Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 14 Sep 1998 14:03:57 +0000 | From | Neil Conway <> | Subject | Re: NEWSFLASH! Linux ported to Commodore VIC-20!! |
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Alex Buell wrote: > > On 14 Sep 1998, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > > In all seriousness, with the processing speed of modern CPUs it > > probably would be a no-brainer to support data storage to tape. In > > fact, it really isn't very different from the "sound card modem" > > stuff (tape adds some funky failure modes that phone lines don't have, > > but that can probably be ignored. Of course, all error-correction has > > to be forward error correction, since it isn't possible to get > > feedback from the receiver. Hmm... if nothing else, this just might > > have enough hack value for someone to do it "just because".) > > If the old Spectrum, ZX81 and BBC B and many others that were around in > the early 1980s can do it, then it can be done. I remember the VAX > minicomputers had to be booted directly from tape.
Speaking as a sad git who disassembled the code in the Speccy ROM which handled tape I/O, I can confirm that it was really simple stuff. Only a couple of hundred bytes of Z80 assembler involved IIRC (it was about 15 years ago!). And of course, the Spectrum ROM is now publicly available, isn't it ?
The question I guess is: why ? :-)
Neil
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