@FediverseSymbol

Sing to me of command line passing styles, oh fediverse.

We all know the Unix one, with its minor variations of DOS (slash instead of minus) and GNU (long form arguments with double-minus).

I think dd's style (dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda bs=4096) was inspired by IBM's JCL.

And didn't AmigaDOS/TripOS have some limited, but rather consistent style?

(Let's disregard straight-forward function calls in Lisp Machines, Oberon systems or anything BASIC)

#retrocomputing

Made some good progress with the pico #SharpMZ80K emulator this evening. For the first time (after merciless kludging of the 8253 code wot I wrote) I have SP-5025 BASIC up and running - and executing a "hello world" program!

#RetroComputing #BASIC

no no no *you* can't freely scan through the collected works of humanity, that right is reserved for the large language models.

@vidak The first computer my family had at home was an Osborne, which came with a manual detailed enough that it included a wiring diagram which allowed ~11 year old me to with out how to wire up an 8 micro switch game joystick to its parallel port and use it to control games I wrote in basic (and later, Z80 assembly).

https://github.com/dhansel/ArduinoFDC#ardudos

this could be the ticket. just rewrite this in ulisp.com.

ArduinoFDC is a sketch that implements a floppy disk controller. It works with Arduino Uno, Leonardo, Nano, Pro Mini, Micro and Mega.

ArduinoFDC consists of three parts:

A library providing low-level functions to allow reading and writing disks at the sector level as well as low-level formatting disks.

Integration of ChaN's brilliant FatFS library to provide file-level functions for reading and writing files and directories in a FAT (MS-DOS) file system and a high-level format function to initialize a FAT file system.

An example sketch implementing ArduDOS, a (very) small DOS environment for browsing a FAT file system as well as a low-level disk monitor to access sector data on the disk, including the ability to transfer whole disks or single files via the XModem protocol.

ArduinoFDC works with double density (DD) as well as high density (HD) disk drives. It can read, write and format 5.25" DD (360KB), 5.25" HD (1.2MB), 3.5" DD (720KB) and 3.5" HD (1.44MB) disks.

from: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/5290

The minimum requirement for floppy use was, as you already guessed, 32 KiB. And oh wonder, DOS can be booted on a 32 KiB machine. Still, not much space would have been left for any application. 48 KiB was a more realistic size for real world applications.

(DOS itself (everything without the shell COMMAND.COM) was about 9 KiB for 1.x, 24 KiB for 2.x, 36 KiB for 3.0 and 46 KiB for 3.3. So minimum RAM to boot would be 32 KiB for 1.x, 48 KiB for 2.x and 64 KiB for 3.0 - after 3.1 a memory expansion board would be needed to boot on a genuine PC.)

https://winworldpc.com/product/ms-dos/1x

from: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/6443

The first CP/M computers had RAM sizes starting from ~16kBytes (CP/M 2.2 needs about 20kB). So, CP/M, aiming to be a portable, "one-size-fits-all" operating system, had to assume some memory map. The main RAM area a bare-bone CP/M system needs for its own purposes is the sector buffer, sized 128 bytes, that has to end up somewhere. CP/M decided to put that at 080H by default. That left the first byte to be used by user code (thus, the TPA) at 0100H.

Below that (0-80H), CP/M puts the BDOS vector and a stub for the reset code (8080 starts execution at 0 after reset), so you had to have a limited amount of ROM that could overlay at least the first three bytes (JMP into the BDOS). At 5CH, you would normally see an FCB (the second main CP/M data structure), also all the other administrative data structures CP/M needs reside in the lower 80H bytes.

I’ve built a Forth 2012 implementation in Common Lisp for a client. Today, I was give permission to make it public. MIT license, CCL and SBCL, includes an FFI as well. https://github.com/gmpalter/cl-forth