I’ve been having too much fun recently to write. Sorry about that.
One of the problems I have found is that there is no way (that I have yet found) to use the MicroDrive with CP/M or UCSD Pascal. (There is a way to use the MicroDrive with DOS 3.3, it is called DOSMASTER and I still have not been able to get it to work.)
But finding a supply of 5.25” floppies is challenge. All of mine left for places unknown years ago and the only ones I have found around locally have been high density or something from a mushroom farm. I have read about the problems of the magnetic medium or its top coating clogging the disk drive heads and forcing the owners to clean and almost rebuild the drives. Not something I look forward to doing myself.
I found a listing in an online auction for a supply of still sealed disks and bid. The final price was about equal to the shipping charges. So I am now the owner of 50 blank new disks for less than $20 delivered. (When I first started with Apple in the late 1970s the same disks were $10 each.
I have completed the creation of a base set of CP/M disks so I now have a fully operational system on that side including:
- dBase II (or perhaps dBase ][ as I have seen it sometimes)
- WordStar and Word Perfect
- COBOL
- FORTRAN
- Pascal
- Assembler
- FORTH
- PL/I
- BASIC Compiler
It’s a great start.
