FRANK.MCCONNEL

First met an HP3000 less than five years into its product life. Also conversant with Unix. Have worked on TCP/IP stacks and applications derived from BSD and MIT/CMU-licensed code, now sometimes hacking on freevt3k (github hairyvisionary freevt3k) which is GPLv2 licensed.

Last Notes

2026-09-17 17:15:47 UTC

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Is this a comment on 26 or 27?

2026-08-27 08:00:05 UTC

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The classic-3000 MPE terminal driver is a strange thing and classic-3000 MPE is not very like Unix. Basically, the application has told MPE to read from the terminal (READ or FREAD intrinsics) and the file system has got the I/O system to build a read request and dispatch it to the terminal driver where the terminal driver finds it when responding to received data. If there's no read request pending when data comes in, the terminal driver mostly discards the data!

2026-08-27 07:19:42 UTC

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Now imagine a terminal driver that echoes BS when you press back space, but then follows it with SP if it finds you are at the first character of the read request. With a sufficiently fancy HP terminal, you cursor up to a previous command that you want to do again (the cursor movements are done locally), then press back space which sends BS SP and erases the command prompt, then press the terminal's ENTER key (different from RETURN) which retransmits the previous line.

2026-06-16 18:26:19 UTC

some amusement for @npub1lq6…nf7e
Reported "no net, no dial tone" on 20 May. Five truck rolls and twice switching to a different pair later, on the afternoon of 09 Jun we had a decent pair and service was restored. This not too far from deepest darkest Sillycon Valley in Palo Alto CA. Two entities involved, Sonic who provide both DSL and dial tone, and AT&T who provide the pair to Sonic, so maybe not the tariffed telephone service. 1/2

2025-05-27 02:31:16 UTC

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There have been a couple revisions to the C standard since. My kinda benchmark for this sort of thing is whether the examples use prototype-style function declarations and definitions. If they don't, the book goes on the bottom shelf unless it's K&R. (Friends of the Library sale where we'd try to sell a softcover like this for $1, and I see it often.)

2025-04-19 20:38:21 UTC

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Of course they came with Windows 10 (and I did get to put my foot down and insist on Pro rather than Home) and so we had to use that, apparently it was the Linux that "looked old" (vs the reimplentation of VMS that is Windows NT)

2025-04-19 20:27:05 UTC

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It was...interesting...seeing Debian w/LXDE in use at a friends of the library organization. Systems were set up to auto-login on boot (shared use by a bunch of volunteers), to print to network-attached printer, to have a webulator (IceWeasel/Firefox, later also Chrome) and LibreOffice.
And, well, they got used. But there were a couple folks being vocal about how volunteers want new stuff, and so we got some new all-in-ones with Windows 10.

2025-03-02 23:17:15 UTC

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works from here, most recent post 40m ago

2025-02-24 17:36:44 UTC

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Given the QVALITY of DOGE IT I suspect mail with spoofed header and SMTP addresses will get through.

2025-02-18 19:48:02 UTC

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Not only can it run in 20KB of RAM, it can run on a processor with a clock frequency of maybe as much as 2MHz (being lazy and not looking at what could actually be in an MDS800, just remembering what was in an HP2645 terminal ~1976).
If your CP/M came with hardware in the 1980s you might not have got the DRI manuals. It was toward the end of the 1980s when I saw them (with a Morrow Decision I which had its own sort of interesting manuals, for the Z80 card with the MMU).

2025-02-16 01:40:38 UTC

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I hope I helped you get there faster!
I don't recall a CPM.SYS file. I remember there being a CP/M in system tracks that was the CCP and BDOS and a BIOS, and being kinda mystified about how one would change the BIOS but not really needing to change the BIOS because the hardware vendor had already done that (which is what CP/M was like in its decline, there for you to use).

2025-02-15 22:30:18 UTC

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I did not but I think if you look at http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html you will find a link "CP/M 2.2 ORIGINAL SOURCE" to a cpm2-plm.zip file which includes CPMOVE.ASM which looks like 8080 ASM source for something that might be it
It is AMAZING what has been allowed to escape

2025-02-15 06:55:27 UTC

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I actually did live through the late CP/M era, running it on a Z80 card in an Apple ][ so I got a pre-configured diskette in the box with the card and made a copy of that as my everyday booter. It wasn't 'til later that I got to read a CP/M 2.2 Alteration Guide but even that was probably 30 years ago.
I am remembering reading about MOVCPM and thinking it must know where all the absolute references (e.g. JMPs and CALLs) are so it can modify them for the desired system address.

2025-02-15 05:38:37 UTC

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td0 is a Teledisk disk-image file, which is somewhat version-dependent and not what I think of as well-documented (though this could have improved in the last 20-30 years). That's why I looked at the zip archive.
It has been a while since I thought about how to sysgen a CP/M system. My thinking is that the blob of code that gets loaded from a boot loader must have previously been loaded from stuff in a file or files. Like, um, CPM.SYS.

2025-02-15 03:24:19 UTC

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am looking at CPM.SYS from cpm-dist.zip with hexdump -C and at 0x0080 I see "c3 5c 37 c3 58 37" and am thinking those are in the ballpark for a 20K system, the CCP ought to start at 0x3400

2025-02-15 02:16:28 UTC

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suspect you may be looking for http://www.retroarchive.org/maslin/disks/8inch/index.html which has links to cpm-dist.td0 and cpm-dist.zip

2025-02-04 09:55:24 UTC

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Just one.
Do we think he and his bright boys know their way around federal-grade "legacy systems"?

2024-08-31 01:30:00 UTC

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Is the "order" to Apple and Google an "order" or a "suggestion"? I kinda wonder that Microsoft wasn't included but I guess they haven't made a phone OS in long enough that any phones they did make the OS for can't get service at present.