CCP/M Meeting Notes, May, 1989 I'd like to talk briefly about what happened at last May's meeting and then talk in some detail about my visit to the Trenton Computer Festival on April 22, 23. Three new members joined. New member Rod Drymon and I talked about uncrunching and library (LBR) files etc. Bob Person snuck in some mind-blowing C-64 synthesized music at one point. No formal presentation. I handed out pamphlet newsletters (new format) and CCP/M guidelines as well as mentioned the upcoming Trenton Computer Fest. New member Reinhard May and I talked about OTHELLO. One OTHELLO program we have is written in E Basic. We also have a C version of OTHELLO. Al Hathway and I talked about an IOP he's written. This is a program which permits him to assign keystrings to his numeric keypad and function keys. I am trying to change it to make my Royal arrow keys work when I use VDE. Trenton, 1989 My wife and I headed down Saturday morning, early. We got to Trenton at about 10:00 and found Bliss Hall shortly thereafter. I saw Jay Sage on the way over and we chatted a bit about the upcoming all-day CP/M Conference. There were about 40-60 people at the Conference I'd say. The number grew steadily from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. I spotted Howard Goldstein fairly quickly. I'd heard from Jay during our walk over that Howard was using a loaner hearing aid and that he was having difficulty with it. Howard is blind and this extra aggravation was surely annoying. I introduced myself to Howard and he smiled and shook my hand. It became clear to us that moving out of the main room and into the hallway would make for better conversation so we did that. I would like to quote from Jay Sage's Z33 manual what he has to say about Howard Goldstein. "One individual, Howard Goldstein, must be singled out for the transcendent role he has played in the development of ZCPR33. We have been in constant communication with him during the development process, and he has been a sounding board for all the new concepts. In his capacity as beta-tester extraordinaire, he has subjected the code to remarkable scrutiny, uncovering countless minor and occasional serious flaws. He has also suggested dozens of ways to shorten the code. Above all, working with him has been a pleasure and delight." Although I've chatted with Howard and he's called my computer, this was my first real encounter with him and it was great to be there! I bought Jay's Z33 Manual after Hal Bower's talk. It is a joy to read and will be a jewel in the archives of CP/M literature. I highly recommend it. Hal Bower told us that scheduled speaker Cam Cotrill was unable to come and was somewhere in Italy as we met! Hal then proceeded to take Cam's place with great skill and ease! Harold (Hal) Bower is a third of the team of three individuals who are responsible for the latest DOS replacement for the BDOS of CP/M. Jay spoke next. Jay gave an overview of the history of Z-System. The talk was introductory and per usual the audience was a mix of mostly Z-System users but occassionally non users. Frequent audience participation became the rule around this time and that marvellous situation occurred in which no leader emerged but rather each person in the room lead the topic for a spell, asking this, claiming that, suggesting this, announcing that. Bruce Morgen saw fit to suggest every so often that the speaker consider giving an overview of the topic at hand, for the benefit of those who might not be familiar with the topic. I kept thinking that it would be a good idea for us all to go around the room and give our names and anything else we felt like but it never happened! Oh well. Bruce Morgen. Now who is he? What did he write? This kind of question kept occurring to me! I knew I'd heard the name but in several encounters I could not place the accomplishment. Well, I've just satisfied myself that I am sure that among many other accomplishments, he's the author of an article in the latest TCJ. "REL-Style Assembly Language for CP/M and Z-System". Howard asked me at a slow point if I could find Bruce and take them both aside in the quieter hall for a chat. I found Bruce and we went outside. Howard then told a story about some guy who wanted to give a message to his neighbor and so scribbled one out and left the note on the neighbor's fence. After a day or so when it was apparent the neighbor still hadn't read the note, the fellow sent the same message to a Z-Node on the West Coast. It was answered by his neighbor the next day. Hal talked in the afternoon, after Jay, again. This time about the future of ZSDOS ZDDOS and Z-System. "Bank everything". This was the way he tried to summarize where we are going. With the 64 k limitation of CP/M, there is a growing need to bank BIOS, DOS and CP. Ian Cottrell was there. He's just released PBBS 4.50. Bill Earnest was there. He has been running a Remote Access System for probably 10 years. I recognized a fellow who'd come to our Z-Fest and who was giving Jay a board with a Z180 on it that will make an Apple run ZSDOS and Z34. There was a fellow who kept speaking out making this and that point. For example, the SYSLIB 16-bit divide function fails to return the remainder, apparently. He said he fixed this. The audience encouraged him to send his code to a RAS. (This bug has been repaired in the Version 4 Libraries). Hal talked a bit about what he did to the older libraries. SYSLIB 3.6, Z3LIB 1.3 and VLIB 1.1. Harold Bower has completely rewritten every routine in all three libraries and added his own, called DSLIB. This one supports date and time stamping. Alpha Systems has released the REL files for free distribution. The code is smaller, faster and fully documented in online .HLP files. The manual of hard copy of the .HLP support was circulated by Hal. Impressive. The Flea Market on Sunday was amazing! Junk and Jewel. 5 acres of hardware and software. I ended up escaping the whole experience by only buying for $5 a cable that will hook my brother's Zenith PC compatible's 9-pin serial port to his 25-pin modem. These cables are known to go for something like $25 I think. Bruce Morgen landed for $100 a 10 mb Xerox 820 system. New. All in all, a great time. If I told you all about all the people I met, all the other stuff I saw and did etc. I'd fill another few pages. Editor Jim Taylor has given me three pages and I'm still over that, so I'll close and see where else I can remove the excesses. See you June 13 in Farmingon. We're going to talk about FATCAT, the disk cataloguer. And if all goes according to plan, your next newsletter will be received encased in a floppy disk jacket. Please take the time to fill out and return the questionnaire (which you will be receiving shortly). It will tell us many things about your needs, one of which is the floppy format you would like your disk to have. Lee R. Bradley, CCP/M Secretary, April 27