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  KEN ABOUT .......... SURFING
by Ken Ross: email.gif (183 bytes)petlibrary@bigfoot.com

Web Site: http://members.tripod.com/~petlibrary


 

SURF'S OUT!

When BT announced their Surftime package earlier this year it kept changing its shape & colour each time it was talked about, so when it finally arrived in my area I decided to give it a try. The £5.99 fee that had been announced was, it seems, only part of what was needed. A further £4 was to be levied on top and I had to use BTinternet.com, or one of a choice of ISP's - or in reality a single holding ISP with various shells.

The sign up procedure was online and at one point demanded the account number to be entered as on my telephone bills. Wrong! I entered it with upper case on letters. Wrong! Transposed letters and numbers. Correct. I Got through all the hoops and on the last screen clicked on the 'Settings Info' link, rather than have everything reconfigured for me. Result - freeze up, a solid lock up of browser, machine etc.

I phoned up and eventually managed to get the info required. I refused their offer of a CD-ROM, (the requirements read out to me when I asked about the Mac meant it was pointless).

  • Time passed and it was time for me to try and get on the unmetered line.
  • No go - line busy!
  • Repeat
  • Line Busy
  • Pull open the options menu on PPP control panel and set it to redial as quick as possible 100 times.
  • 100 times line busy

Every time the procedure was tried it gave the same result. One day I set redial to a ridiculous figure and sat down with a book. My Mac tried its best for the next 2.5 hours with an equal lack of success! Enough is enough, I declared and I wanted to cancel a service that I hadn't used and was to be charged for anyway. The expression 'passed from pillar to post' was demonstrated to its utmost as they ended up lamely saying perhaps you could write us a letter.

Another part of the Surftime offer was the ability to get online for 2p/minute during weekday 8am-6pm. Sorry, but Onetel, (see last journal), can do me 1p/min without any hoops and the freephone help line have heard about 68K Macs.

STOP PRESS

Just had a letter back from a jobsworth at BTinternet who told me, stripped of officialese

"hard luck - pay up for service you've never used"

and enclosed an extract from terms & conditions which pointed out

2. SURFTIME DOES NOT INCLUDE ACCESS TO THE INTERNET.

More on the subject next article .......

COMP.ALT.SURF!

Whilst looking at a note from Onetel a quick calculation revealed that it would be cheaper for me to log on to a BBS in America directly via Onetel than to use the standard daytime local charges from BT!. Whilst on the subject of BBSs, those who have signed up for Cable & Wireless can get long distance calls for 50p on a Saturday for any single call however long it turns out to be.

Situated in Woking is Lentil BBS on 01483 834626, PC based but friendly to Commodores. Sysop Robert Lister can sometimes be found online for a chat. Fellow Mac users can use the 'communications' option in ClarisWorks as it works very well with Lentil.

The settings that work with Lentil, (at least on my Mac), are:

XMODEM
VT102

Parity = n
Handshake = n
Bits = 8
Stop = 1
Speed = 38400

Speak text is rather fun ;->

Have you ever looked at the free readers ads in the back of Macformat? You'll have seen in the small print a mention of AppleEye BBS in Bedfordshire. On 01234 882180 / 826025 this is a purely Mac BBS run by sysop Mike Dawson. It runs on software called First Class, which can be got through the post from Mike Dawson, downloaded from Imperial College Sunsite or from my very own:
http://www.appleonline.net/kenross/68kmacstuff/

There is also an offline reader called Bulkrate that will do the phone up, swap mail and hang up, very useful during more expensive times.

(At the moment AppleEye BBS is having a few problems - non Mac related it seems - but all should be sorted out soon).

INCORRECT NUMBER

One of my correspondents was having problems with a program I'd ported across from the CBM8000 to the C64. He was using drives 8 & 9 and when it asked for the drive to use it would cause no end of problems when he entered either.

Chuck Jones light bulb!

He had never even seen an 8050 twin drive. The program was using the syntax to ask for which of the twin drives to use, 0 or 1. He had entered 8 or 9, the device numbers of two separate floppy drives! The chap had resolved things with a rewrite that used 1541 phrasing.

In the Commodore World the concept of drives and devices can have two different meanings.

Twin disk units can have device# (>=8) and drive# (0 or 1). Default saving /loading is from device 8, drive 0, when using disk commands.
dload"*" is equivalent to load "0:*",8

Single disk units can be called either device# or drive # (>=8), which can lead to confusion in these sort of situations. Disk commands on the C64 can use a secondary address, of which
load "*",8,1
is the most famous. Commands written in the
load"0:*",8
phrasing will work quite happily.

(Ed: I think if you regard a single disk unit as having a variable device number, (default=8), with only a single drive, fixed at 0, there is no confusion. If a program asks for a drive number you say 0 and if it asks for a device number you give it 8. Of course, if the program does not ask for a device number, as I suspect was the case with the program mentioned, you have to rewrite it to do so. Disk commands on systems prior to the 64 also used secondary addresses. In fact, until BASIC 4 for CBM came out they had to. I would say the most famous was LOAD 15,8,15,"$0", which was how one looked at the disk directory in those days.)

Commodore Device Numbers:
1 = 1st cassette
2 = 2nd cassette
4 = Printers (sometimes switchable to 5)
5 = CBM/PET modems are 5 (according to my references)
8 = Disk drives (but can be altered with software to 9-15)

Disk drives can have tracks cut on the PCB to alter the device number permanently. Switches could be linked in for ease of use. According to my references the 1581 drive, (at the top of my wish list!), is the only drive that has device number switches built in at the factory. They lurk on the back panel.

0 & 3 - I've come across references for these as being the CBM & its screen but I can't find the reference at moment :-<

(Ed: My reference, Programming the PET/CBM by Raeto West, states under the description for INPUT# that 0 is the keyboard and 3 the screen. One use of device 0 is that one can input from the keyboard without the Return key causing the program to abort;->)

HARDWARE D.I.Y

When you've got an assortment of equipment, (such as C128D, 1570, Amiga A500+ running AMI64LINK, 8096 running SIPOD LINK), that need to be connected to each other in varying combinations that you need to keep unplugging & plugging due to lack of ports to leave them in, life can get tiresome.

The C64 serial connection is a bus system with no mirroring, as can happen in DIN connections at times. It uses a 6 pin DIN socket, (but plugs can be 5 pin 240 degrees type if nothing else is to hand). Flicking through the Maplin catalogue revealed a 6 pole changeover push switch and so was born the serial bus switch box. On each switch was 18 pins, which = 6 * A/common/B. This was mounted on a strip of veroboard using three commons on one side as mounting pins soldered up into signal buses, the other pins being bent upward so only those 3 went through board to the soldering side. The three other signal buses were linked up with wire above the board. Then cutting wire to suit and pre tinned worked my way along each socket/pin pair doing each DIN socket pin / switch pin in sequence and 48 solder joints later it was ready.

Then I realised that I hadn't thought about a box for it beyond a mounting plate for the DIN sockets - looking through my odds box found a dead Amiga external drive casing. Double sided tape located things nicely. Front panel worked up in Sharedraw on my Mac from the measurements taken after fitting, laminated up with sellotape and hey presto a bottle neck is reduced!.

LATEST STUFF FOR 8 BITS

The first thing to benefit from the serial switch box is the 700 ( or B series in USA) in the creation of
http://www.appleonline.net/kenross/700download/
which is where the archives live for that machine.

JPG files now can be viewed on the C64 - Steve Judd's creation JPZ120 can be found in a number of places including <ahem >
http://www.appleonline.net/kenross/c64download/
There are 2 versions, one for SuperCPU kitted out machines and one for stock C64's.

THIS MONTHS URLS OF NOTE

More places off the beaten track that is the information super highway.

I'm sure that IBM's have improved since this?
http://www.cs.dal.ca/cs1200/presentations/chap1/sld009.htm

Howard Aiken
http://www.maxmon.com/1939ad.htm

Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I (the IBM ASCC) http://nimbus.temple.edu/~zpreston/computers/computer_history/20th_C/markI/markI.html
The ENIAC and Back

This chap seems have a few dodgy bits of HTML on his site but it's worth persevering!
Enid Blyton.
http://www.btinternet.com/~ajarvis/blyton.htm

Malcolm Saville
http://www.btinternet.com/~ajarvis/saville.htm

First and early Lone Pine books written by Malcolm Saville for those of you who recall his works here is a scanned collection of dust covers ;->
http://www.btinternet.com/~ajarvis/saville/lonepine.htm

While we're on the subject there is a Malcolm Saville society to be found at. http://www.witchend.demon.co.uk/clp.htm
http://www.witchend.demon.co.uk/index.htm

For older mac owners there is
http://www.applefritter.com/

Check out the pickle's Vintage and Compact Macs FAQ
http://cc.kzoo.edu/~k98cl01/faq/index.html

And Finally <grin>
http://www.fortunecity.co.uk/skyscraper/perl/316
For those of you who use to get the paper version of the ICPUG journal here's Maureen's artwork including some favourites from those days.

AS SEEN ON TV

If you've ever caught Michael Moore's Awful Truth TV prg on channel 4 you'll have seen the weird and wonderful world of the USA paraded before you.

In the 12th July at 00.20 hrs edition he revealed that a chap had been turned down from a police force for being too smart. Cut to confrontation between reporter and police hirer & firer. In his office a copy of PC world was prominent, along with a big PC screen (no pun). Cut to chap turned down for being too smart and he's sitting in front of a Mac power book.

 

C64 MODIFICATIONS FOR BIG FILE READER

By Roy Burford

Other work by Mr Burford .
http://members.tripod.com/~petlibrary/BURFORD1.HTM
A guide to COMAL

The Big File Reader listing shows it's 80 col / BASIC4 origins and the use of device / drive conventions in the disk commands can be confusing to those who lack the understanding of them.

A few modified lines are needed to reflect C64 usage with device number replacing drive number.
(The original Big File Reader program to modify can be found in the last E-Journal)

320 REM UNWANTED LINE
440 IF ASC(A$)=254 THEN T=18 :DV$="2031/1541": D$="2.6":GOTO 480
480 PRINT "UNIT" ,RIGHT$(" "+STR$(UN,3),"-";DV$;"USING DOS";D$;" "
910 N$=MID$(4,16)
930 PRINT FLAG,X$,N$
1490 M$=":" +SF$+",SEQ,W"
1510 OPEN 7,SD,7,M$
1610 replace STOP with END
1640 M$=":" +SF$+",SEQ,W"
1660 OPEN 7,SD,7,M$
1990 has missing : character before REM

 


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