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SubjectRe: NEWSFLASH! Linux ported to Commodore VIC-20!!
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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