From: lowen@pari.edu   
      
   Mark McDougall wrote:   
      
   > Lamar Owen wrote:   
   >   
   >> Last post by me on this very off-topic   
   >> thread.   
   >   
   > I will never, ever, ever, mention eBay in a ng post again!!!   
      
   Indeed.  Replying to this in a new thread would have been a good idea; but I   
   just hit reply....   
      
   >> and briefly I had a model III hi-res board on the   
   >> backside, just because I could.   
   >   
   > Didn't all those pointy bits hurt every time you sat down???   
      
   :-)   
      
   It certainly was an odd machine.  It was a late model Model 4D bought in   
   1987 (probably one of the last machines off the line). I sold it in 1992;   
   the guy I sold it to still uses it, at least a couple of years ago, when I   
   asked him about it.  I had put a K/LOK 30MB HD inside, with a bracket for   
   the HD controller above it, and put this conglomeration in the upper floppy   
   bay, with some creative cabling down to the I/O expansion bus connector   
   (and with a male card edge connector out the back, snarfed from the model   
   III hi-res board's cabling, for attachment to the ORCH90).  I had a   
   breadboard arrangement for playing with stuff hanging off the expansion   
   bus; was working on various things like displays, RAM buffers, and even a   
   12 bit analog to digital and digital to analog card for data acquisition.   
   I didn't sell that last piece, but, in a fit of cleaning up the basement,   
   threw it out years ago (probably 1996 or 97).   
      
   I had upgraded the power supplies, and had installed a half-height DSDD 40   
   track 5.25 and a DSDD 80 track 3.5 in the lower bay (I think I'm   
   remembering that properly).  I had an Orchestra-90, as well.  It had my   
   homebrew 320K RAM upgrade installed (a variation of the 80Micro design,   
   using 256K chips in the second bank) with driver software that I wrote to   
   add the extra banks of RAM to the @BANK SVC's in LS-DOS 6.3.1.  I still   
   have the source of the @BANK SVC mods, somewhere.  It was a gate-array mod   
   4.  I had installed the Radio Shack mod 4 Hi-res board and the SmartWatch   
   chip; this required snipping some excess material off the hi-res PC board   
   itself; fortunately there were no signal traces on that edge of the board.   
   I had to cut a hole in the metal shield for the SmartWatch to 'poke   
   through' the back; again, I don't remember if I left the model III hi-res   
   board on the back or not.   
      
   On the software side, that 30MB K/LOK drive was HUGE by LS-DOS standards,   
   and so DISKDISK got a real workout, although I had been playing with a   
   psuedo-subdirectory program (it worked similarly to diskdisk in operation,   
   with a 'chdir/cmd' that brought in the new directory 'cylinder' on the fly,   
   just like diskdisk; it also required a 'SUBDIR/DCT' driver.   
      
   Not having subdirectories has got to be one of LS-DOS's biggest limitations.   
   Being limited in number of drives to eight, and having very spartan space   
   limits on those eight really makes it hard, too.  Even with the XDROM   
   booting directly from the internal 30MB hard drive, I had to do way too   
   many things to move between programs and such.  And then there was this   
   strange single-tasking limit....   
      
   That's one reason I sold it; it was getting too limiting for what I wanted   
   to do (I was doing a lot of BBS stuff at the time, and even with my blazing   
   fast Okidata 9600 bps modem, having to quit doing anything useful on the   
   box while downloading something was a real drag).   
      
   The other big reason was the Tandy 6000 sitting next to it that was getting   
   a lot more use, with Xenix 3.2 plus development set installed.  Once you   
   taste multitasking and multiuser operating systems, the single tasking   
   LS-DOS begins to look rather paltry; being able to fire up an rzsz session   
   in one terminal and still get useful work done in another is golden!  Also,   
   as I was getting married in Feb of 93, I needed the money from the sale,   
   and Patrick gave me a good amount for a sizable lot.  Sure wish I had had   
   eBay back then; but that was right at the beginning of the Web, and there   
   were very few 'real' websites out there.   
      
   Since the T6K could boot LS-DOS 6.3.1 for Model II/12 (which I bought from   
   Misosys; I still have the original 8 inch floppy of that), I migrated all   
   my LS-DOS software over to the T6K in Model 12 mode.  I was working on an   
   @BANK extension to use the 1MB 68000's RAM as Z80 memory when my TRS-80   
   world pretty much ended; I bought two AT&T 3B1/PC7300 boxes, each with a   
   40MB drive and 3.5MB of RAM, and a 10MHz 68010 CPU, and I packed up the T6K   
   (and eventually sold it, too).  I then upgraded to a dual-box Apollo DN3500   
   setup; I bought a surplus Apollo DN3500 network system (8 workstations   
   (68030@25MHz, 8MB RAM, 160MB ESDI drives) with 19 inch monitors) for $100   
   from a local manufacturer and combined parts to get a server with 32MB of   
   RAM and a 690MB ESDI disk, and a workstation with 24MB of RAM and a 170MB   
   disk (using the 690MB drive for OS storage and stuff), and the 3B1's went   
   away.  At the time, PC hard drives were still in the sub 200MB range; that   
   690MB ESDI drive was worth several thousand dollars at the time, and was   
   three times the size of the typical 386's IDE drive (physically, too: it   
   was a full-height 5.25!).   
      
   And then I found out about a new system called Linux; I was given a pair of   
   386SX boxes and moved on up to Linux, dual-booting with DOS and Win 3.1   
   (later Win95).  I ran Soft Landing Systems Linux (kernel 0.13, IIRC) for a   
   while, but found it pretty limiting at the time.  Later I bought Red Hat   
   Linux 4.0 and ran it on my by then upgraded to a K5/90 PC.  The 25MHz   
   68030's in the Apollos were very slow, even by Pentium 90 standards, so the   
   Apollos went away (I found the market for them was very very slim, and so   
   they got trashed, unfortunately).   
      
   And I've run Linux ever since (this laptop runs Fedora Core 5; I don't even   
   dual-boot into Windows any more, since I got VMware Workstation).  Kindof   
   got back into the TRS-80 thing a few years back when Tim Mann's xtrs   
   (upgraded from the original xtrs that only did Model I) was first released;   
   it was kindof fun to go back and remember where I started in computers.   
   --   
   Lamar Owen   
   Director of Information Technology   
   Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, Rosman, NC   
   www.pari.edu   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)