new_castle_j
Experienced Member
Hello all.
2 years ago I heard about and operating system called TurboDos by Software 2000. I found it fascinating, I read every manual I could find and searched the internet for forum posts and archived message boards related to the topic. Thanks to everyone who's made their TurboDos resources available, I've been able to realize a dream of installing and running this OS. The hardware I have running was manufactured by Intercontinental Micro Systems. It consists of a 16 bit Master processor board with an Intel 186 and 1MB of RAM and a slave processor board with a Zilog Z80 and 128K of banked RAM. These two boards are networked together over an S-100 Bus sitting in my IMSAI chassis. TurboDos version 1.43 is installed on a 10MB Winchester out of an old IBM PC. The Hard disk controller is an OMTI 5400, there is also a RTC and 2 8" floppy drives. There's some cool things about this system. I can have my terminal wired to the 8bit slave processor and execute MASTER.COM which connects me to the 16bit master over the S-100 buss "network" and from there I can run 16bit software. The disk is arranged into 31 different "user areas" which I can use in similar fashion to subdirectories and store different related files together. All of the disk I/O is buffered, if I do a DEL *.*, the terminal will instantly report all the files are deleted. Then a few seconds later, the drive starts up and physically deletes them from the disk, meanwhile, I'm concurrently doing other things. I haven't had time yet to play around with some of the other features I've read about, it was only 2 weeks ago that I experienced that magical moment of seeing the A0: prompt. Many of the forum posts I read talked about how memorable that moment would be... and it was. I had never worked on this old of machine before, it's taught me how IT professionals used to have a much closer relationship to the hardware than we do now. One thing that was really slick on this machine was installing onto the hard disk. After formatting, simply copy the boot files over to the hard disk and reset. There was no playing around with boot tracks, the onboard EPROM on the Master processor card takes care of searching the disk directory and reading in the OSMASTER.SYS file which is the OS, then the OSSLAVE.SYS file gets downloaded into the 8bit slave board and booted.
Using knowledge from this forum and Dave Dunfield's website, plus an adapter board from John Wilson, I was successfully able to wire up an 8" floppy drive to a 200Mhz Pentium PC and read/write/format CP/M disks, this will be helpful in transferring files from the internet archives to this old system. TurboDos is supposed to be able to run almost anything that CP/M 2.2, CP/M 3.0, MP/M can, and also some IBM PC software, although I have not had time to try yet. I jumped right in to attempting resurrect TurboDos on another machine.
If anyone out there finds this interesting, I encourage you to post to this thread or PM me. I'm interested if to connect with other TurboDos users or enthusiasts. This next attempt to resurrect TurboDos will be on an L/F Technologies 16 bit machine, anyone remember working on these?
2 years ago I heard about and operating system called TurboDos by Software 2000. I found it fascinating, I read every manual I could find and searched the internet for forum posts and archived message boards related to the topic. Thanks to everyone who's made their TurboDos resources available, I've been able to realize a dream of installing and running this OS. The hardware I have running was manufactured by Intercontinental Micro Systems. It consists of a 16 bit Master processor board with an Intel 186 and 1MB of RAM and a slave processor board with a Zilog Z80 and 128K of banked RAM. These two boards are networked together over an S-100 Bus sitting in my IMSAI chassis. TurboDos version 1.43 is installed on a 10MB Winchester out of an old IBM PC. The Hard disk controller is an OMTI 5400, there is also a RTC and 2 8" floppy drives. There's some cool things about this system. I can have my terminal wired to the 8bit slave processor and execute MASTER.COM which connects me to the 16bit master over the S-100 buss "network" and from there I can run 16bit software. The disk is arranged into 31 different "user areas" which I can use in similar fashion to subdirectories and store different related files together. All of the disk I/O is buffered, if I do a DEL *.*, the terminal will instantly report all the files are deleted. Then a few seconds later, the drive starts up and physically deletes them from the disk, meanwhile, I'm concurrently doing other things. I haven't had time yet to play around with some of the other features I've read about, it was only 2 weeks ago that I experienced that magical moment of seeing the A0: prompt. Many of the forum posts I read talked about how memorable that moment would be... and it was. I had never worked on this old of machine before, it's taught me how IT professionals used to have a much closer relationship to the hardware than we do now. One thing that was really slick on this machine was installing onto the hard disk. After formatting, simply copy the boot files over to the hard disk and reset. There was no playing around with boot tracks, the onboard EPROM on the Master processor card takes care of searching the disk directory and reading in the OSMASTER.SYS file which is the OS, then the OSSLAVE.SYS file gets downloaded into the 8bit slave board and booted.
Using knowledge from this forum and Dave Dunfield's website, plus an adapter board from John Wilson, I was successfully able to wire up an 8" floppy drive to a 200Mhz Pentium PC and read/write/format CP/M disks, this will be helpful in transferring files from the internet archives to this old system. TurboDos is supposed to be able to run almost anything that CP/M 2.2, CP/M 3.0, MP/M can, and also some IBM PC software, although I have not had time to try yet. I jumped right in to attempting resurrect TurboDos on another machine.
If anyone out there finds this interesting, I encourage you to post to this thread or PM me. I'm interested if to connect with other TurboDos users or enthusiasts. This next attempt to resurrect TurboDos will be on an L/F Technologies 16 bit machine, anyone remember working on these?