Re: What exactly WAS Apple Pascal?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <0PUJc.1071$W86.286@nwrdny03.gnilink.net>,
Moll  <Bettykate@dosius.com> wrote:
> Paul Schlyter wrote:
>> In article <40f7d453$1_5@corp.newsgroups.com>,  <exegete@nunya.biz> wrote:
>> 
>>>It also supported 3.5" disk drives. That 800K of storage was a big
>>>improvement over 1-4 140K drives.
>> 
>> 
>> I can easily imagine....
>> 
>> A friend of mine patched Apple Pascal 1.1 to run on 80-track double
>> sided 5.25" floppies, which yielded not 800K but 640K -- but that too
>> was a huge improvement over the 140K standard Apple II diskettes.
>> I did the same to Apple DOS 3.3 and Apple CP/M (both Softcard CP/M
>> and Appli-Card CP/M).  And here Apple Pascal and Apple CP/M showed one
>> big advantage over Apple DOS: one disk volume could be 640K large.
>> In Apple DOS one disk volume could not be larger than 400K....
> 
> I'd like to see something like that. XD Especially since my emulator 
> supports a block device with 1.4 MB capacity... ^^;;;;;

Well, it would take a lot of work.  In the case of Apple Pascal, it
involved boot tracing, disassembly of the P-machine and then figuring
out how the disk access parts worked.

Apple DOS 3.3 would be simpler, since it's so well documented.

And CP/M is already adapted for configurations to disk drives of
various sizes - the CP/M alteration guide describes how the disk
parameter tables need to be modified to the disk size you want to
use.  Some adaption need to be done at the BIOS level too.


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