Meeting Notes CCP/M February 9, 1993 Maximum Leader Al Hathway called the meeting to order and asked for the reports from the officers. The Secretary's notes were blessed. The Treasurer's report included the bottom line of $750.53. Newsletter Editor Tom Veile has been given recently to hoarding bills to CCP/M and when he gives them to Treasurer Tom Mannion, the Club may very well go down the proverbial Chapter 11 tube, but, as long as he keeps them, we're fiscally fine. Steve Dresser, Al Hathway, M* Dalene, Diane Thome, Tom Mannion, Eric Palm, Stephen Griswold, Lee Bradley were present and accounted for. Trenton '93 will be April 17-18 this year. Al Hathway expressed interest in helping organize the CP/M conference(s) and Banquet. Start gathering your used equipment, your checkbook and gas up your truck. You've got less than two months to T-Day. David McGlone sent out The Z-Letter #23 recently to subscribers. He has moved to Eugene, Oregon. Chris McEwen has indicated interest in publishing The Z-Letter and I believe the next issue will be done on his press. The Z- Letter costs $18/year and may be ordered from Lamda Software Publishing, 149 West Hilliard Lane, Eugene, OR 97404-3057. Support David's efforts and send him a check. The Z-Letter is excellent. Al Hathway talked about the great deals you can get at computer shows. He's recently picked up an RS-232 switch, some floppies etc. at very low prices. Typically, it costs about $7 to get in. Keep your eye out for announcements of these shows in the paper. Stephen Griswold has recently equipped the BBS with ZMODEM protocol capability. He tried to demonstrate it but the board was down. The board has been failing recently and we have not figured out what the problem is. A local operator must be present and must hit R to Retry the disk access when the system crashes. Al Hathway gave a brief history of modem protocols. With packet switched networks and their overhead, efficient protocols have become important. The original 128 byte packet (Xmodem Christensen) evolved into 1k block protocols. Much later, Chuck Forsberg developed the HMODEM program (for Heath). This eventually become known as ZMODEM protocol. ZMODEM features dynamic data sizing and is 95% efficient. 1k block transfer is 80% efficient. This translates to a 1 1/2 minute savings for a 10 minute transfer. Stephen got RZMP and ZMP from Ian Cottrell's board. Hal Bower has written an SB180 overlay. RZMP and ZMP were written by Ron Murray. There is a large collection of overlays for different CP/M machines. Among the features making ZMODEM attractive, Tom Mannion and others mentioned crash recovery (an aborted transfer can be resumed from cut off point on a second call). Also, ZMODEM is well-suited to the latest modems which support MNP4 and MNP5. Tom Mannion said MNP5 (the one which does compression) and ZMODEM are capable of 280 characters per second (not sure what baud rate this applies to.) Finally, ZMP uses overlays. If you want to get ZMODEM going on your CP/M computer, CCP/M has at least 4 people that have experience in preparing the software for different machines. If you are running an IBM type computer, an external protocol which hooks into ProComm (and I'm sure other communication programs) and which does ZMODEM transfers is available. It's called DSZ and may be found in the archive Z-EASY.ZIP. Lee Bradley, 2/23/93. These notes were written on a 486DX2/50 under Myz80 and Z-System using ZDE version 1.6. Just in case you're interested. The SIEVE12 benchmark on this machine takes about 5 seconds. It takes 39 or so on my 4 mHz Royal. I've got ZSDOS, DateStamper and NZCOM running. I have 7 megabytes left on my B: drive. About the same left on my A: drive. I'm in trouble on my C: drive; only 6 megabytes left. Of course, there's always the D: drive for those times when you need a few more k. It has 1 meg. I would like to personally thank Newletter Editor Tom Veile for the job he is doing on SIB. Tell him you love him by sending material! He takes floppies, hard-copy, crayoned code on business cards, holographic images, virtual vaporware. Anything. The only requirement is that it be emulatable on a KIM-1 (or compat.). Tom Veile's address is: Tom Veile, 26 Slater Ave., Norwich, CT 06360 Speaking of 486's, the first thing I did (well, the 2nd thing, the first thing I did was send the hard disk back for a replacement hard disk) was remove the line in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file that ran Windows 3.1. The only thing I've figured out how to do under Windows is exit from it. This you do by typing Alt F X. See elsewhere for Windows Tag Lines that Stephen Griswold, Tom Mannion, Howard Goldstein, Daryl Gehlbach and others have collected.