Maximum Leader Al Hathway called the meeting to order and asked for the
reports from the officers. The Secretary's notes were blessed. The
Treasurer's report included the bottom line of $750.53. Newsletter Editor
Tom Veile has been given recently to hoarding bills to CCP/M and when he
gives them to Treasurer Tom Mannion, the Club may very well go down the
proverbial Chapter 11 tube, but, as long as he keeps them, we're fiscally
fine.
Steve Dresser, Al Hathway, M* Dalene, Diane Thome, Tom Mannion, Eric Palm,
Stephen Griswold, Lee Bradley were present and accounted for.
Trenton '93 will be April 17-18 this year. Al Hathway expressed interest in
helping organize the CP/M conference(s) and Banquet. Start gathering your
used equipment, your checkbook and gas up your truck. You've got less than
two months to T-Day.
David McGlone sent out The Z-Letter #23 recently to subscribers. He has
moved to Eugene, Oregon. Chris McEwen has indicated interest in publishing
The Z-Letter and I believe the next issue will be done on his press. The Z-
Letter costs $18/year and may be ordered from Lamda Software Publishing,
149 West Hilliard Lane, Eugene, OR 97404-3057. Support David's efforts and
send him a check. The Z-Letter is excellent.
Al Hathway talked about the great deals you can get at computer shows. He's
recently picked up an RS-232 switch, some floppies etc. at very low prices.
Typically, it costs about $7 to get in. Keep your eye out for announcements
of these shows in the paper.
Stephen Griswold has recently equipped the BBS with ZMODEM protocol
capability. He tried to demonstrate it but the board was down. The board
has been failing recently and we have not figured out what the problem is.
A local operator must be present and must hit R to Retry the disk access
when the system crashes.
Al Hathway gave a brief history of modem protocols. With packet switched
networks and their overhead, efficient protocols have become important. The
original 128 byte packet (Xmodem Christensen) evolved into 1k block
protocols. Much later, Chuck Forsberg developed the HMODEM program (for
Heath). This eventually become known as ZMODEM protocol. ZMODEM features
dynamic data sizing and is 95% efficient. 1k block transfer is 80%
efficient. This translates to a 1 1/2 minute savings for a 10 minute
transfer.
Stephen got RZMP and ZMP from Ian Cottrell's board. Hal Bower has written
an SB180 overlay. RZMP and ZMP were written by Ron Murray. There is a large
collection of overlays for different CP/M machines.
Among the features making ZMODEM attractive, Tom Mannion and others
mentioned crash recovery (an aborted transfer can be resumed from cut off
point on a second call). Also, ZMODEM is well-suited to the latest modems
which support MNP4 and MNP5. Tom Mannion said MNP5 (the one which does
compression) and ZMODEM are capable of 280 characters per second (not sure
what baud rate this applies to.)
Finally, ZMP uses overlays. If you want to get ZMODEM going on your CP/M
computer, CCP/M has at least 4 people that have experience in preparing the
software for different machines.
If you are running an IBM type computer, an external protocol which hooks
into ProComm (and I'm sure other communication programs) and which does
ZMODEM transfers is available. It's called DSZ and may be found in the
archive Z-EASY.ZIP.
Lee Bradley, 2/23/93.
These notes were written on a 486DX2/50 under Myz80 and Z-System using ZDE
version 1.6. Just in case you're interested. The SIEVE12 benchmark on this
machine takes about 5 seconds. It takes 39 or so on my 4 mHz Royal. I've
got ZSDOS, DateStamper and NZCOM running. I have 7 megabytes left on my B:
drive. About the same left on my A: drive. I'm in trouble on my C: drive;
only 6 megabytes left. Of course, there's always the D: drive for those
times when you need a few more k. It has 1 meg.
I would like to personally thank Newletter Editor Tom Veile for the job he
is doing on SIB. Tell him you love him by sending material! He takes
floppies, hard-copy, crayoned code on business cards, holographic images,
virtual vaporware. Anything. The only requirement is that it be emulatable
on a KIM-1 (or compat.). Tom Veile's address is: Tom Veile, 26 Slater Ave.,
Norwich, CT 06360
Speaking of 486's, the first thing I did (well, the 2nd thing, the first
thing I did was send the hard disk back for a replacement hard disk) was
remove the line in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file that ran Windows 3.1. The only
thing I've figured out how to do under Windows is exit from it. This you do
by typing Alt F X. See elsewhere for Windows Tag Lines that Stephen
Griswold, Tom Mannion, Howard Goldstein, Daryl Gehlbach and others have
collected.
