TurboDos Resurrected!

[new_castle_j]

This is very cool. The first computer I ever wrote a program for was the IMS Series 8000 that my dad had at his radio station in the early 1980s. I'm getting ready to pick up most of the cards (and the backplane) for that system with the goal of eventually setting it up to run TurboDOS.

I've found a couple of drive images that will boot CP/M and then allow you to load TurboDOS from a second hard drive image. I'm interested in getting it the x86 version to work on a PC (5160?) but so far the only diskette images I've found seem to be for DOS commands that allow DOS to share TurboDOS resources, rather than actually allowing the PC to run TurboDOS.

Right now I'm going through the documentation found (mostly) on bitsavers, and just trying to get a handle on it. (And trying not to get distracted by the hardware documentation, which I've also been working through.)

If you PM me, I can guide you to the resources you need and the process to get booted. Glad to see some interest!

 

[twmiller]

If you PM me, I can guide you to the resources you need and the process to get booted. Glad to see some interest!

That'd be fantastic! Will do! Thanks!

 

[twmiller]

Thank you, new_castle_j! This is booted off of the floppy of my 5160. Right now I have the XTIDE in it with a 128 MB DOM, so I don't think a HDD install is happening quite yet (though the 10 MB MFM drive is still in the system, but unplugged and with the controller card uninstalled, but that might be a 'next step' option).

 

[fritzeflink]

Other interesting sites, previously listed are:

http://www.cpm8680.com/turbodos/

http://www.retrotechnology.com/dri/turbodos.html

http://z80cpu.eu/roche-pages/79-data-articles/archive/79-turbodos

The z80cpu.eu is dead and I have to go to https://web.archive.org/web/2021122...he-pages/79-data-articles/archive/79-turbodos
I didn't got a reply from Piergiorgio Betti a lot of months ago which is sad as I had contact with him for a long years

For TURBODOS:

Not for all and sometimes in german language. For the Philips P3800/P3500 Turbodos Systems there are some manuals and images there. You have to scroll down a little bit.
I post it here as there are is less to find about the Philips computers.

PDF data sheets and various doc

 

[new_castle_j]

Thank you, new_castle_j! This is booted off of the floppy of my 5160. Right now I have the XTIDE in it with a 128 MB DOM, so I don't think a HDD install is happening quite yet (though the 10 MB MFM drive is still in the system, but unplugged and with the controller card uninstalled, but that might be a 'next step' option).

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Very satisfying to see that you got TurboDOS booted! It was a multi-year project to re-construct TurboDOS for the IBM-PC. I pieced it back together from fragments that were scattered all over, a little bit of luck was involved too in nursing some files off failing floppy disks.

 

[twmiller]

Very satisfying to see that you got TurboDOS booted! It was a multi-year project to re-construct TurboDOS for the IBM-PC. I pieced it back together from fragments that were scattered all over, a little bit of luck was involved too in nursing some files off failing floppy disks.

Yeah, it was very cool to see it boot up! I have various pieces of an IMS Series 8000 being shipped to me. My ultimate goal is to get THAT running TurboDOS, but there's going to be a learning curve here, because I don't know *anything* about S100 systems, and I haven't used one since I was a kid! lol

 

[new_castle_j]

Yeah, it was very cool to see it boot up! I have various pieces of an IMS Series 8000 being shipped to me. My ultimate goal is to get THAT running TurboDOS, but there's going to be a learning curve hear, because I don't know *anything* about S100 systems, and I haven't used one since I was a kid! lol

Nothing to worry about, IMS hardware is very resilient, they were fanatical in their manufacturing processes. PM me or start a new thread for anything you get stuck on. All the resources are available to support TurboDOS on an IMS 8000.

 

[twmiller]

Nothing to worry about, IMS hardware is very resilient, they were fanatical in their manufacturing processes. PM me or start a new thread for anything you get stuck on. All the resources are available to support TurboDOS on an IMS 8000.

Out of curiosity, have you fooled around at all with "networking" TurboDOS on the PC to an S100 machine? What I've got is the backplane / card cage, a CPU card, two MPU cards, two 64k memory cards, two I/O cards, and a floppy card, all IMS from from the late 70s/early 80s. I've also picked up a NF6X 50-pin controller to 34-pin drive adapter, and a couple of Meanwell power supplies. My plan for getting the thing to boot initially is to run a couple of Goteks on the FDC, but I'd like to eventually get mass storage of some sort. It seems like the original IMS Winchester controllers are a) unobtanium b) require some sort of 'card' for the drive as well as the S100 card, and c) also require an actual Winchester (versus MFM) drive, which I don't have. A cursory exploration makes it seem like TurboDOS had some built-in ability for resource sharing between machines through networking (which I'm assuming is serial based)? I was thinking that might be a good stopgap for mass storage, at least for the short term. The hardware for this beast is trickling in, but when I get it all collected I'll take some pictures and start a separate thread about it. I'm just trying to devise a plan for getting it up and running.

 

[new_castle_j]

Out of curiosity, have you fooled around at all with "networking" TurboDOS on the PC to an S100 machine? What I've got is the backplane / card cage, a CPU card, two MPU cards, two 64k memory cards, two I/O cards, and a floppy card, all IMS from from the late 70s/early 80s. I've also picked up a NF6X 50-pin controller to 34-pin drive adapter, and a couple of Meanwell power supplies. My plan for getting the thing to boot initially is to run a couple of Goteks on the FDC, but I'd like to eventually get mass storage of some sort. It seems like the original IMS Winchester controllers are a) unobtanium b) require some sort of 'card' for the drive as well as the S100 card, and c) also require an actual Winchester (versus MFM) drive, which I don't have. A cursory exploration makes it seem like TurboDOS had some built-in ability for resource sharing between machines through networking (which I'm assuming is serial based)? I was thinking that might be a good stopgap for mass storage, at least for the short term. The hardware for this beast is trickling in, but when I get it all collected I'll take some pictures and start a separate thread about it. I'm just trying to devise a plan for getting it up and running.

Yes in fact I have fooled around with the networking capabilities of TurboDOS, that was my main interest in it. I have networked both MS DOS and TurboDOS PC’s together. In my case I use ARCnet as the transport and it’s very reliable. TurboDOS doesn’t care what you use as the transport, IMS offered their machines with a RS485 based solution, it was much slower, but still worked. There’s also an RS232 networking option, I have not put in the effort to try setting it up however. The resources you can share are printers, hard disks, floppy disks, modems, and you can remote connect your terminal to other CPU’s on the system, there’s also software for exchaning “e-mail” and instant chat between terminals. Originally, when PC’s were networked to a TurboDOS system, they benefited from the larger hard disk that TurboDOS offered, the MS DOS hard disk storage at the time was limited to 32MB, often you would network a PC without a hard disk and save money that way. A diskless PC could be booted over the network having it’s operating system served up by the TurboDOS machine, it would have a local drive letter mapped to the remote hard drive partition on the TurboDOS machine.

The earlier S100 hard disk controllers from IMS (the one that needed a separate daughter board) are very hard to find, and they could drive a standard MFM disk with the right daughter board. The later DMA hard disk controllers from IMS (model 1100) are much more common and obtainable, not to mention easier to work with.

 

[twmiller]

The earlier S100 hard disk controllers from IMS (the one that needed a separate daughter board) are very hard to find, and they could drive a standard MFM disk with the right daughter board. The later DMA hard disk controllers from IMS (model 1100) are much more common and obtainable, not to mention easier to work with.

Ah, that's all very cool. It sounds like I probably want to try and track down an IMS model 1100, then!