Lobo Systems MAX-80, Operation Manual

Page 1: ...358 SOUTH FAIRVIEWAVE GOLETA CALIFORNIA931 1 7 8051683 1576 TELEX658 482 ...

Page 2: ...ystems Inc Model I Model 111 Model 4 and TRS 80 are registered trademarks of Tandy Corporation PUBLISHED BY LOBO SYSTEMS 358 South Fairview Goleta California 93117 Copyright 1984 by Lobo Systems All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976 no part of this publication may b e reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means or ...

Page 3: ...nstructions manual may cause interference to radio communications It has been tested and found to comply with the limits for a Class A computing device persuant to Subpart J of Part 15 of FCC Rules which are designed to provide reasonable commercial environment Operation of this equipment in a residential area is likely to cause interference in which case the owner at his or her own expense will b...

Page 4: ...acking materials Lobo Systems will provide them at cost Products available through Lobo Systems but which are not manufactured by Lobo Systems carry the manufacturer s warranty only LIMITATION OF LIABILITIES The above warranty does not apply if the product has been damaged by accident abuse misuse misapplication or if the product has been subjected to unusual physical or electrical stress or has b...

Page 5: ...software is with the buyer Should the software prove defective or unsatisfactory following purchase the buyer and NOT the manufacturer distributor or retailer assumes the entire cost of all necessary modification service or repair Lobo Systems shall have no liability or responsibility t o the buyer or any other person or entity for any liability loss or damage caused or alleged t o be caused direc...

Page 6: ...MAX 80 OPERATION MANUAL LOB0 SYSTEMS VERSION 2 1 ...

Page 7: ...ODUCTION CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION s INTRO 1 standard Features of the MAX 80 INTRO 3 The MAX 80 Philosophy of Documentation INTRO 6 About This Manual INTRO 7 And If INTRO 8 Manual Overview INTRO 9 GLOSSARY INTRO 13 LOB0 SYSTEMS VERSION 2 1 ...

Page 8: ...MAX 80 OPERATION MANUAL LOB0 SYSTEMS viii CONTENTS VERSION 2 1 ...

Page 9: ...ther operating systems available for it DOSPLUSI LDOS and MULTIDOS the MAX 80 can also use programs from one of the other extremely large bases of software It includes standard all of the hardware necessary for controlling a variety of computer accessories letter quality and high speed printersr graphics plottersr telephone communications modemsr speech synthesizers scientific and engineering inst...

Page 10: ... for the MAX 80 and how to install applications software the kind you need to really things on CP M Plus This section of the manual presents overall descriptions of the MAX 80 and its standard CP M operating system It also gives a brief glossary of computer terms that are all too often bandied about without adequate definition Please note we make no claim to having the official definitions of any ...

Page 11: ...nd frequently more than double the amount of internal memory that is provided with most other microcomputerst including business microcomputers Even many of the 16 bit computers come standard with only 64K RAM Meaning Meaning that programs can be made t o run faster than they d o with just a fast microprocessor Meaning even more money saved MAXIMUM FLOPPY DISK DRIVE EXPANSION The standard MAX 80 c...

Page 12: ...nchesters MAXIMUM COMMUNICATIONS Two RS 232C serial ports with independent baud rates are standard on the MAX 80 as is a I Centronics compatible parallel printer port These three ports allow maximum interfacing to most printers plotters modems and speech synthesizers A computer specializes in communications Cars specialize in transportationr houses specialize in shelter governments specialize in t...

Page 13: ...disk drives are compatible has been plugged in the MAX 80 is ready to run any of the variety of operating systems set up for it including CP M Plusr DOSPLUS LDOSr and MULTIDOS YOU won t have to worry about multiple hardware manufacturers or multiple hardware warranties There is just one hardware warranty the Lobo Systems one year all parts all labor warranty We could not afford to warrant the MAX ...

Page 14: ...either expect or intend t o make a lot of money by discovering some special means of doing something and then keeping it secret so that everyone has t o come t o us in order be able t o use it The MAX 80 is no secret It uses high technology hardware and high quality software but the techniques and knowledge involved are not privy t o us Our income from the MAX comes because it is a genuinely good ...

Page 15: ... from a 5 or 10 Megabyte Winchester drive Plus connections to parallel printers And to serial devices more printers or modems And to miscellaneous unknown controllers Plus total reconfigurability of the characters put up on the video screen And reconfigurability of the keyboard And 12 function keys in CP M My word even the cursor is changeable Describe all that will you Well we tried And all these...

Page 16: ...ings up the right way the first time Take your time follow the procedures in this manual carefully and you will find that your MAX 80 will be up and running in very little time AND IF However if you have read and followed the instructions in this manual and still have questions or problems then call Lobo s Technical Information Office at 8 0 5 683 1576 Our technical support staff is happy to assis...

Page 17: ...up manual is the only one of the manuals that you will have t o read Eventually the Technical Reference Manual may become a necessity for some future project but that will be some time after you have mastered the other operating system You can now turn to the respective operating system manual CP M Startup Manual Once your MAX 80 hardware is set up you can begin with the operating system This manu...

Page 18: ...for a program they might for instance want to demonstrate that even with an arbitrary starting point you always get the same result But there is no way to generate a random seed except by one s own guesswork which is not very random Lobo s Pseudo Random Number Generator won t generate a truly random number but it will generate one that is pretty close it certainly is a lot better than guesswork An...

Page 19: ...are described in most modern logic design reference manuals The System Programming section describes in detail all of the dedicated hardware addresses in the MAX With this information one could install a complete operating system on the computer in fact many have been already All That You do not have to read everything in this manual in order to be able to run the MAX 80 It is a large manual becau...

Page 20: ...MAX 80 OPERATION MANUAL LOB0 SYSTEMS INTRODUCTION VERSION 2 1 ...

Page 21: ...ed in the Xerox 5 1 4 inch CP M format or the standard CP M single sided single density 8 inch diskette format In addition with the other operating systems available for the MAXI you will be able t o use most of the applications programs which run on the TRS 80 Models I and 111 BACK UP T o make copies of T o back up a floppy diskette or a hard disk is t o duplicate the contents of the disk This is...

Page 22: ...ost quite a bit more in long distance phone bills and in aggravation since many people can read faster than that The 202 modems have largely been replaced the the 212 modems since they re nearly the same price and the latter can communicate with a greater variety of other modems BIOS Basic Input Output System The part of CP M which is created by the hardware manufacturer for a particular configura...

Page 23: ...or the operating system being used will appear The term boot by the way comes from some jargon of yesteryear lifting oneself up by one s own bootstraps Fortunately starting up your MAX is a little easier than that BOOT DRIVE SELECT SWITCH This switch is accessible from the rear of the MAX 80 and is used t o designate the drive that the MAX 80 will expect t o be the permanent boot drive The switch ...

Page 24: ... matrix that is 8 pixels wide and 8 pixels tall 64 of the characters are made up of matrices that are 8 pixels wide and up t o 16 pixels tall T o understand what user defineable characters means see the definition of Graphics Resolution be low COMMUNICATIONS The RS 232 serial and the Centronics type parallel interface ports are often called communications ports because they usually are used t o in...

Page 25: ...system is so popular in the microcomputer industry that it has become known as a standard microcompter operating system Not all microcomputers are capable of supporting CP M but many do The widespread use of CP M has encouraged the development of impressive quantities of application software which run under CP M The MAX 80 is sold with Version 3 of Digital Research s CP M and can support all corre...

Page 26: ... translating what you tell the computer into those 1 s and 0 s and back again when you want the answers t o your problems Thus you need both hardware and software t o collect analyze and disseminate data with a computer DATABASE A structured collection of data that is kept on disk and which is accessible and updatable by applications programs The database of a business is the primary factor in how...

Page 27: ...ot disk DISK SYSTEM Your MAX 80 is a disk system It requires a disk drive for operation It supports a number of popular disk operating systems CP M DOSPLUS LDOS and MULTIDOS The diskette or disktettes that contain the operating system are called the system diskettes When the machine is booted the operating system on the diskette in the boot drive is loaded into memory and run The terms disk system...

Page 28: ...taken t o find specific data for the fixed disk is very fast High access speed coupled with very large storage capacities make fixed disks desirable for business systems Businesses usually require that very large data bases be readily accessible t o application programs FIXED MEDIA The media in a fixed disk drive Unlike the media in a flexible disk driver these media are permanent They are usually...

Page 29: ...CROPROCESSOR see Processor MEGAHERTZ MHz One million cycles per second The Z80B in the MAX 80 processes at 5 MHz or 5 million cycles per second MODEM Short for Modulator DEModulator A device that connects the MAX to a telephone line so that messages files etc can be sent or received over the telephone network For various types of modems see the definition of Bell above MULTIDOS TRS 80 compatible o...

Page 30: ...ctors 34 pin for the 3 and 5 inch drives and for the parallel printer 40 pin for the expansion bus and 50 pin for t h e 8 inch and Winchester drives The RS 232C connectors each require a DB25 25 pin connector and the video requires a phono plug T h e technical details of all of these ports are given in the Hardware Part of the Technical Reference Manual PROCESSOR T h e device located in a computer...

Page 31: ...80 has the capability of displaying 640 pixels horizontally and 225 pixels vertically and allows a great degree of control over the images you can create on your screen There are 192 character shapes which the MAX 80 is capable of displaying at one time You may re define any or all of these character shapes Although you can not independently control each dot pixel of light a method of graphics res...

Page 32: ...t cable to use is the molded one that already has all its lines in place and changing the lines in the MAX 80 The last method has been made quite easy because the MAX 80 includes two removable headers one for each serial port whose lines may be moved with a minimum of effort See the description in the Hardware Part of the Technical Reference Manual INTERFACE In the computer industry the word inter...

Page 33: ... is installed in it the ROM is also called Firmware ROMs are chips which contain programs that are executed by a computer Usually the ROMs are activated upon boot up of the system and their code is placed into an area of memory For instance the MAX 80 contains a boot ROM with code that executes every time the MAX 80 is powered up or the reset button is pressed This code is placed into a particular...

Page 34: ...that contain many rows and columns of calculationst but today have much wider uses engineering and scientific calculationsr modeling in production management etc They are also called Calcs Calcsheets Financial Modelers etc SPEECH SYNTHESIZER A device for turning computer signals from either a parallel or serial port into noise Sometimes the noise even sounds like something recognizable But never b...

Page 35: ... two bytes 16 bits in succession In the MAX 80 s Z 80B microprocessor each address is given by a Word The term is still used in the normal way when it comes to human words WORD PROCESSOR A program for writing editing rewriting and deleting the whole mess Since the primary reason for computers is communication word processors are by far the most popular programs purchased for computers especially f...

Page 36: ...WAX 80 OPERATION MANUAL L O B 0 SYSTEMS GLOSSARY VERSION 2 1 ...