UCSD P-System on a hard drive - any pointers?
Can't recall if I've asked this here before - looking for anyone with personal experience or connections to enable hosting the UCSD P-System OS on an 8-bit system (Heathkit) with a hard drive. I'm looking for more depth than you can find by just Googling (I'm familiar with most of that content I think). I'm not that interested in the later version by Pecan that was for the IBM PC. If you've no interest then thanks and enjoy your day, otherwise more detail below. tx! * Glenn I have fond memories of using the P system on a Terak 8510a - that was a pretty cool platform (LSI-11 based; wondering - does the museum have one?) P-System was never a big success for multiple reasons, but it has some nice qualities that make it worth preserving, including full screen editing and an IDE-like environment, semi open source (at least the pre-commercial versions done at UCSD) and broad platform support. It was a learning environment that I suspect influenced many who were new to computer science in the late 70's so it deserves a place in the annals of personal computing history. I'm working on a Heathkit platform (H8 or 89). I have the Heath implementations (both rev II and rev IV) but Heath never bothered to support their own hard drive (Z67) - probably because the P-System was rapidly fading around the time that came out. Working with floppy versions is tedious and unreliable - I'd like to host this on my Z67 emulator on the Heathkit. I'm aware that UCSD has released the earlier versions (I.5, II) but the most promising approach (I think) is to use the later "CP/M Adaptable" release. This uses a translator layer to map the P-System BIOS to the CP/M BIOS. We already have CP/M BIOS support for the Z67. The preferable release would seem to be Rev IV from Softech since that supports "Winchester" drives and memory swapping, etc. Again I have a licensed copy of the IV release but it's the Heath tailored one - I'm thinking the CP/M Adaptable one is a better starting point. I've found many of the needed pieces of this in the Maslin archive and in Bitsavers so I've got most (maybe even all) of the pieces of the puzzle but it's a bit tedious to piece together a working system. So if you've got experience (or only interest) in this topic or more importantly know of any substantial work that's been done (or an "expert" - perhaps someone from Softech or the original UCSD team?) I'd be interested in more information. Thanks! - gfr
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Glenn Roberts