Indus GT with CPM Chip - Rarity?

[Doctorx]

Really just what the title says.. I had an Indus in the mid 90’s that had the chip and I never took the time to play with CPM.. Since selling that guy I have never seen another one - not on ebay, not here, nowhere.. 

 

My guess is they are very rare? Was that an expensive option?

[_The Doctor__]

You can buy the memory add on dirt cheap today, anything was 'expensive' back then. You either built it yourself, or you had your pockets emptied

[+videofx]

I just order ordered 2 of the CP/M RAM upgrades. 10 euros each

[Peri Noid]

SRAM Charger from @tf_hh does the same thing. And costs €8 (plus shipping).

[+slx]

We never saw the Indus GT this side of the Atlantic but I‘d suppose the RAM upgrade was rather rare as it must have been expensive (on top of a not too cheap drive), few people would need 40-column CP/M and even the buffering would have been attractive only for those routinely using software with heavy disc access. 

[_The Doctor__]

Um 80 column CP/M display on Atari since forever....

[Doctorx]

I was unaware it was simply a memory upgrade.. so the disk drive itself had a CPM processor in it regardless? My assumption was the purchase was for the processr addon..

 

learn something new every day at atari age!

[+Stephen]

The Indus drives used a common Z80 processor in it, so CP/M was just able to run on it.

[+Larry]

Is there any compelling CP/M app (assuming one has a win pc or mac)? 

[+Stephen]

I only ever used the Z80 CP/M stuff.  I will say I was most impressed with the Microsoft series of programming languages.  You could mix them in a large project.  I would venture to say that WordStar was the most well known / used app, but @flashjazzcat awesome Last Word has far surpassed that.  I've never ran across anything on CP/M that could access more than 64kB so that does rather limit it.

[oracle_jedi]

On 3/2/2023 at 4:40 PM, Doctorx said:

Really just what the title says.. I had an Indus in the mid 90’s that had the chip and I never took the time to play with CPM.. Since selling that guy I have never seen another one - not on ebay, not here, nowhere.. 

 

My guess is they are very rare? Was that an expensive option?

Prior to @tregare recreating them back in 2014, I had never seen a real one in the wild.  I think the original Indus ones are super rare.

 

That said, I don't know if anyone would want an original one badly enough to pay a premium for it.   The original is large, and I would expect generated more heat.   Functionally it is identical to the newer versions which are smaller, use less power and generate less heat.

 

I have enjoyed exploring CP/M on the Atari with the Indus GT.  Playing Zork in 80-column mode (albeit software 80) was interesting, although slow.  Borland Turbo Pascal was a revelation.  I programmed TP on a DOS machine BITD but never realized Borland released an almost identical package for CP/M.

 

Wordstar reminds me how far Word Processors have come.

 

 

 

 

[+slx]

5 hours ago, Stephen said:

  I've never ran across anything on CP/M that could access more than 64kB so that does rather limit it.

The Amstrad PCW8256 had 256K and IIRC used it as a Ramdisk or even buffer for its Locoscript word processor (which I liked very much for its clever command key system but which probably wouldn‘t run on the Atari as it used more than 80x25). 

[Atari8guy]

On 3/5/2023 at 8:22 AM, Larry said:

Is there any compelling CP/M app (assuming one has a win pc or mac)? 

I'd rate SuperCalc and Microsoft's Multiplan as a bit better than the native A8 spreadsheets, though SynCalc on the A8 is good, it's not 80 columns.

 

[JR>]

I bought an Indus Drive with the original board in it years ago. It's the only one I've ever seen or heard of, so I would say they were fairly rare.