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TurboDos Resurrected!

new_castle_j

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 3, 2011
Messages
320
Location
Texas, USA
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?
 
Kudos on a truly landmark achievement! This and other forums are littered with posts and threads from people (including me) who developed an interest in TurboDos but then gave up in frustration because the available documentation was so scattered and incomplete.

If you ever get to writing up a step-by-step guide to getting up a TurboDos system from current resources, you will be as appreciated as that Egyptian guy who carved the Rosetta Stone.

Re your hardware - I think you probably mean Industrial Micro Systems International (IMS International) who were the greatest promoters of TurboDos multi-user systems. Or is Intercontinental Micro Systems an even rarer breed? In any case L/F Technologies is definitely a successor company to IMS International run by the same people, with focus on European markets (they had strong German links). Later they went Unix and were last heard of as Cube Systems building blade servers in Nevada.

Rick
 
To clarify, Intercontinental Micro Systems (ICM) is a different company than International Micro System (IMS). ICM was based out of Anaheim CA and IMS was in Carson City NV. These companies are very easy to confuse because they manufactured competing product lines and both specialized in TurboDos. To further muddy the waters, IMS changed their name to L/F Technologies and sometime in 1988 acquired ICM.

As for the ICM hardware I mention in my post, it was manufactured in 1985 while both companies were still separate entities.
 
Here's a couple of pictures. You can see it's a mass of ribbon cables going to all the peripherals. Only 2 cards are in the IMSAI chassis. The hard disk interfaces through the parallel port of the master processor, the RTC plugs into the parallel port of the slave. Floppy I/O requires a daughter board as well. All of these peripheral boards were referred to as "personality" boards in the manuals.

Chassis.jpg
Disk Controller.jpg
master.jpg
slave.jpg
 
I started work on the L/F Technologies machine and was able to get it to boot from floppy disk twice, it's not booting reliably so I have some bugs to track down. Anyways here are a few screenshots from one of the successful boots and a couple of commands that were run on the console.

1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg 4.jpg

One difference between TurboDos and CP/M is that there are no built in commands. When I execute a DIR, there must be a DIR.COM (8bit) or DIR.CMD (16bit) file somewhere on the disk. Every command is simply a file that gets loaded and executed. TurboDos allows file attributes to be set so that you don't have to have a command file present in every location you want to use it. For example, if I copy all of the commonly used commands to A0: (Drive A, User Area 0) and then set all files in that location with the global attribute, they will be accessible from any location on the system, very similar to defining a search path in UNIX. Having a hard disk is a huge advantage to this operating system.
 
More progress has been made on the L/F Technologies 16bit TurboDOS machine. I was able to browse the hard drive today, it's a Maxtor XT 2190. Based on the contents I saw, the system was in use up until 1990 in some kind of Real Estate office. This system has a 186 master processor with 512K of memory and 6 186 slave processors. There's lots of files regarding amortization schedules and deeds. It's got WordStar with Mail Merge and another software suite for loan servicing. All of the OS files and object files are there too, everything needed to generate and link a new OS together. I also found the PC-DOS emulator and utilities to read and write files to and from PC-DOS floppy disks. The hard disk started having trouble reading some tracks, I will have to see if I can extract what's still recoverable. It's great to find out that the processor, memory, and hard disk controller are still functional!
 
Here are some pictures of the L/F Technologies machine and a couple of screenshots of the contents of the hard disk. Does anyone recognize the filenames shown?
LF Tech1.jpg LF Tech2.jpg LF Tech3.jpg
DIR1.JPG DIR2.JPG
 
Absolutely wonderful!

I threw away my home-built HD64180-based micro with TurboDOS... :(

I have a virtual implementation that runs under simh and some people have tried it. It works.

/per

tdos.PNG
 

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Have you looked at the Turbodos documents on bitsavers under icm/ and ims/ ?

Yes, I have made myself familiar with the resources available on bitsavers. I've read all the manuals related to TurboDOS ICM and IMS there at least once. Without the bitsavers archive, I would never have gotten this far. It's really a treasure trove. Thanks Al!
 
Well done! TurboDOS is slowly coming back, slowly is the word.........

There was also a PC 8088/8086/80186 version allowing you to make a PC a part of the RS232, as opposed to buss, TurboDOS network.

I have 4 Pulsar Little Big Boards that i hope to buss network one day.... it's been on my to-do list sine 1985!
 
Any software that can be preserved is precious.

I had heard that some of the most long-lasting TurboDos systems were those used in small businesses for stock control, customer files and so on, where several users accessed common files on a central disk. The difficulty of migrating core business data out of such individually-customised systems was the only thing that stopped people jumping to newer systems.

I hope you have saved all disk contents to relocatable media..

Rick
 
Tonight I have started copying off whatever I can recover from the hard drive of the L/F Technologies machine. I was able to connect a couple of 5.25" floppy drives to the system, one I use to boot up TurboDos and the other I use to copy files onto. It's a very slow process and I wear ear plugs because the Maxtor XT2190 gives off a nasty howl. I have found that if I do a copy *.* command, the hard disk will hang after a few files and tell me it cannot read a sector. However, if I copy one file at a time, the rate of success is much greater. Once I fill up a 720K disk, I pop it into my PC and use 22disk to copy the files onto a flash drive. I've also been able to gather some clues as to what this machine was used for, attached is a screenshot of a program on the disk called LASS.CMD
LASS.jpg
 
It took all day, but I have recovered the majority of files from the failing hard drive of the L/F Technologies machine. 630 files so far, transferred to my PC 1 floppy disk at a time, just over 9 MB of data. There were many many failed attempts to copy files off the disk, but persistance paid off, by continually retrying, the disk eventually let me have the files. It also seemed to work better after the disk had been spinning for a couple of hours.

Among the programs I have discovered on the disk are Turbo Pascal (16bit), Word Star (8bit and 16bit), and New Word (16bit). However, when I launch these programs, TeraTerm displays a bunch of odd characters and things don't line up, I get enough to glean a few words off the screen here and there though. I've been told that these programs need to be configured with an overlay file. Can someone describe how the overlay file works? On the disk I see lots of files named .OVR, I'm guessing these are various overlay files for different terminals, I just don't know how to use them.

newword.jpg TurboPascal.jpg
 
The WordStar issues will be much easier to solve than TurboDos, because WordStar is very well documented and was distributed with the files needed for customisation, so long as you knew what your terminal and printer required. Documentation is widely available online - including at Bitsavers.org.

On your disks, look for the executable files WSINSTALL and WS.COM. WS ought to be the unpatched distribution of the main executable, and WSINSTALL is the interactive setup up utility. It includes usually a library of options for terminals and printers, and a patch utility for most of the locations you are likely to want to fix. If your peripherals are listed, then the OVR files are likely to be on the disk. You don't actually need an unpatched WS.COM - you can re-install any working executable to a new configuration, via WSINSTALL.

If you are using a terminal that is not listed, you need to know the proper command sequences (often escape sequences) that WordStar needs to send to the display and/or interpret from the keyboard. I spent many hours doing that for a VT100, and still don't have it perfect. But WordStar is very patch-friendly once you get the documentation. You can even change the screen messages in WSMSGS.OVR if you want. You can also patch in your own macros.

I think your NewWord may be a patched version of WordStar 3.03 - the intro screen is certainly the standard WordStar home screen, though not properly displayed.

Rick
 
Now that I have recovered all of the files from the failing Maxtor XT2190 drive, I am going to attempt to re-install TurboDOS onto a different drive, a Tandon TM362. I've been able to run the Winchester Format utility that was provided by L/F Technologies and it successfully formatted and verified the drive. I then create the TurboDOS hashed directory map and start copying files over. This is where it gets stuck, it will copy a few and then hang, sometimes I receive a bad sector error. I believe that the hard disk is good since it was tested and worked in a different system so I'm checking each setting. I have a question about formatting a winchester, the format utility asked for the usual number of heads and cylinders, but there were some other questions that I was not familiar with and couldn't find documentation on what they mean. Below is a screenshot, anybody know "on load time" "off load time" "sector offset" and "sector interleave"
Unfortunately, the spec sheet for the Tandon TM362 didn't give me any clues.

FMTWIN.jpg
 
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