12-Oct-80 10:22:00,1626;000000000000
Date: Sunday, 12 October 1980  10:22-MDT
From: Frank J. Wancho <FJW at MIT-MC>
To:   INFO-CPM at MIT-MC
cc:   FJW at MIT-MC
Subject: Sector Interleaving and other things

I visited a firm on Thursday that is heavily into using NorthStar
machines as a base for their product: a multi-user machine.  I
discovered that their OS lets you run whatever you want, such as CP/M,
but you must convert to their file format.  One of the changes
required in being able to run CP/M in that system is to change CP/M's
sector interleaving back to sequential!  Why, I asked.  Because it is
faster, I was told.  Apparently the newer disk controllers that have
come on the market since CP/M was first written take up the slack.
N*'s DOS in fact uses sequential sectors and so does the N* version of
UCSD's Pascal.

Has anyone played with CP/M BDOS from this angle and have any facts
and figures to back up either position?  I plan to try it out in a few
days myself and see what happens with my six minute assembly (which is
heavily I/O bound - it seems).

Meanwhile CP/M-86 is well on the way since it has been announced.
MP/M and CP/Net were somewhat premature in release (that's a rumor).
It still bothers me that software is released to let the users debug
it, but that must be a fact of life...

You CAN BUY the source for CP/M 1.4 from Digital Research at some
"reasonable" price.  You can also BUY the source for 2.2, but you must
be an OEM, and pay $5K for the priviledge ($10K for MP/M 1.1).

Indeed, parts of 1.4 was written in PL/M, but I am told that all of
2.0 and up is in assembler...

--Frank
14-Oct-80 12:19:00,423;000000000000
Date: Tuesday, 14 October 1980  12:19-MDT
From: Lauren at UCLA-SECURITY (Lauren Weinstein)
To:   INFO-CPM at MC
Subject: speed/fast

I highly recommend the SPEED and FAST programs to CP/M 1.4 users.
Once you have those things, you won't care about your sector 
layouts anymore.  They speed up all disk-I/O bound programs by
a factor of about 3.  They are on the user's group distribution
number 38.

--Lauren--
15-Oct-80 01:39:00,397;000000000000
Date: Wednesday, 15 October 1980  01:39-MDT
From: Frank J. Wancho <FJW at MIT-MC>
To:   INFO-CPM at MIT-MC
cc:   FJW at MIT-MC
Subject: The BSTAM Connection

Does anyone have BSTAM available?  I'd like to try a file transfer
across the net using a TIP-to-TIP connection under BSTAM.  If you
don't know how to make a TIP-to-TIP connection, don't let that stop
you from replying.  --Frank
23-Oct-80 05:04:00,300;000000000000
Date: Thursday, 23 October 1980  05:04-MDT
From: POURNE at MIT-MC (Jerry E. Pournelle)
To:   INFO-MICRO at MIT-MC, INFO-CPM at MIT-MC

Subject:INFO-MICRO Digest   V2 #46
I have the first 25 or so CPM User Group disks, plus a few of
the higher numbers.  What can I do with them (that's useful)