[sebhc] I spoke HDOS...

[Walter Moore]

...a long time ago.


$reminisce on     /* (i.e. you may want to skip forward...) */


It only took me about a week of looking at the Heathkit add in Byte Magazine
in the summer of 1977 before I went ahead and ordered an H-8 with cassette
I/O and two massively large 8K static RAM boards, the cassette software and
one of those dreaded H-9 video terminals.  I would have loved to have had
the IMSAI or the Northstar, but as a college student, they were just too
expensive.

Come November, there was a knock on the door and a freight company (I hadn't
even heard of FedEx then) delivered a very large box to my door.  Hard
decision - pass my physics class or solder together the computer.  I
remember laughing during the physics final because I didn't know half the
stuff on the test - obviously I spent most the time working on the computer.

I am sure that everyone who put one together can remember the joy of seeing:
                            _
     |_|  _       _    |_| |_|
      _| |_| |_| |     | | |_|

         _         _    _
        |_        |_|  |_|  _   _|
      |  _|   |_| |    | | | | |_|

                            _
       _      _   _     _  |_|
      |  |_| | | | | | | |  _|

on the front panel.  I actually took the computer to my brother and keyed in
the program again so he could see it (my first portable?)!  An H8, H9 and
dual cassettes was almost usable by 1977 standards

West Coast Computer Faire, 1978.  Life was good.  Road trip from Seattle to
the Faire.  Heathkit was there with the H17.  WOW!  Dual disk drives and an
operating system!  I couldn't wait for the kit version of the disk, so I
ordered the factory assembled one.  I think it was late November that I had
the disks up and running.  Then I discovered that JGL had ported this game
called "Adventure" to the H8.  I needed another 8K to run it.  I bought that
8K board and my brother, his wife and I spent three days at Christmas
mapping out the cave.  Life was great.

In Feb '79 I added the LA36 Decwriter II to the system.  It had a 20ma
current-loop interface, so the H9 got configured to 20ma and I could get
hardcopy just by hitting the online key (yea, I suffered at a slow baud
rate, but it was hardcopy and the H9 would "blank out" at a higher baud
rate).

Various stuff, H8-4, more memory, H19, tin-plated buss problems, HDOS 2.0,
Microsoft Basic and Fortran, conversion of the LA36 to serial and
accelerated to 60 CPS.  In 1980, the local Heathkit center gave me $150
trade-in credit for my H-9 when I bought my H19.  One of my better deals!

Somewhere in here I wrote a device driver for the LA36 (or any ASCII
printer) which gave it pretty good forms control and proportional pad
characters (The LA36 could be tricked into always printing at it's
"catch-up" speed of 60 CPS, but then you had to send NULL characters
whenever you did a CR or LF.  If you sent the maximum that may be required,
short or blank lines were painfully slow.  This driver kept track of
vertical and horizontal position and sent the minimum NULLs, which resulted
in a throughput of about 50 CPS).  A friend was trying to market it, I don't
know if he sold many copies.

In 1981, I upgraded to dual 8" drives.  A company called Data Compass made
an equivalent to the H47 disk drive.  I bought that and sold off my 5.25"
drives (big mistake).  Dual 1.2 Meg drives!  Wow!  You could actually do
some real work, which I did.

In 1981 I compiled the H19 source code and started rewriting it.  This was
the first step in developing the firmware for the Northwest Digital Systems
Graphics-Plus 19.  80/132 column, 25/50 lines, Tektronix 4010/4014
emulation, off-screen scrolling memory, a hardcopy option and a lot more.
Amazing what you could fit in 12K or 16K.  I still have one.  I even believe
that they made a version for the H89.

Then it was time to get a job, and the H8 received little use over the next
couple of years, mostly my brother-in-law doing FORTRAN on it for classes.
I guess somewhere in early '86 it was powered down when I got an AT and only
recently have I tried to power it up...


$reminisce off   /* (I warned you that you might want to skip forward!) */


The old H8 has a few problems, but it does try to run.  It needs to warm up
a little, then it seems stable for a while, last time staying up and running
for a week before it crashed.  I can't say as much for the 8" disk drives.
The Remex drives worked as a master with most of the smarts on it, and a
slave which could pretty much read/write disks and send the bytes to the
master.  My master's head was trashed back in the '80s.  The slave was
working back then, so I could do a single drive system.  Now the slave is
not working.  It seems the head will not move towards track 0.  I am hoping
that between the two drives I can get one working drive.

Question:  Does anybody know of anyone who can read HDOS 2.0 8" DSDD disks?

I would love to get any data off these disks that I could.  I have a few 8"
DSDD drives from other manufacturers which I was going to try if I had to,
but if anybody knows of someone who could read them and transfer them to
CDROM, that would be great.

Over the past year I picked up a few items on eBay.  I now have 4 H-8s.  One
is Z80 based, and three are 8080A based.  The Z80 smoked, one shows only the
power LED and one other LED, and the last I haven't tried to do anything
with, its case being well damaged (may become a parts machine).

This week my 6th H88/89 should be showing up.  It is supposed to be in
running condition.  Three of the five in my possession are running, I have a
replacement CPU board for a fourth, and I'll have to work on the fifth.

I have something like 14 Siemens FDD-100-5 drives (all seem to work), 4 of
the Tandom TM100-4 96 tpi drives, 6 H77/37 cases (one pretty well rusted,
but it powers up and it only cost $1), 2 H17 3 bay cases, 3 H19s (one needs
a keyboard encoder which I can take from a spare video logic board), and a
few other spare boards for the H88/89.  Also, 3 ET-3400As and two ET-3400s,
one with the ETA-3400, all seem to work.

I have managed to pick up a soft-sectored controller, but I do not have the
driver or the ROMs to make it work in an H89.  I would love to be able to
make this work in a system. I've acquired some soft-sectored floppies which
would be nice to read and burn to CDROM.

I have an extra H-8 extended configuration board and extra 8080 CPU card
also.  As I get stuff working, I'll be letting some of this stuff go.  I
don't really need six H89s!

I also have the HDOS 2.0 source listings.  I was going to scan these in and
see what I could do to turn them into source code.  Does anybody know how
common the source is?  Has somebody done this?

I also have Buss issues 6 - 111, which was also going to get scanned (I'm
tired of boxes of paper - time to go digital).  Is there interest in these
if permission could be gotten to post them?

Pretty long introduction, eh?  Oh, yea.  My name is Walt, I've been
programming for 30 years now, my heart programs at assembly level, and I can
handle a scope and logic analyzer.  I want to thank those that have done the
work to start up and contribute to this mail list and hope that we can keep
those H-8 panels glowing for a long time.

..walt



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