80-Bus News

processor, along with its memory management unit, and 64K words of RAM. An alternative would be to use the Intel 8086 processor, in conjunction with the Intel 8087 floating point processor, which gives truly amazing speed of calculation. In either case, the result of using such a board would be a system that could not be described as old fashioned, as it would be able to keep up with the latest in hardware, while not wasting the investment in the existing system. In the “ultimate” system, the original main processor would still be in use, running programs that had as their main function the transfer of data and programs from one processor board to another. What a good idea the 80-BUS is! [Ed. – makes you wonder what is so ‘original’ about the Tycom MicroFrame claims?]

Here endeth the quotation from the competition entry, and we are back into the present. Notice that last idea? I’am sure that there is no connection between Micropower and Belectra Ltd, who announced their HSA-88B recently, and am not for one moment suggesting that they have not had the same idea as I did, completely independantly. It is an extremely good idea, no matter who had it first, and I will be ordering a board from them as soon as I get the readies together. In the meantime, anyone who wants to use any of the other ideas in the list above is welcome to help themselves, as long as they send me a free board to review. I am surprised that Belectra have not sent me a board to try out, and review…

The Ring is in Orbit!

Actually, it is more like a square at the moment, but I expect we can improve on that! For those of you who are new readers, the old, printed program library has met its end – but I thought it would be a good idea to circulate discs or tapes with programs on, as a substitute for the library. Not many other people found the time to write and say that they thought so too, and it nearly didn’t get off the ground. Frank Everest WAS convinced, and set a disc going for the CP/M users with Pertec DSDD drives, which earns him the Real Enthusiast’s Medal (or REM, which gets ignored!), so now there are four of us swapping our programs. There would have been more, but I lost my list of names and addresses of people with similar systems. So, if you are wondering what you said that annoyed me, chaps, it wasn’t anything at all! Those who want to join in the loop for systems compatible with mine had better let me know, pronto. Users of other systems, tapes, or whatever – if you want to run some sort of exchange, it won’t happen if you sit on your hands and wait for it! So far, I have had free copies of some quite clever CP/M utilities, and have given away a couple of games I wrote or adapted, and the source code for boring old MONITOR.COM. It may not sound like a lot, but it is more than nothing at all, which is what you get if you do nothing…

On behalf of IO Research!

Since they seem to be too busy to let the editor know what ports the Pluto uses, or send me details of the price of the palette board, I will copy the relevant information out of the Pluto manual. (I wonder why nobody who sells Pluto boards has thought of looking in there? I thought I was the only one who only looked in the manual as a last resort!) I quote from the manual, with slight changes to avoid being accused of ripping it off… [Ed. – see article on IO mapping elsewhere.] This seems to cover all the questions asked, although it does not say whether the recently announced pallette board, for which I am willing to sell my soul, is to use the spare two ports. I expect it does, as I can not think of any other use for then…