Reading DEC 5 1/4" floppy disc archive

[John_BS]

Can anyone please point me to a person or organisation who might be able to assist in extracting word-processor files from 1980's DEC Rainbow floppies? I believe they're Wordmarc originated.

Thanks
John

[TonyDuell]

The Rainbow floppy drive was an RX50, which is single-sided, 80 cylinder. Normal MFM data encoding. The data capacity was thus around 360KBytes.

Physically, a PC 1.2MByte drive should be able to read the disks although you would obviously need special software. I am NOT offering to do it.

[John_BS]

Thanks for the info. I have the Wordmarc install discs, (and Winchester drive utilities) so the easiest solution would seem to be to find someone with a working Rainbow?
John

[paulsherwin]

If you can find somebody with a Rainbow, you should be able to transfer the files to a more modern computer using Kermit. There are Rainbow versions for both MS-DOS and CP/M86 - can't remember if there's one for CP/M. The DOS version (MS-Kermit) is likely to be the best developed.

[Dave Moll]

I'm pretty sure there was a CP/M version of Kermit developed, as I seem to recall using it to transfer Amstrad PCW files to PC many years ago.

[JohnBHanson]

http://www.dbit.com/putr/ is a useful program for reading rx50 disks on a 1.2MByte drive

[paulsherwin]

Originally Posted by Dave Moll

I'm pretty sure there was a CP/M version of Kermit developed, as I seem to recall using it to transfer Amstrad PCW files to PC many years ago.

There was certainly a CP/M version, but I can't remember if it would run on the Rainbow - they were rather an odd design.

[G6Tanuki]

If you can get a version PC [DOS or Windows] Kermit to listen via a cable to the Rainbow's serial-port [at a suitably low speed] you can do some fun things.

CP/M has a function called pip - it can be used to copy the contents of a CP/M file to another 'device' such as a serial port.

Set up the receiving Kermit on a PC connected to the serial-port, using the command:

log session c:\session.log

then use the CP/M 'pip' command to send the file to the serial port [which might be defined as TTY: or something].

If you set the speeds of the serial-port on both the sending and receiving ends suitably-low you can get away with not needing to bother with XON-XOFF or CTS/RTS flow-control.

[Phil__G]

Over on the Nascom group are a few Gemini Multi Format Bios users - maybe you could ask there?

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

There was certainly a CP/M version, but I can't remember if it would run on the Rainbow - they were rather an odd design.

The Rainbow is not necessarily CP/M. There are 2 processors on the mainboard, a Z80 and an 8088. It can run CP/M-80 (what most people call 'CP/M') on the Z80 or an IBM-PC-Incompatible version of MS-DOS on the 8088.

I would be very suprised if there was no version of kermit for this machine though.

Alternatively as the printer port is an RS232 port (not Centronics parallel) you could 'print' the files from the word processor software and capture what comes out of that port.

[paulsherwin]

As I said upthread, there are certainly versions for the 8088 and I think the CP/M version will run on the Z80, but I haven't seen a Rainbow for 30 years and can't remember without checking.

[John_BS]

The Rainbow seems to have been very well engineered, and could boot in at least a couple of different systems?


https://youtu.be/qPHFnFKulFE?feature=shared

[Nick_B333]

Assuming access to a 5.25" 80 track drive they could probably be read with the Greaseweazle tool, then the subsequent image files accessed with cpmtools.

There is a disk definition for Rainbow in cpmtools.

# PRO CP/M RZ50 DZ format (Perhaps only 79 tracks should be used?)
diskdef dec_pro
  seclen 512
  tracks 80
  sectrk 10
  blocksize 2048
  maxdir 128
  skew 2
  boottrk 2
  os 2.2
end