rprised when I tried it There weren t any carriage returns Everything was run together I spent a little more time with the system software and discovered that Polly s designers made a trade off when they chose not to put line feeds in text files The serial device driver inserts a line feed after every carriage return But that s not all The Printer Screen driver routine converts a line feed into a carriage return but ignores carriage returns It depends upon the wormhole driver to insert a line feed uses that line feed to advance the display but ignores the carriage returns I was able to make a device driver which does what Bob wants When selected it disables the automatic line feed function when it is not selected the automatic line feed functions normally permitting Printer Screen to work properly The device driver is the same as oly s Sio PS but has one added initialization routine the automatic line feed is bypassed I have called this driver SIO PS and it is connected to the system using Setup GO by selecting the CUSTOM command ne answers that the driver name is SIO and then to use the standard dialogue lt A gt lt C gt lt T gt REPORT By Al Levy The Man Who Doesn t Mind Hell Old Spanish Proverb Know Heaven Doesn t Although the proverb is somewhat overstated it makes a point that is often overlooked when one is making comparisons I suspect that many LICA members or most computer users do
171. rs with similar concerns The Poly s printer driver routine only sends 7 data bits for each character The 80H high bit s reset by the software before it 1s put into the 8251 Also the 8251 is programmed for ODD parity This means that 8 bits are sent and the 8th bit vs the parity bit If you look at the letters in the words Disk SYSPROG you wil notice that the letters are italic on exactly those characters which have the parity bit set Some of the covered Italic Char Hex 7 bit Binary Parity Received y 9 44 100 0100 i 1100 0100 y i 59 110 1001 1 1110 100 n 72 Tit 0011 0 01i 0021 a x 68 110 1011 0 0 10 1011 y 5 53 101 0011 1 110i 0011 J Y 59 101 100i 1 1101 1001 y p 50 101 0000 t 101 0000 n R 52 10 0010 0 0101 0010 n 0 4F 100 1134 0 0100 iiti y G 47 00 90111 1 1100 Htt When your printer is set to 8 data bits no par ty it interprets the Parity bit as an 80H bit and does italics When your printer is set to 7 data bits no parity there is a definite framing problem 3 JAN FEB 1987 and you get garbage printed To solve the problem you need to set your printer to 7 data bits odd parity 2 stop bits Actually the stop bits won t matter since in asynchronous mode it will just be waiting for the next start bit anyway and will ignore extra stop bits If you cannot set the parity arangement on your printer then you can change the Poly s Printer driver setup routine I am discussing the setup for
172. s in place on the proper drive before each verification cycle If it cannot find the correct dictionary file it asks for the proper disk This Letter i MAY JUN 1987 way you can continually swap dictionary disks and output file disks on the same drive if necessary Spell comes on a flippy with the programs and some dictionaries on one side and the remaining dictionaries on the other side To order Spell send me check or money order for 35 payable to Ralph Kenyon Letters Dear Ralph February 2 1987 How happy I am to hear from you It has been quite some time since we have used our unit as it seems that the users and support for PolyMorphic in the DFW area fell into the cracks Being users and not programmers we could really use some help in getting our unit back on line to do some task ever so small Please advise if you can be of help of get us in contact with some people in the Dallas area Dick Brown Richardson TX Dick I m sending you a printout listing everyone know in Texas who had or has a Poly There should be a few people in the list who will be willing to help you The list includes the people whose subscriptions to PolyLetter have expired if you discover that any of these people have gotten rid of their Poly please let me know Try contacting Charles Thompson who has often been a contributor to PolyLetter Ed Dear Ralph March 3 1987 First off I would like to say that I think you are do
173. s that we want an actual ESCAPE character Gnomus ate one ESCAPE which goes to mark the end of the definition Seventh and finally the RETURN tells Gnomus that the definition is finished It also tells PramKey to resume command file mode so the next characters come from the command file again Well there you have it edit was used to feed the command buffer with a definition sequence for Gnomus and PramKey was used to feed the definition sequence from the command buffer to Gnomus all because I was too lazy to type the date twice And whenever need to type the date I simply type ESC d and Gnomus feeds the date back for me PramKey is the spin off which can be used to input parameters from the keyboard while command file mode is effective To obtain a copy of PramKey send 15 to Ralph Kenyon edit is also 15 but 25 gets you both Next issue I ll tell you about my new Submit RL program for starting a command file with answers as input parameters on the command line PolyLetter 8706 Page Letters Dear Ralph November 23 1987 noted in a previous issue 8704 that my atrocious puns have won me a PGL disk I would like PGL V 17 Never able to resist a challenge submit my answer to your current question Alphabit soup No additional puns come to mind at the moment maybe I m cured Ron Moffatt Rochester NY Right again Ron see the Bit Bucket Ed Dear Ralph November 18 1987 Jimmy Carter told us he h
174. sembler 8701 08 8048 Cross assembler comments Ron Moffatt 6704 04 ABSTRACT SYSTEMS POLICY Ralph Kenyon 4706 05 ACT cA CD Report Al Levy 6701 05 ARISE GO Ralph Kenyon 8701 04 Asmb GO Housekeeping Ralph Kenyon 8703 06 Automatic Liaefeed Disable Bob Jones 4701 04 BAGELS BS Program Description 6704 07 BASE BS Program Description 0705 68 Back Issues of Polybetter Prices 6703 06 BOILING BS Program Description 9704 08 BugNote 010 0 Edit exit bug Ralph Kenyon 8701 07 Buglote 011 0 RDD exit bug Ralph Kenyon 8703 08 Buglote 012 0 boot bag Ralph Kenyon 704 10 CANHON BS Program Description 704 07 CASHFLOW BS description 6702 09 Cassete use Chuck Thompson 4705 01 CHASE BS Program Description 8704 07 Chemistry program descriptions 8702 08 CLEAN TAIL BS program O702 10 Cleaning beards Jim Trahan 8703 02 COMPARE TWO BS Program Description 0705 08 COMPRESS BS Program Description 8705 68 COPY COMMAND HELP Ralph Kenyon 6704 08 Confidence Test failure Ralph Kenyon 4706 10 CrN Ralph Kenyon 6702 05 CRASH Ralph Kenyon 0704 05 Cross assembler comments Ron Moffatt 8704 04 Cursor Contre ia Edit Ralph Kenyon 4702 02 Diablo 620 Setup Chuck Thompson 6705 01 Disable Automatic Linefeed Bob Jones 8701 64 DWP 230 Printer Hookep Ralph Kenyon 0705 03 East Coast Service Davis McCara 8703 01 EFABLE COMMAND HELP Ralph Kenyon 8701 07 Epsom R308 Dr Briarty 8701 02 Eratic Memory Chris Bagley 8701 02 Ethics Bob Bybee 0706 03 Ethics Ralph Kenyon 8706 04 Exec A 5 Ral
175. set to find the 9 monitor that came with the system Haven t used it in a while but it always served in a pinch Oops all the video is smashed into one vertical line Scratch two monitors So I found a cheap Samsung green screen monitor mail order for about 65 Rushed it here by UPS Blue Hooked it up and it worked fine except that the characters were too wide for the screen A little adjustment of the monitor s controls and the two controls on the Poly video board solved that problem So the Poly s back in operation But then disk drive problems struck I started getting more and more errors from my 1 floppy drive Replaced drive 1 and it s no better Exchanged drives 1 and 2 and still drive 1 doesn t work reliably So I started suspecting the power supply PolyLetter 8701 Page Measured the volta aha The 5 supp drives and drive two So I spent a couple of days locating parts removing the power regulators from the system and replacing them After all this the 5 volt supplies measured 4 85 and 4 95 on the two drives well within tolerances Run the confidence disks and now the drives both read with no errors Whew Glad that s over Button up the system replace the cover put the brand new Samsung monitor back on top of the Poly and hol bits Batman the disk drives are producing errors again Now I m ready to kick myself he disk drive problems started just after I bought the new Samsung
176. shows that 3 of the 5 plugs are open That short on the CPU must have burned out the trace where the plug connect to it and it must have happened in three different slots The one getting power and the ones on either side of it Soo the trace burned out before the diodes and before the fuse No wonder the fuse was a 5 amp instead of the 2 amp fuse which was recommended Okay to fix this I solder a jumper wire from plug to plug on the back of the back plane Now I put all the boards back in except the CPU This time I put in my spare CPU card Horay the system works Okay I ll check out that CPU card later BugNotes Abstract Systems BugMote 011 0 December 21 1982 RDB 4 3 has a bug in its exit routine The vector in SRA is not restored on exiting from RDB with the Q command This results in jumping PCHL to the location of the RDB single step handler when some spurious interupts occure Normally the front panel would be entered under these conditions but the address of the routine for the interupt has been reset by RDB to point at its own single step handler If memory has been ZAPed this interupt will coast thru the NOP s to reboot IF you have 8 MAY JUN 1987 memory thru OFFFFH If the top of memory is less than OFFFFH and there is no protected program there an infinite loop NOP s thru to FF blowing the stack and rebooting will result If the editor BASIC or some other program has placed data in memory
177. sible to swap boards including the CPU I have also omitted the most important data Let s get to it MS DOS and PC DOS are decidely not MULTI USER Networks are tricky and I have seen and heard of more problems than successes 100 to the rescue Using concurrent DOS and or TurboDos multi user is a natural implemented way to go MS DOS can be Cand indeed it 15 as a subsystem Taking seven users into consideration 7000 is not a lot of money I am somewhat involved in both graphics and music I am aware of the GOBS of memory and the need for real time speed in both endeavors I am sure that professional sound studios would buy a computer that would give Megabyte of RAM provided it was reliable and the needed software was available l have heard CAD CAM people complain about the speed of AT software Professional Sound Studios are eagerly awaiting good MIDI systems TALS 3S 3 brand new area and should earnestly he studied by all computer manufacturers board designers and software houses People in the medical profession are now using computers for more than billing What an ideal tool for X RAY analysis leap to them 7 PolyLetter 8701 Page Thermographic and on it goes analysis not presume to teach anyone their business I do know that as I am exiting the Poly Editor I am typing ahead a whole set of commands and when I look up the machine has already executed at least three of them This is ten y
178. stom help files can be added by the user Setup GO shows which printer is the default device It includes selection of two printer mini cards device 1 and device 0 as a normal option in the questions With two printer mini cards you can switch between two printers without unplugging them This version also corrects for the bug in Poly s DELETE routine Other nice features include showing the driver name and showing the printer name with the default parameters These extra features have been added without using more costly disk space it is the same size as Poly s version 11 sectors Poly Hardware Expansion The CPU type and speed cannot be expanded The Screen cannot be expanded Memory to 56K FFFF the lowest 8K being unusable one 64K board does the trick Configuration CP M hardware upgrade by Poly Drives up to three 5 25 inch drives any combination of single sided single density with 350 sectors each and double sided double density drives with 1400 sectors each up to four 8 inch drives with 2464 0 6M sectors Single Sided or 4928 1 2M sectors Double Sided up to 3 hard disks I have three double sided single density 96tpi drives with 1600 sectors each The volume manager allows up to 7 volumes on line at once I have also had a Music Synthesizer board running in my Poly Ram disks or extra memory could be installed but software would have to be written to utilize it Many other S 100 cards should be installable
179. t arrived UPS within 9 days Despite all this I m still very pleased with everything about OKIDATA except the earlier than expected printhead failure I wonder if I might have better cleaned or lubricated it It was poorly protected from household dust I left the cover off practically all the time I also wonder if the pins might have snagged on bi drectional while accidentally printing off the edge of 8 1 2 paper Again I welcome your comments Earl Gilbreadth Savannah GA p s 1 24 Had not weighed this for mailing yet and just received your 8606 I especially like Zits key bounce Front Panel SAVEF Printer Interface Test and BASIC filename Pleas do not feel obligated to publish any of this without severe editing Sincerely Most SSSD disks will do ok on DD and on DS but they are not certified by the manufacturer to do so All are manufactured using the same process See the article The Straight Wire elsewhere in this issue for more on RS 232 cabling Thanks for writing Ed PolyLetter January 20 1987 I rather like the idea of no GOTO story jumps It was frequently confusing One negative comment though about the typography If it s possible for you to have the same size type but without all that space between characters it would certainly be more pleasing to the eye and easier to read I think you re using proportional type but with all that excess space between characters it s hard to
180. t cry over spilt milk even if it is a damn shame Let s share what we have left with whoever s left I ll make available my mailing list including the non subscribers to anyone who wants to send me a self addressed stamped envelope For 5 00 you can have it on SSSD disk There is still room for the Poly to grow I have updated SD proms and an improved Exec also run 96 tpi drives I have ASROM prom versions for 40 track drives and for drives with fast step times Chuck has a set of my fast 40 track ASROMS running on double sided TEAC drives he gets 800 sectors per drive And the disk access only takes one seventh 1 7th as much time I run fast 80 track ASROMS on double sided drives and get 1600 sectors per drive 1 2 Megabytes in a single 8813 I do have a 30 Megabyte XT clone It rarely gets used but I hope eventually to put the Poly operating system on it It would be great if I could get it to run the Poly Software then I could have the best of both worlds Ed Dear Ralph January 25 1987 Glad you are still around We use a Poly 8813 with 2 8 drives every day at Sloan Brothers for order entry and invoicing It s a good ol PolyLetter 8702 Page work horse A second 8813 sets idle We d like to sell it Also in the family we have 1 apple II 3 Osborne s and a new IBM convertible Don t buy one it stinks The second Poly 8813 might get used if we could run CP M We are in love with Wordstar amp DBAS
181. t level and I wanted to invoke edit from a command file where UCHR has no effect So I changed it to a gnome which eye s WHO edit GO can be invoked in command files and can input and convert CTRL characters With this capability I can type in two or three Exec commands on one line separated by M s and execute them all in one stroke Furthermore edit knows how to find and copy a marked block from anywhere on the screen to the cursor location With all this information I am sure you could upgrade B EDIT to include the additional features have mentioned After all we re both competent programmers with considerable experience in the Poly environment Competetion is after all competition In my opinion it was monopolizing and secrecy which killed Poly s chance for a good market share Had we healthy competition low prices and lots of sharing but that s off to never never land again with the rest of the nostalgia Incidentally ISS advertized a spelling checker with a mere 3 000 words SISS RL for 350 well before Frank s SPELL advertised as having 20 000 words appeared A S Spell has about 12 000 words Ralph A PARALLEL 8251 UART by John J Warkentin The Editor of POLYLETTER has voiced a desire for a black board that could be plugged into an integrated circuit socket that normally is occupied by an 8251 Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter UART and provide support for a parallel prin
182. tell Were you to take out some of the space between characters you could afford to use 7 lines per inch instead of 8 this would also improve readability Further on the typography the smaller typeface see page 7 Issue 8602 Mar Apr 86 is even more difficult to read especially with the fresh ribbon And finally a blank line between paragraphs is a tremendous aid to readability even a half line is a great improvement over no space at all I found most interesting Bob Bybee s comments about his conversation with current PolyMorphic owner Sirous Parsei The attitudes expressed by Mr Parsei are directly descended from the attitudes which kept PolyMorphic instead of IBM from being the industry standard microcomputer I ve run across this attitude many times In its early days PolyMorphic was light years ahead of its competition on the technical side but the inability to 4 MAR APR 1987 understand marketing reality kept PolyMorphic from success Mr Parsei s attitude has always been PolyMorphic owns the PolyMorphic owners and anyone who tries to sell anything to these people is an enemy of PolyMorphic Baloney Had PolyMorphic encouraged others to adopt its operating system provide peripherals and write software it would be alive today I made a trip to Goleta Santa Barbara in 1982 to try to encourage some sort of activity on the part of PolyMorphic and Mr Parsei to generate more interest in Poly and
183. tem 88 the operating system and includes modified commands Included are Dfni OV Dfn2 OV Dfn3 0V Exec OV Gfid OV Prnt OV and Setup GO All Exec errors reported in BugNotes have been corrected in this version and new commands HELP UnSys WRITE and ReStart have been added Also DONT amp SQUEAL have been restored and DLIST is recursive for sub directories LIST and TYPE have been modified to prevent scrolling past protected portions of screen LIST also shows the number of free directory entries so the program Space GO is no longer needed Also in ENABLEd mode the flags for each file directory entry are shown D for deleted S for system and N for new With the flags you can see just which files to use CLEARNEW or SETNEW on before using BACKUP TYPE does not scroll past long lines more than 64 characters long With both LIST and TYPE a is used instead of a and typing ESC will exit from either no need for CTRL Y Sniff shows the current sector being tested It erases the sector number if the sector was ok It also leaves the last sector number tested on the screen if you exit with a CTRL Y Also you can tell Sniff what sector to start with If the starting sector is larger than the size of the disk Sniff checks the entire disk It defaults to the used sectors Sniff lt d gt lt ssss gt will start checking with sector ssss on drive d With this enhancement the program SNIFFALL GO is no longer needed
184. ter but something else For instance system won t boot every time those chocolate diskettes your son stuck in your drive are worn out bad oxide you find yourself in the front panel your power company thought you ordered 440 three phase for home service whoops this could have caused that transformer rod to go they may be responsible so I would check with them Or fragmented data or loss of is another problem First suspect the electron pump They are only good for about 2 billion bits so when you get lousy data the impeller is generally shot unless the seal is leaking then the bits leak out into the bit bucket You will need to replace the bit generator its next to the baud rate generator call Polymorphic for further details and pricing The most drastic problem encountered is smoke After you see the smoke its too late Even if you rip the computer apart and find the cause it s to no avail Once the smoke leaks out of an IC it can t be fixed it has to be replaced Now if you have this problem of a bad IC you will have to replace it This is where the few tools I mentioned will come in handy Replacing an IC is really very easy After locating the defective unit it is good idea to determine why it went bad or you will be in the same boat again shortly after replacement Its a good idea to make sure all cards are properly seated I suggest a four lb ballpeen using only a half backswing these cards are a little delicate S
185. ter port Although such a project is only slightly less complicated than a full blown parallel printer port there are certain instances where such a hardware device would be most useful It certainly minimizes the software modifications required to support a change in printers Before I begin the discussion of this project let me make one thing perfectly clear I have NOT built this device to the best of my knowledge it SHOULD work but I cannot guarantee that it WILL work If anyone does build it and discover that it does work 6 NOV DEC 19 please let me know via a letter to POLYLETTER THEORY Let s begin with a brief discussion of the 8251 UART The 8251 is basically a serial to parallel converter and vice verse We do not need to concern ourselves with the serial side of this 1 C to understand what is going on with this project The parallel side of the 8251 however is important to understand as this is what we have to emulate The parallel side of the UART is connected to the computer s internal data address and control bus In the Poly these are contained on the CPU card buffers drive the S 100 bus The 8251 has 8 bi directional data lines 4 interrupt lines 4 control lines and of course a 5 volt line and a ground line There are additional lines particularly for voltages that we need not concern ourselves with here Internally the 8251 has a data output register a data input register a control register
186. that I have the only one in the U K United Kingdom I had the original Poly 88 construction manuals and with these and a good deal of self help I ve been able to get over the few breakdowns that I have had so far Does Poly produce any field service data or repair manuals apart from Confidence disks I have these My main problem is in getting documentation When Poly sold me the Exec 96 they only sent me update notes from the previous version my manual is for Exec 72 so there is a big gap on which I have no data I have nothing on WordMaster and Arise is just a name in the directory to me While Poly was very helpful at first they didn t answer any more and so it was a tremendous thing for me to find that PolyLetter existed I gather that Poly is still in business but what do they sell I never see a single ad or reference to them it s a shame that the 8813 was 5 years ahead of its time I wish you every success with PL it really is a lifeline and I read and re read every word of the copies that I have I will try to let you have a contribution soon Could you please let know the contents of the various disk of the month series volumes so that I can order some Thanks again for your response to my letter I look forward to hearing from you again soon L Briarty Nottingham Great Britian Dr items in this letter have been in recent issues of PL The rest I will address here as there may be some other reade
187. the same speed but is now working for two users each about 1 2 the time and the system software must all be written to use that time sharing You can t get more than 64K actually 56K in a Poly because the 8080 has only a 64K address space If you put in bank selectable memory you could have part of the user memory area set to exchange with banks This is of no use to any existing software that I know of You could put in a RAM disk but it would need a driver program to interface it and it would look like either a disk drive or a peripheral device rather than more memory As for the 16K to 64K modification One reader has phoned in to say his son who is studying EE converted a board for him I have three boards which have been modified each in a different way The 125 you quote is Poly s charge for the labor to do do not know if Poly has released their version of the modification to their dealers Next time I talk to Poly I ll ask if they will release their version Ed Dear Mr Kenyon 5 Nov 1986 was very pleased to receive your letter and the copies of PolyLetter that you sent me appreciate the POPs I problems of editorial handover that has occurred lt lt The contents of the 1984 issues looks very good and if any of the copies with data on Arise the spares kit diagnostics etc are available they would be very welcome As far as the disk of mine that you have is concerned I sent it in as
188. through whenever possible and put any cross jumpers on the plug on the serial mini card The header published in Poly s printer upgrade Printer 40 only works when there are some crosses in the cable The necessary lines in the RS 232 interface are defined as follows 1 Ground 2 TxD Transmit Data 3 RxD Receive Data 4 RTS Request To Send 5 CTS Clear To Send 6 DSR Data Set Ready 7 Ground 8 DCD 20 DTR Data Terminal Ready These lines connect to the Poly s plug as follows Name RS232 Plug Ground 1 cS TxD 2 2 RxD 3 1 RTS 4 4 CTS 5 3 DSR 6 cc 5 Ground 7 DCD 8 cf 5 DTR 20 6 On the Poly s side of the plug we have 16 RxD input 15 TxD output 14 CTS input 13 RTS output 6 MAR APR 1987 12 DSR Cinput 11 DTR output 10 RxC input 9 TxC output TxC is the Transmit Clock pulse and RxC is the Receive Clock Pulse These are used for clocking the bits out of the 8251 USART chip In almost every case we just feed the Poly s output clock pulse back to itself by connecting pins 9 and 10 In essence Poly is telling itself to go ahead and process the bits After this it gets slightly more complicated But things are much simpler if we know that we have decided to make the cable straight through whenever possible First the data line When we connect a printer or some other device to which we send data we must be able to get the data to it This involves con
189. to get a copy However since you sold your Poly lock stock and barrel software included to Percy Roy Perhaps it is Percy that I should be asking to put SPELL 3 0 in the Public domain I went back to my old 48 tpi disk archive and found the original SPELL 3 0 that you sent me How about letting me put it in the PolyGlot Public Domain Library Or do I have to ask Percy Roy as the new owner of the rights to it As part of my Masters in Human Resources Management I was taught to seek the win win solution to controversies Also Gerald Neirenberg says that the object of negotiation is not a dead competitor but a solution both can live with Let us put this controversy behind us by putting SPELL Yr S 6 SEP OCT 1987 3 0 in the public domain By the way Frank months ago you promised me an article on the tricks you employed to make a PC clone act similar to the Poly As you saw yourself your earlier article on transitioning to a DOS machine got considerable response We have people out there who have both Poly s and DOS machines and who would like to have help making it easier to use the DOS machine in light of their Poly experience How about it Frank does PolyLetter get another article describing the half dozen operating system commands and a dozen editing commands that make the thing similar to a Poly I have looked through all the PolyLetters that you edited and have not found any item on eliminating key bounce Would
190. to try to keep as many Polys in use as possible He was polite but obviously wanted me to go away which I did Those of us who ve had software to sell and most Poly owners professed to want more software availability had to try to sell it without any help from PolyMorphic Several of us have compiled user owner lists and offered the lists to PolyMorphic but there apparently was no interest It s ironic that Sirous is distrustful of and unhappy with Bob Bybee I know of several Poly owners including me who are probably still using our machines solely because of the work of Bob Bybee I m no great computer expert but I know that with my pamphlets and articles on Poly operation I ve helped a number of Poly owners understand and operate their computers and I m on Sirous s list too I just don t understand the attitude never have never will Keep up the good work Ralph We need PolyLetter and the input from you Bob and the others who are still trying to keep the PolyMorphic computer alive Best regards Chuck Thompson Dallas TX 7 lines per inch was also suggested by Al Levy I am trying it in this very issue I ve also gone to 12 cpi to decrease the intercharacter spacing It looks better to me but I m only the editor What do you think It s true that PolyMorphic Systems has moved to smaller quarters twice in the last few years and their operations are shrinking but they are still operating We can
191. total 15 00 15 00 2 13 00 28 00 3 12 00 40 00 4 10 00 50 00 5 9 00 59 00 6 8 00 67 00 7 8 00 75 00 I m not sure about Don Moe s Form Al Levy bought the computer which used to be Don s lock stock and barrel along with much software originally owned by Logic Inc Al has submitted much of that software for inclusion in the public domain see PolyGlot Library Volume 8 but Form OV was not among them I can ask Al if he has more to submit Ed Ralph May 3 1987 l enjoyed the note from Glen McComb Perhaps he or one of he other design team members could write an article or a series for us on the Poly design history goals etc They were certainly far ahead of anyone else When I got my Poly others were pushing front panel paddle switchess In spite of this design brilliance the company faded what 6 MAY JUN 1987 went wrong and could it have been avoided I d like to read this story what do you think Bob Johnson Roanoak VA p s My daughter is using my Poly as a word processor after her much newer Kaypro broke down Bob have you read the book The Peter Principle The author claims that for the purpose of promotion supercompetence is incompetence If your boss doesn t understand what you are doing he won t think it s good and your promotion chances go down I think that s one thing that happened to the Poly They were so far ahead of their time no one could believe what they saw Poly looked differ
192. ts 1l had just spent 3 painful hours entering all the changes to the data in my household budget spreadsheet What a job Thank Poly don t have to enter that again Ok now to save it to disk Oh no It s a disk crash I am suddenly looking at Error 0106 Horrors The drive didn t start Well you dummy you ve been asking for trouble by using that flakey drive when you have two perfectly good new ones to put in Murphy s law says that it ll happen when it s the worst possible time Okay okay now what do I do Dol really have to enter that data again Fortunately run with my system enabled so maybe I m not dead yet I bring up the front panel and load 2D92 the address of SYSRES poke a 3 in there and move the system disk from drive 1 to drive 3 Ok let s try CTRL Y nothing Oh yeh chagrin BASIC takes over the CTRL Y Oops better not do that anyway this program has an ON ESCAPE which will erase all the data anyway What luck Ok let s see when we get to REE it starts at 3203 but that wipes out the run time environment Let s examine where 3203 goes Ok go indirect to the JMP address It looks like it s putting a value in the accumulator MVI A 1 Then it does a LXI H data Ok continue Another LXI H data Oh ya this is one of those strange skip routines Ok follow it to the end It calls an overlay Ok let s do it Set the program counter and go Hey that looks like a cross ref list and I
193. tuff until the command file is done executing You read about Gnomus Well I wanted to define ESC d as a macro to produce the current date for Gnomus but I didn t want to have to enter the date twice So I figured that I could go into my INITIAL command file and put edit s invoking character right after TYPEing the date on the screen Then I would invoke Gnomus s define a macro facility and let edit feed Gnomus the date Didn t work I had to put the command last in the command file so that the keyboard buffer was read after the command file was finished Not being one to let this stop me I figured that what I needed was something which would turn command file mode off long enough to get the info from the keyboard buffer Those of you who have played with or actually used CP M remember the SUBMIT utility which acts something like Poly s command file mode but gets the parameters from the command line or from the keyboard buffer Well I decided that I needed a program which would watch the stream of input characters and turn command file mode off long enough to get the info from the keyboard buffer and back on again after getting a parameter I took a good look at the special characters and decided that the percent character which happens to be used in the IBM PC as well as in CP M is the appropriate character to use Since a parameter is gotten from the keyboard I decided to call the program PramKey The program tur
194. u had to put the answers to the program s questions in the command file too How often have you wished to be able to give the answers the program wants and then resume the command file Well it s easy enough to do from a BASIC program by using the following codes Z PEEK 11656 REM Save command file flag POKE 11656 0 REM turn off command file insert parameter input routine here POKE 11656 Z REM restore command file flag From an assembly language program the following code works LDA CMDF Get command file flag PUSH PSW Stash it on the stack XRA A STA CMDF Turn command file mode off insert parameter routine here PolyLetter 8706 Page POP PSW Get flag from stack STA CMDF Put it back It might have been zero The latest version of my Clock and date programs both work this way I wanted to have these inputs when my system booted up but didn t want to terminate command file mode But what about programs which are already written How can we make these programs work in the same way I find it hard to do anything in the exact same way twice and remembering all the same things to do at boot up time would be too much for me So I made the computer do it for me by having a very long INITIAL file Well during the latest work on edit GO see PL 8705 I wanted to edit a line during the command file Unfortunately edit puts its result in the command buffer and Poly never sees that s
195. uch as Frank Stearns Bob Bybee and Ralph Kenyon The PolyMorphic computer is a Classic Life goes on and more speed capacity and versatility are needed so gradually the Poly s are being relieved of some of the larger tasks and being allowed to rest while the younger IBM guys take over It would hardly be an office though without my faithful 8813 s standing by to lend a hand whenever they are needed Thanks for listening JIM TRAHAN Ralph April 4 1987 I couldn t decide which public domain disk to claim as my prize especially after reading the JAN FEB PolyLetter So enclosed is a check for 30 please send PGL V 11 thru PGL V 16 and I ll consider the free one as any one of those 6 My thanks to Stan Reifel for submitting his cross assemblers to PolyLetter As we discussed on the phone awhile back thanks for the call I have been toying with the idea of a ROM or RAM disk for the Poly system drive Surveying the available S 100 cards it appears that the best solution is to wire wrap a custom circuit Are there other hardware hackers reading PolyLetter that would be interested in a device of this type If so I would be glad to submit schematics and construction details as work progresses Keep up the good work Ron Moffatt Thanks for the order K 9 See Bit Bucket Ron I bought the documentation for Semi Disk to see if it could be used as a RAM disk It seems like there is no real difficulty in implementing it b
196. uch trouble The clone fits on almost any desk The S 100 system needs space and more space maybe even rack mounting The Chinese and others have made parts cheap and well within the reach of the mass market Cost for 640K for an MS DOS machine is now about 80 00 PolyMorphic Systems an 100 company is asking 700 for a 64K RAM BOARD That s sixty four not Six Hundred Forty A complete XT clone with a twenty meg hard drive can be purchased within the range of 1300 to 2000 depending on configurations A new S i00 system has to cost at least 5000 00 and probably more like 7000 00 Outside companies American and foreign are now making upgrade boards for IBM PCs like there is no tomorrow For the consumer this means you are no longer locked in and in addition competition drives prices down It was this factor that made me considered a clone I have reconfigured my MS DOS system at least eight times in the past year So the original reasons for buying an 100 system compatibility availability of parts and the choice of buying from many sources is no longer valid This is especially true since I can buy at least two machines of some other type instead of one S 100 system The decided advantages of an S 100 are reliability speed flexibility and the ability to upgrade ad infinitum Although l can buy boards for an XT machine there is eno way I could ever change it to an AT type machine With an S 100 system it s pos
197. ular one of my girlfriend The first time she did it I tore the computer apart and looked for two days before I noticed the overspray on the bezel She now uses a little stencil to mask the bezel and got the time down to one day now on 6 JUL AUG 1987 suspected painted screens So can you with a few tips you ll find here Next you turn on the system and there is this terrible noise and it gets louder and louder First check to see if you have closed the disk drive door on one of the children s hands no children then proceed to check for cats tail in fan you would swear that sound is the horizontal oscillator whine it is so high but no we have to look further and sure enough its a transformer rod knocking You haven t serviced it in five years but I don t blame you you didn t get any documentation with the system and didn t know where the dipstick was at Have no fear any small engine shop can repair it for a nominal fee Unless they have to long block the thing Next is the intermittent trouble these are one of hardest to find Here you will need to use straight forward logic process of elimination knowledge of the theory of Murphys Laws ability to use the phone for assistance from someone you have never talked to before an extreme amount of patience coupled with last but not least LUCK The first thing to do with an intermittent problem is to note when the problem occurs there could be outside forces at work Not the compu
198. ut data areas at the end and chopped off those sectors of 00 bytes feutting it down from 116 to 81 sectors in the process 8 JAN FEB 1987 Disk PGL V 11 has 16 files on it 46 free entries 249 sectors in use 0 sectors deleted 1 sectors free Size Name 2 ceglobals cs 28 ect c 28 c 2 CS 17 3 CS 2 5 CS 12 c6 CS 2 cc CS 22 cc8 CS 4 ce4 CS 5 ceio cs 3 CCLIB_AS 1 SETUP AS i c 60 12 Introduction dC 21 CCIO AS 5 READ THIS TY Disk PGL V 12 has 6 files on il 55 free entries 275 sectors in use 0 sectors deleted 75 sectors free Size Name 102 TERMINAL ip2 AS i75 ADB 4p3_AS 0 TERM GO 4 ADB GO 1 TERM DC ADB DC Disk PGL V 13 has 7 files on it 53 free entries 274 sectors in use 0 sectors deleted 76 sectors free Size Name 0 SYMBOL TX 37 SYSTEMIO TX 19 CLOCK TY 7S FUNCTIONS TY 4 STORAGE TX 34 PABSETABLE TI 1 048 Cross Assembler TX Disk PGL V i4 has ftf files on it 49 tree entries 290 sectors in use 0 sectors deleted 60 sectors free Size Name 87 EXPRESSION TY 25 8048 TEST TX 11 MAIN PX 30 PSEVDO TI 63 PARSE TI 16 CASM DOC TX 4 TOD0 TX 2 ASMC TI 8 FRONT TX 33 casm 60 t 8048 Cross Assembler TI Disk PGL i5 has 11 files on it 49 free entries 348 sectors in use 0 sectors deleted 2 sectors free Sise Name 40 SYMBOL TY 77 FUNCTIONS TX 87 SYSTEMIO TX 3 MAIN TX 7 FRONT TI 14 STORAGE TX 37 PARSE FUNC TX 1 PARSEPABLE TX 29 PSEUDO TX 2 ASMC TI
199. ut it is still somewhat costly Cover 250 With the volume manager software the Semi disk could be connected as a special device Once booting from a regular disk and imaging to the Semi Disk it would Do you know what to feed 3 MAY JUN 1987 operate as a very fast disk drive When I spoke to Glenn McComb he talked of a similar device You might touch base with him as well If you want speed I have ASROM proms with a fast step time version fast drives required There is a project which you could look into that some of our readers would be interested in How could the Serial port on the Poly CPU be converted into a Parallel port It seems to me that the 8251 and the BRG chips could be removed and plugs connected in such a way that a parallel port results Of course the best implementation would have to be software invisible to the existing serial port usage Can it be done Are there other hardware hackers out there who can say what would be required There are users who would like to have a parallel port instead of a serial one Ed Ralph April 7 1987 I have a 76 Poly 88 which I was planning to replace its entire innards with a Teletek SPC 1 actually as systemaster Do you know a if anyone would like the old boards for spares or b if anyone is running CP M with the original Poly boards I d actually like to keep the Poly boards but with a CMOS RAM board amp FDC rather than the Teletek a board of dubious re
200. ves Make ot Vince Greenen 445 Buckeye Naperville IL 6 312 420 8813 days 312 961 2511 evenin For Sale Video Board 95 8 Disk Controler 150 Printer Interface 50 Poly CPU 125 Priam Hard Disk with Poly Interface card and Power Supply 400 Poly Keyboard Screen enclosure 175 Charles Trayser 415 651 5931 FOR SALE Two 5 SSSD SA400 drives 25 each Ken Lowe 5936 W Zina Circie West Valley City UT 84120 801 969 7736 Charles A Thompson PolyCom Associates 2909 Rosedale Avenue Dallas Texas 75205 1532 Phone 214 368 8223 PolyCom General Ledger 125 Version 4 is the original form where you keep each separate set of books on separate diskettes Version 5 is menu driven and allows you tc keep number of different sets of books on line Version 5 requires a hard disk preferably or at flopp es Either version is 125 00 including t operations manual D esst D500 v FOR SALE Poly 8810 box with power supply and mother PolyLetter 8704 Page board 50 plus shipping For Sale Poly 8813 2 DSDD drives 48K Keyboard III monitor Merrill Cottington 814 Story St Boone IA 0036 515 432 8743 For Sale 8813 with 2 SSSD amp 1 DSDD 5 drives Keyboard II 8813 with 3 SSSD 5 amp 88 MS Keyboard II Make Offer to Doug Reaser 205 277 3167 Three 8813 s for sale two with 3 drives one with two All have 64K memory Keyboard Il and Koyo monitor 200 each 500 takes all three
201. vil War but it all depends on you You could change history BOXING allows you to go twelve rounds of championship boxing and was re written for the Poly 88 by Tom de Felice Leominster MA HELP In this section I share with you the help system files I have built up over the last few years The entire system is included with Abstract Systems Exec SHELP COMMAND COPY HELP file for system command COPY The COPY command copies one existing file to a new file Syntax COPY cntpathitold file TX m path2 lt new file TX RETURN n amp m are drive numbers pathi and path2 are subdirectory paths old file is the file to be copied and new file is the new file name new file will be an exact copy of old file COPY may be combined with ZAP yielding ZCOPY ICOPT works faster for copying larger files COP Dick 2 LETTERS DICK Minimum size COP or ZC Example Abstract Systems etc 191 White Oaks Road Williamstown MA 01267 413 458 8421 DISKS DRIVES MODEMS PROMS SOFTWARE SPELL 1 MAXALL diskettes 5 10 hard sector 11 per box of 10 Hayes Micromodem 100 for only 25 300 baud in bus direct connect modem Limited quantity HayesSys modem software for the Micromodem 100 25 A S Spell a good spelling checker for 35 Abstract Systems Exec Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 Abstract Systems Proms Enhancements amp bugs corrected 35 PolyGlot Librar
202. ware and MicroPhone software on the Macintosh was able to move everything I wanted across to the Mac error free at 3600 baud Theoreticaly both machines could go at bauds up to 9600 but I began to get errors over 3600 This could have been me and not the soft hardware too Bybee s Poly to modem cable hooked up to the printer port also worked perfectly with a Hayes compatible modem the first time I use CompuServe and MCI Mail regularly and the 8813 zipped smoothly into both of them So for PolyLetter readers who are crying about things the 8813 can t do or shouldn t be relied on to do because of its age 1 it makes a superb computer communications terminal It s big beautiful CRT type makes data services amp BBS s appear at their best and the results can be saved to disk and pulled right up in WordMaster II for easy editing formatting amp printing 2 Since the Poly and the Mac can trade text files zip zip all you Mac freaks out there can use the Poly when you want the Mac when you want and move files back and forth as easily as attaching one cable between the two cases No more fears that any work done on the Poly will be stuck to than system forever All for the moment Keep publishing Sincerely Michael Aquino St Louis MO Mike Thanks for sharing your MacPoly experiences with us Al Levy has been transferring files between the Poly and other machines during his tenure as editor of
203. with and runs SSSD 8 disks Also some background in missing back issues should help clear things up The 86 01 issue had a very appropriate article on cabling printers I d like to get in touch with the author 3 MAR APR 1987 OLD BUSINESS Haven t had a chance to hook up your HAYES modems yet Every bit of available time has been consumed with swapping ROMs 26 28 on different CPU boards and with various system disks and serial headers and cables I m getting very inconsistent printer characteristics with different combinations I ll try to prepare a report on all this after I work out as many of the wrinkles as possible I m getting lots of good use out of the SA 400 drives though but still haven t found anyone to re align the old ones for under 35 FINANCIAL AND INVENTORY PROGRAMS I ve had frequent occasions to write special purpose almost one shot programs to compute yields and amortize investments and compute present worth I d be glad to mark up a listing on some of these programs or perhaps put together something that would satisfy others needs if they will contact ditto for inventory I maintain a retail furniture inventory system that assigns a stock code to every component delivered the delivery code actual cost including freight current list price current location Cinvoice number when sold manufacturer manufacturer code color material same as codes product category code condition code for damage or
204. wo way mode It connects as a custom printer to the existing software I could easily modify my driver for other S 100 parallel interface cards but had thought about the person who has no need for the serial interface at all perhaps they have an in bus modem or no modem at all Congratulations for submitting the second correct response to K 9 s food You get extra credit for identifying the food as a Byte sized serial as well See Bit Bucket E d 4 Hi Ralph August 3 1987 I really appreciate the service you have developed for the Poly people When I originally started using this machine I thought she was a 1 of a kind machine This one may be This PolyMorphic is housed is a roll a way type cabinet with built in printer serial amp 9 B amp W monitor This package was assembled I believe by GST Laboratories and was used as a video data logger with a mammogram machine The A D converter is still installed I doubt the printer will last much longer so would like to find a parallel port Maybe there will be one listed in PolyLetter Anyway Thanks I will probably call you again with another order soon Sincerely Wayne Dewey Oceanside CA Hi July 16 1987 I saw your ad in Computer Shopper I am interested in a Poly88 mainframe cpu card and cassette interface card I have a Poly VTI card and manual and several cassettes asm BASIC sample programs and BASIC 5 with manuals I was in college whe
205. y Sincerly Ed Hello Ralph July 12 1987 Is it poetic justice when a misspelled word appears in the description of a spelling checker Last paragraph flippy I ve had a chance to try out the Z 80 cross assembler What is the difference between casm GO and CASMZ GO suldn t either one to run Apparently they expect to see a system clock of some sort Not having one Do you have any details on what it would be it was necessary to edit FRONT AS and change a MACRO from CLOCK EQU on to CLOCK EQU off The entire file must be re assembled I modified the command file ASMC to give the code a new name Anyone with a 2 drive system is up the creek Maybe you could offer the de clocked version on a PGL disk The documentation on this disk Z80 refers to the 8048 assembler I haven t tried that one yet but I suspect the clock will also need to be disabled Should there be different documentation The format amp commands seem to work the same On your musings of removing the serial I O chip and replacing it with a parallel device Don t do it First there 1s no pin for pin compatible device and second you would lose communications with an external modem My suggestion is to do some detective work on the printer driver we already know it talks through WH6 amp 7 By locating the processor in and out instructions in these wormholes we can modify the code to talk to an auxiliary S 100 parallel boar
206. y Volumes 1 thru 23 6 each Send 1 90 for a complete catalog ffree with any order Make checks payable to Ralph Kenyon Do No ew For Sale 8813 System with Decwriter printer Make offer Karen Kiysz 4050 Hearthstone Court Cincinnati OH 45245 513 752 7186 Poly for sale Costa Mesa CA C Barclay Gilpin 407 Lenwood Drive 92627 714 642 0390 8 JUL AUG i987 Eight inch MAXALL 32 hard sectored diskettes for your MS 15 00 per box or 115 00 per ten boxes Also many used boards parts and systems CALL Al Levy Post Office Box 71 Hicksville NY 11802 516 293 8368 PolyMorphic Systems 7334 H Hollister Avenue Santa Barbara CA 93117 805 685 6238 1 System Software Exec 96 WordMaster II amp BASIC disks addendum w o manuals Normally 150 Special 95 2 Manuals User 150 Special 95 3 Other Manuals and Theory CALL WordMaster amp BASIC Normally of Operation Manuals 4 CP M hardware conversion 100 plus parts CP M license manuais and software 200 5 16K to 64K memory card conversion 125 00 plus parts The i6K board has to be a Poly board and in good working condition 6 Serial mini cards Reconditioned 75 board 30 7 SD controller 95 Bare For Sale Multiple 8813 systems each with 3 drives 64K Monitor and Keyboard Make offer Robert L Schwartz 906 Main Street Cincinnati OH 45202 513 241 3447 For Sale 64K 8813 with 3 dri
207. y to speed it up but failed Instead I decided to write my own in assembly language This program was called DIS80 and offered in the July 1983 Disk Of The Month You quickly generated your own version of a fast disassembler written in assembly which I declined to advertise in PL Soon after I learned from you about the relocatable features of the Poly assembler I wrote and sold a program which would load and relocate a program in high RAM The program was called MAKEREL for Make Relocatable and was advertised in the November 1982 PolyLetter In the January 1983 issue you offered a program of your own called MakeRel which performed the same function Ralph you and I have disagreed for years about intellectual property rights and I see that we continue to disagree When you disassembled the Poly ROMs and created your own version the 3 NOV DEC 1987 so called ASroms you claimed to have fixed several bugs and added features to the ROMs You asked me to advertise these in PolyLetter I declined to do so because I felt that the code in the ROMs was the property of PolyMorphic not of Abstract Systems No matter how many minor changes you made to their code you did not rewrite the majority of it and so you would be profiting from their development work if you sold it IBM sued several clone makers over this issue citing that the clones had substantially copied the ROMs in the IBM PC IBM won Most clones now use a s
208. you don t get a problem by the time it starts the Galpat routine you don t have a problem Intermittent problems may be delivered from such I had a CPU board that was infected by the devil I swapped it with PolyMorphic I got rid of the board but not the devil does PolyMorphic know something I don t The board I got back is intermittent It knows just when to go Alpha Sierra A lockup with front panel or otherwise can be a problem If all else fails and you re in Edit or Basic don t shut off the computer After rebooting GET EDIT or BASIC and generally the text in edit or the program is in basic can be found intact Loosing run time is a small price to pay Rebooting does not zap RAM That was explained in a much prior issue of PL Bob Bybee wrote and sells a good communication program SM GO for the Poly I have used it to transfer at 1200 Baud Poly to IBM or vice versa Need two modems to do it but it works fine I have also used it to contact Bulletin Boards It has it s limits but it works I have one setup where I operate a Diablo 1620 printer with both a serial and parallel port Poly goes serial and IBM goes parallel The Printer Works in Hayward California sells a board that fits into the empty slot on the Diablo 1620 and accepts both serial and parallel input with a 64K buffer to sweeten the deal Input from either computer can be stacked in the buffer serially but not fed at the same time otherwise you v
209. your printer driver but it applies to other drivers as well but the addresses may be different Printer 30 makes a call to SETUP in the Proms SETUP takes immediate data The first byte is the device select bit and the baud rate nibble The remaining bytes are for setting up the USART and are outputted to the usart control port bit 4 10H selects device i or 0 as is strapped on the serial mini card Bits 0 thru 3 select the baud rate Baud Rate Pega Multiplier et at X16 0 0000 4 INVALID 1 0001 50 2 0010 75 3 0011 110 4 0100 134 5 0101 150 6 0110 300 T COLTS 600 8 1000 900 9 1001 1200 A 1010 1800 B CTO 1s 2400 C 1100 3600 D 1101 4800 E 161476 7200 E CAFI 9600 The code in Printer 30 on Exec 76 looks like this SETUP EQU OO2ADK 3018 LDA Pspeed Get the Printer speed byte 3015 STA 4003 iStore it here for Sary 3021 CALL SETUP Setup the 8251 USART chip 3024 4003 35 1 Baud rate device select 3025 DB DAAR Dummy control instruction 3026 DB 40H Reset to programs ng mode 3027 DB ODAH DA 11 0 t 10 Program ane stop bits Odd parity enabled Word length 7 datz bits Multiplier 116 3028 D8 0 End of programming dita The programming instruction has the format SSPpLLFF SS Stop bits it 2 st p pacts 10 1 1 2 stop bits 01 1 stop bit 00 invalid P Parity select 1 EVEN 0 ODD p Parity controi 1 ENABLE 0 NO PARITY LL WORD LENGTH 00 5 bits 01

PolyLetter 1987 - PolyMorphic

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