In just a few months, while coding two products simultaneously, Barnaby produced Supersort and Wordmaster which were released in Sept of 1978 at a computer show in New York. The first two products were a word processor and a sorting program which he got Barnaby to code.
He began studying the Datapro reports on dedicated word processors and decided he wanted to do a software company. After his stint with IMSAI and after working on a banking system for Credit Suisse Rubenstein decided to start a company. Rubenstein had worked for IMSAI under his then mentor Bill Millard where he ran into superstar assembly language coder, Rob Barnaby. The brains behind it included industry pioneer Seymour Rubenstein, who much later developed a spreadsheet product called Surpass which became Quattro Pro. Under CP/M, "STAT LST:=UL1:" followed by "PIP LST:=IOBYTE.TXT".One of the most interesting stories in the history of computing surrounds the dominant word processor of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s - Wordstar.
Well, at least this much seems to work on the AltairDuino:Ĭonfigure 2SIO port 2 to Serial (pin A6/A7), 9600 baud.Ĭonnect serial terminal or printer to AD second serial port at 9600 baud.
I use AltairDuino in its raw form, just a Due with no switches and leds, one of my growing collection of little cp/m machines. (This info was first published on the rc2014 google / usenet group) I hope this info helps you setup printing. No high power processing so a cheap pi zero should be sufficient. FX85 works quite well.Īlso configuring wordstar4 for HJPLJET and sending to port 9100 of my Lexmark CS410dn will print the wordstar print.tst file with the various printing characteristics ok, this should work to any printer that supports a flavour of PCL. You may need to experiment with configuring your word-processors under cp/m for an Epson printer e.g. Many of the Epson printers, including this one, have ESC/2P embedded and hence can directly handle escape sequence input for formatting from older legacy Epson printers. My printer is an Epson XP-860 and responds to a plain ascii stream. The program serial_tcp_redirect.py is from Also a terminal program may show the ports in a clear manner. You can use the command ls /dev/tty* to see your current ports, easy to see them appear and disappear as you plug and unplug your device, just repeat the command to refresh the list.
Your serial port name may vary - on rpi likely to be /dev/ttyUSB0, but on Mac and possibly on other Linux it will vary. Replace my IP address of the printer "192.168.1.141" to match your network configuration. Use this command at the command prompt under Linux on rpi or other system, doesn't have to be linux, just make sure you have python serial support set up. I configure under cp/m with stat so that lst: points to the send serial port.
I do not have a printer with a serial port but have several network connected printers and find the following works with a serial usb connection from cp/m to my rpi and then forwarding to a network printer.
I use the rc2014 flavour of CP/M computer but think that this will apply to AltairDuino users who have configured for a second serial port. I am experimenting with printing from apps e.g. Printing directly from second serial port to a network printer. Let me repeat an earlier post so you can get too working as a redirector device: