From uchinews!news.ecn.bgu.edu!wupost!spool.mu.edu!agate!dog.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!librik Tue Mar 9 14:32:59 CST 1993 Article: 35818 of alt.folklore.computers Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Path: uchinews!news.ecn.bgu.edu!wupost!spool.mu.edu!agate!dog.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!librik From: librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Librik) Subject: Re: Wierd Code Paths (was Re: Gods on Usenet?) Message-ID: Sender: nntp@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU (NNTP Poster) Nntp-Posting-Host: cory.berkeley.edu Organization: University of California, at Berkeley References: <0zOlrAEPBh107h@lorc.eskimo.com> <1993Mar2.115145.12858@odin.diku.dk> <1993Feb27.184932.26902@godel.questor.wimsey.bc.ca> Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1993 09:47:21 GMT Lines: 80 Status: R lowen@lorc.eskimo.com (Lamar Owen) writes: >Ah, the IJG books... A hundred points to somebody who can tell me >what IJG stands for.... (This is bona-fide folklore/pseudohistory...) What's an even more interesting question is why computer books were getting published by the International Jeweller's Guild -- though I suspect Harv Pennington, the master of disks who wrote the first IJG book, TRS-80 DISK AND OTHER MYSTERIES, was a jeweller in real life. (TRS-80 DISK was a book that was on the shelf of every serious TRS-80 owner. It told you how to recover from all sorts of disk failures, missing sectors, trashed sector- allocation-tables, etc. Many of these were caused by the DOS, of course, which was garbage. But more on this later.) >I have most of the TRS-80 IJG books, including MicroSoft BASIC decoded >(which gave you the COMMENTS to the code, but YOU had to generate >the disassembly...) Fair play -- anything else would have violated copyright. [Praise of Bill Gates deleted] >Much better hacker than Randy Cook, who wrote one of the most buggy >operating systems ever--although I can understand Randy's reasons. Well, it's not really Randy Cook's fault. He started work on a DOS for the TRS-80, and when he got a first, simple beta-version hacked out, Radio Shack promptly shipped it as TRSDOS 2.1 (you don't want to know about TRSDOS 1.1). Cook got annoyed; they fired him, stole his code, changed the words "Randy Cook" to "Tandy Corp" in the easter-egg copyright message, and released it as TRSDOS 2.2. Needless to say, it would still randomly destroy the directory and dump garbage in your boot sector. They fixed a lot of the bugs in TRSDOS 2.3, though if you deleted an open file it would still trash the allocation tables. Cook went off, finished writing the DOS he had started, and it was released as VTOS, a fine system; later it became LDOS, and (in a true sign of justice in the world) was bought by Tandy and released as TRSDOS 6 for the Model IV. And this brings us to the real point about the TRS-80 and the programmers who loved it, and why it hasn't had the tenacity of the Apple 2 in the intellectual market: Radio Shack didn't support it. This may be hard for most of you to understand -- especially if you grew up in the IBM PC era -- but except for the TRS-80 hardware itself, and the SCRIPSIT word processor, EVERYTHING offered by Radio Shack was CRAP. If you were a TRS-80 person, you threw out their DOS, and bought one of the many compatible DOSes (such as Apparat's NEWDOS, Misosys's DOSPLUS, VTOS, etc.) You had Harv Pennington's TRS-80 DISK AND OTHER MYSTERIES. Your editor/ assembler was Microsoft's EDTASM-PLUS, and your debugger was TASMON by the Alternate Source. You subscribed to 80 MICROCOMPUTING, and if you really knew what you were doing you got THE ALTERNATE SOURCE as well. You played Big Five's arcade games and Scott Adams' Adventures. Of course, this may sound a bit like the Apple world, where lots of different companies made the best books, magazines, and software. But in the Apple world, the computer store where you bought your Apple also sold Nibble magazine, etc. Radio Shack *never acknowledged the existence of any outside support for their machine* -- they certainly never sold 80 Micro in their stores. And most outside computer stores (Computerland, etc.) didn't stock much TRS-80 stuff, since that was Radio Shack's machine. So -- you just had to know. Had to read 80 Micro, do a lot of mail order, and enthusiastically spread the word around when you had found a gem out there. It was a world of user's groups, and of awesome special hardware bought from all sorts of places. There's a reason that the great TRS-80 DOS, Newdos/80, supported twenty-five customizable options describing the characteristics of every device attached to the system. But if you went into your local Radio Shack, knowing nothing about the machine, and wanted to get a computer, you got saddled with a good machine and junk software. And so comp.sys.tandy is full of people selling off stuff that nobody wants. (I'd still love to see someone offering a COMM-80 serial interface, an Alpha joystick, or an Orchestra-80... but then I always suspected those of us "in the know" were few and far between.) I don't think I've ever heard of this happening with any other machine. The closest thing in the mainframe (er, mini) world is the way that people bought AT&T UNIX and threw it out, stopping only to send their proof of purchase registrations to Berkeley for BSD. Any more stories? - David Librik librik@cory.Berkeley.edu