[Coco] Looking for rma or r63 source.

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 06 December 2019 15:25:03 Stephen Fischer wrote:

> I think that we need to get as suspicious of people that declare they
> have the original copy of "The Bible" written by "GOD".
>
> Provenance is a pivotal vernacular in the art world.
>
>  From the French word, provenir, meaning “to come from,” it proves the
> history of ownership of a specific piece of art. Provenance is the
> documentation that authenticates a particular art piece.
>
> It's all in the "Provenance" which we don't have.
>
> There has been so very much disassembly of CoCo programs and comments
> added over the years going way back past the memory of some people
> that they think they have the original and not a comments added
> disassembly of the original program.
>
> I am not declaring that I can tell the difference, it would take the
> word of someone who at least worked at Microware. That is, word of
> someone who left the very restricted 6809 world to earn a living on
> 68000 systems like K____ D______ who worked on the unreleased version
> of OS-9.
>
> SHF

Stephen: (and anybody else that gives a fat rats ass)  Based on what I 
found in K-D's newest "Christmas Present" rbf.mn when I first converted 
rbf.mn to run on the 6309, the most educated opinion I can come to was 
that the Christmas Present rbf.mn was intentionally poisoned to prevent 
us from ever using a hard drive of more than 131 megabytes.

I'm the one who put the multiple cluster code BACK into rbf.mn at that 
time, so now we can use drives up to 4GB. I got the majority of that 
code from the original level 1.000000 rbf.mn, so it was there originally 
from MicroWare, made a few minor tweaks as I was testing it before 
anyone but me ever saw it, then someone else with a bigger machine, an 
Apple I suspect, so bigger buffers, ( as I was often working in the last 
10 bytes of tsedits 56k buffer while doing that on my coco3 ) did it so 
it was a conditional, either r68 or r63 assembly, and thats how rbf.mn 
is to this day except the header comments have been edited to hide all 
those now very old details.

\Somewhat off topic.

I tried to add an "archive this" bit in rbf.mn ed 34, and mentioned at 
the time that a larger default file allocation, like changing the 8 to a 
$20 was good insurance against useing up the FD sectors list of 
segments, but no one paid any attention until it bit the then head 
developer and all hell broke loose.

I still think that bit was a good idea, but should also have coded a one 
less segment maximum segment count into rbf.mn thus protecting the last 
5 byte block.  That 5 bytes would have opened up several other 
possibilities I've still not thought of. Ownership controls for up to 
255 users comes to mind.  And would only use 1 byte of the 5.

By that bit you could have backed up only that which had been changed 
since the last backup. But going to a $20 segment allocation size would 
have made zero diff in the actual size of a file since os9 gives back 
all sectors not used at file closing time. But it would have divided the 
used segment count by 4, and insured that the bug the bit I borrowed for 
the "archive me" flag would probably never occur in practice. But I've 
lost my commit perms, so that will never happen now.

\end off topic

My estimation of K-D's intentions toward the community as a whole went 
several rungs down the ladder with that discovery.  If you have his 
book, take carefull note that rbf.mn's capability in that realm was 
moderately well scrubbed.

You will never convince me that was a mistake. That was intentional. To 
me the puzzle wasn't that fact, but the motivation for it is still the 
unsolved puzzle in my mind.

The singular insult to me is that there is no mention of any of that in 
the rbf.mn headers, giving no credit to me for having done that FIRST.

I'd like to see that fixed, giving credit to me for that, but at 85, I'm 
not convinced it will happen in my remaining time here. And it has left 
a bad taste in my mouth for 3 decades now.

Like Paul Harvey was fond of saying, "and now you know the rest of the 
story."  Make of it what you want.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>