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Olympia People - a nice, but failed attempt

A

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Latvia
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I had really high hopes on this machine, built in the beginning of the 80-ties, but it seems Olympia did everything wrong were they could. Yes, it is all good quality metal machine, with dual 5.25 floppy drives and metal framed keyboard, with 8086 processor, but this is where the good part actually ends.

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The keyboard - even though a mechanical one is very is pretty uncomfortable to type on, with too much resistance and poor feedback, it feels more like a long travel membrane keyboard. It does not have legs to lift it up, so overall the design is not well thought (just comparing to the IBM Model F) from the same time period. Arrow keys do not seem to function, and they are so awkwardly placed, that it would be really hard to use them anyway, but I do think they should work in combination with other keys, so this must be another usability rather than a technical issue

Worst of all, the machine itself, although it can run CP/M, MS-DOS and Prologue, is actually incompatible with anything - the drives have a proprietary 640K format, which can only be read and written on the same machine. It will not read any other floppies, and no other computers can read a floppy created on this machine.

Now I'm stuck with the file transfer - currently running out of ideas how to get files on this machine. I have a laplink cable, connected to a Toshiba Libretto 50ct, but I can not load either LapLink or Kermit, because DOS diskette does not have MODE or CTTY commands. One floppy did have a Kermit version 0.15, but it crashes more often than loads, and can not accept any commands anyway.
There is a substitute program for mode, called V24.com, which allows me to set port settings for COM1, but without CTTY I can not get the computer to listen to COM port. Would be really glad if someone with more knowledge could help me with a hint what else I might try :)
 
The shareware version of 22Disk has the Olympia People listed as one of the supported disk types. If you have a DOS system with a 5.25" high density floppy drive, the software should be able to read and write the format.

I can't find the Kermit supported machines list to make sure that the Olympia People is on it but I would expect a later version to be the most likely to work. Laplink (at least the versions I used) was written to expect IBM PC compatible hardware.
 
It sounds like you have the Olympia People DSDD 96tpi 5.25" Machine. If that is correct and you have a DOS computer that will run
Dave Dunfield's Imagedisk (IMD) you can make a .IMD file and access the .RAW image to copy to/from the image, using cpmtools.

You can also REGISTER with SYDEX and get a copy of 22DISK to access the floppy directly, using 22DISK.


Larry
 
Failed? Wrong? Hindsight is 20-20. Actually it was all those incompatibilities that kept things interesting. It was great when everything wasn't a dull boring XT clone.
 
What version of MS-DOS is this running?

Wouldn't 22disk and the cpmtools only work for reading writing CP/M disks?
 
See post above--CP/M 86 was an option with the People.

There's no reason that IMD couldn't image those disks. I have CP/M samples in my files for this machine but not MS-DOS. I suspect that this is another case of a "not quite PC-compatible" system.
 
I found a MAME thread that promised a set of reference material for the Olympia People but all the links to downloadable manuals and disks are dead. I am used to the quad density CP/M and DOS systems having tools to read IBM PC disks and also read the other OS used by the machine. No documentation, no proof, no idea of what the needed command would be.
 
Sometimes the Wayback Machine has those sorts of pages.


I have an Olympia Report Electronic typewriter that I really like. It's big, smells nice, beeps, and has nice features.
 
I've got both MSDOS 2.02 and CP/M 86 system disks, if it matters.

256-byte sectors on quad density (96 tpi) floppies with a very "loose" interleave for the MSDOS. The first track contains a bunch of system boot code, so I assume that the interface for booting isn't IBM PC-like at all.
 
Sorry for not posing earlier, was busy trying to get data on Olympia.

So far - noticed that all three 5.25 inch drives I have are 360K - I did expect, that at least one would be 1.2 MB

I tried all floppies which came with the computer, and so far I have a very limited success in communication - I can actually connect via serial port to another PC, but data transfer is another story:

Laplink 5 is able to start installation, it even successfully copies remrcv.com file, but then quits
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Laplink 3 - is able to access the floppy, but immediately disconnects, because of wrong com port message
Kermit - only once I heard Olympia drive access when using send, but that's all - timeout, retries, and no success
530 - can access flopy drive, then fails, because can not do anything else
Even MS-DOS copy to COM1 results in a floppy drive access on Olympia, following by a series of very unsatisfied beeps from it, but no file is created

I can only use supplied V24 program, which allows me to set serial port parameters, but it is actually not COM1 I believe, this might be why all installs are failing. As for CTTY, I can only use CTTY AUX instead of COM.
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Besides, I'm not even sure if the copied software is fully compatible with Olympia People - remrcv.com seems to be broken, and kermit on one of supplied floppies just hangs or makes weird screen glitches. I'm starting to think maybe the software has to transferred on Olympia as text, then converted to binary format on Olympia itself?
 
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At least some success - copy /A to com1 at 600 baud speed works, characters are correctly displayed on the Olympia's screen! However, using Olympia's proprietary AUX2FILE command, which should save input from serial to file, results in 0 byte files, although floppy drive seems to working normally during transfer...Any hints, tips, ideas? Already feeling my head spining, trying to finally find a reliable file transfer for this :D
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In other words, and after many retries:

* Text files transfer on Olympias screen works properly - fine, but useless
* Saving text as file on Olympia only appears to work - disk drive works at intervals as if the data has been written, but there are two problems:
- Nothing is actually written
- End of file message is not being received from the host, resulting in machine becoming unresponsive even after end of file transfer
* Modifying word length, bits and other settings do result in some (though partially corrupted) data written to the floppy, but it disconnects very early like if end of file already received. Faster connection types result in more data written.

By the way, it appears that monitor output is a standard D-Terminal connector, which was in widespread use only starting in late 90-ties. It has a standard 8 pin DIN plug at the other end, so it will be very easy to make a monitor wire longer.
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I managed to play around with an Olympia People a few years ago. A nice, solidly built computer - very easy to get inside and all the frames holding the power supply and floppy disk drives slide out just by loosening a couple of screws. Unfortunately it stopped working after (I think) the graphics RAM developed a fault and I ran out of time to keep working on it. At the time MAME/MESS had it implemented as a standard PC clone, but I see there was a commit in 2015 that fixed it to be much closer to the actual hardware. As others have pointed out it's DOS compatible but nowhere near the IBM PC memory/IO port layout, and only a simple boot/monitor ROM instead of a full-featured BIOS.

While I can't help you with your data transfer problem, I've attached my notes from when I was disassembling the boot ROM - perhaps they will be of use to someone.
 

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You say that the drives are "360K", but in this case, that's a little misleading. Single-sided 96 tpi is "360K", even though the term isn't usually used in connection with 96 tpi drives. What drives do you have in your People? (model and make)
 
Chuck(G) said:
You say that the drives are "360K", but in this case, that's a little misleading. Single-sided 96 tpi is "360K", even though the term isn't usually used in connection with 96 tpi drives. What drives do you have in your People? (model and make)
Click to expand...

I did not mean Olympia drives are low density, these drives I mentioned were my other 5.25 inch drives. I hoped to write some extra images with ImageDisk to use with Olympia, but now have to get correct drive first. Olympia People drives are high density, but either drives or controller does not allow to write more than 640K on a single 5.25 inch floppy. Here is the close up of the Olympia drives.

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I did not remove them to check the exact model. I will do next time when I will open the computer. So far, fingers crossed, Olympia itself works flawless, all smoke tests passed, and running around 8 hours a day. And I did notice the data are actually written when transferring from my Toshiba Libretto, unfortunately only found as lost fragments with CHKDSK...
 
Woah--"high density" generally means that media and a drive uses data clocked at twice the original SA400 rate. So, a bog-standard PC "360K" drive is "low density" because it records data at a rate of 250kbps while spinning at 300 RPM. A high-density 5.25" "1.2M" drive records data at 500kbps while spinning at 360 RPM. The "360K" drive uses a track to track distance of 1/48" or 0.53mm. The "1.2M" drive uses a track to track spacing of half that of 1/96" or 0.26mm.

High density media is very different in terms of magnetic characteristics from "low density" stuff.

Note that bit density recorded is independent of track spacing. An old convention was to term 250kbps data written at 96 tpi "quad density", but I haven't seen that term in years. And it doesn't address the issue of what one calls 100 tpi drives (obsolete?).

I find it's more useful to specify the format in terms of sectors, sides and cylinders. So, 256/16/2/80 specifies a disk formatted to 16 sectors of 256 bytes on 2 sides occupying 80 cylinders = 655360 bytes or "640KiB"

A pet peeve that I have is the 3.5" "1.44MB" disk. Work it out--it isn't any of that. It's 1440 KiB but not 1.44MiB.
 
I was wondering, if anyone knows a slow speed serial file transfer program for DOS, which can send data with 300-600 baud rate, and it does have a remote install option? So far all of the programs I tried (various Laplink versions, 530, Fx, etc.) are sending bootstrap at 2400 bps, as a result, my file transfer fails on Olympia, which can reliably process the data only at 300-600 baud rate, according to my tests.

All programs fail the same - file transfer starts, Olympia can handle the speed for a few secs, then it starts to beep and file transfer stops. So far no luck finding a program with lower data transmission rate and with remote install as well...

Forgot to mention, it has to be able to run on DOS 2.11 and 256K of RAM
 
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