AltairClone.com

I am sharing this here because no one in my household fully appreciates my vintage computing "problem". I would first like to share a victory, I just completed loading CP/M onto a 5.25" disk and booting from it with my FDC+. I am feeling pretty darned good about that.

Thank you to Mike (deramp) for the great hardware, software, videos and support. Thanks to Martin for the 88-2SIOJP, Gary for the CPU card and, specific to this milestone, thanks to "Martyn's Vintage Computing" for the video walking through the process to create a boot disk. Also thanks to everyone who contributes to keeping these computers alive.

I am now trying to get a Gotek/FlashFloppy Drive working so I can have two drives but am not having any luck yet. Any suggestions that would be appreciated. FYI, the Gotek does work on my Nabu.

mafisher wrote:I am sharing this here because no one in my household fully appreciates my vintage computing "problem".

Yeah, right there with ya.

Congratulations on your success!

A successful boot after weeks of work is a great feeling!

Congrats to you, our new friend!

And - here - we all appreciate your accomplishment. Our stories are like yours.

Think about this: Back in the 1970s, anyone and everyone that "enjoyed" a microcomputer experienced this. It was often discussed in hobbyists groups and newsletters. A city of a million people might have a small microcomputer club with half dozen to a dozen enthusiasts, and they all had to build their computers and struggled to program them. Some had kits, but even more were "homebrew" guys that made their systems from scratch. Many loaded programs from tape or by hand-entry on the front-panel, some that could afford it had disk drives. Those "lucky ones" had a "chicken and egg" problem, of how to write a BIOS and get a bootloader for it onto their floppies, starting with just raw hardware and blank media with no software on the media to boot from.

So by now having a running CP/M system, you have reached a very piquant summit!