From: Frances &/or Richard Clee <cleechez@tamcotec.com>
Subject: what's going on?

Herman - thank you for your advice. Trust me, I have a far more
intimate acquaintance with the BIOS CMOS of my 386 than I really
have much desire for.  And I even know the master-slave switching
arrangement for two hard discs. I 'm sure you and all the others 
will be pleased to know that I now have the 386 up and running. 
I just went at it t'other night, got the new moon over my left 
shoulder at the witching hour, hit the right recipe (eye of newt,
tongue of toad...) and chanted the William Gates mantra in proper
form...(I think that's how all those techies get the damned 
things to run, isn't it?)
I still haven't any certain idea what the trouble was or what I
did to set it right. But I gave up on trying to make Pamela's 
old drive boot and instead put in an F-disc'd 326 meg. When I 
booted from A and gave the command "format c:" I got the error 
message "Incorrect DOS version". So with nothing to lose, I put 
in the MS-DOS 5.0 disc and ran Setup.  Halleleuljeh! DOS 
formatted the drive, installed DOS 5.0 and from there it
was just the donkey work of bringing it up to spec. But I still 
like Adam's old plug n' play a lot better - pity it took Wintel
15 years to catch on.  Best to you and Zandra from both of us 
here. - Rich

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To: lmmclure1@mindspring.com
From: Frances &/or Richard Clee <cleechez@tamcotec.com>
Subject: what's going on?

To reassure you, Lonnie, I was aware that Zilog are still in
business and have been making CPUs far more advanced than our 
Z80A for many years now, just as Texas Instruments have graphic 
chips somewhat more powrful than our 9928. The point I was 
making was that some folks seem to think that because Adam only 
ever appeared in one circuit configuration that had Coleco
persisted with it, it would not have ever changed. But the fact
is that Coleco apparently already had the successor model in the 
advanced stages of design when the Adam was dropped. For 
instance, there are actually some prototypes of their parallel 
interface card in the possession of former employees. There 
apparently was some sort of language adapter - I've been
promised a French-language Adam by a friend in Montreal so I'll
be interested to look inside. The bus connector on the right-hand
side was exploited by a number of third-party manufacturers for 
add-ons (notably Orphanware) but I'm sure Coleco put it there 
with more in mind than conecting the Atari adapter. Syd Carter 
did some early playing around with the Coleco modem and found 
he could actually convert it to a 19.2 kbaud serial port, though 
he never did anything about it. There is no doubt that had 
Coleco had any sense, the Adam would today be quite capable of 
running General Motors (that's the Adam Mark 87, of course) and 
Zilog rather than Intel would be getting hassled by the Attorney
General.  The subtext was that there are two kinds of fools. One 
says "this is old, therefore it is good"; t'other says "this is 
new, therefore it is better"   In its time, in my view, the Adam 
was good working towards great.  In this time it's as outclassed
as a Morgan in a WSC race. But I am still willing to maintain 
that if the philosophy embodied in the Adam had been maintained,
and applied to further developments in computers as the tech-
nology progressed, our mainstream machine today would be a much 
more satisfactory tool to use than my current 166MMX.
To which all of our Macintosh buddies will doubtless add a 
hearty "amen" - Rich

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To: "Lonnie McClure" <lmcclure1@mindspring.com>,
        "Frances &/or Richard Clee" <cleechez@tamcotec.com>,
        <sands@nanaimo.ark.com>
From: "gerry st.peter" <stpeterg@cadvision.com>
Subject: RE: what's going on?

Lonnie McClure wrote:
>The Z80 has had successors, including the Z280 and Z380. Just
take a look at the ZIlog website.  The 64180, which was Z-80 
code compatible, but had a number of extras of its own included.

Thank you Lonnie for the word regarding the Z280 and Z380...I
never had heard of ZILOG developing those advancements...Last I 
ever was aware was the Z8000...it was a that time supposed to be 
their model to compete with the Intel 8086...I always thought 
that ZILOG disappeared.  Interesting to note that there is a 
website!  I recall reading about the original group that left 
INTEL to start ZILOG...maybe they wish they had stayed.   At the
time they left INTEL and began the production of the Z80, they
were purported to be the avant garde of the CPU industry, and
producing a superior product to the 8080.  Time sure has a way 
of warping the plans of mice and men.  
The company might now only exist to comply with commitments as 
to the 10 year part replacement provisions of OEM suppliers.  
As to whether they are currently manufacturing CPU's I will have 
to visit the site and check it out.  But as Rich says, and at 
that time, and I agreed, the Z80 WAS a leading edge CPU, and was 
used extensively, in many applications.  The newer Z chips though
I am not familiar with them...especially as CPU in personal 
computers...if they still make them ... Maybe I will get one 
and upgrade my ABACUS :-)

Gerry

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