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From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew)
Newsgroups: net.micro.apple
Subject: Franklin FDOS
Message-ID: <209@neoucom.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 6-Jun-86 14:36:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: neoucom.209
Posted: Fri Jun  6 14:36:17 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Jun-86 08:12:09 EDT
Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Lines: 32
Keywords: FDOS, Ace1000, Apple 2

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Hello,
	Has anyone worked with Franklin's FDOS?  It is fairly
compatible with DOS 3.2 in that the IOB structure is the same, and
the well-known entry points are are at the same addresses.  We have
a couple of old Franklin 1000s around the Lab.-- they are pretty
simailar to the Apple II version 7 motherboard, except that they
sport 64K of ram on the board  (64K chips with upper 16K mapped
into slot 0, and softswitch protocol) and an LSI disk control I.C.
stuck on the motherboard.

	I was very impressed with FDOS, as it accomplished a BLOAD
in 2 sec. that took 30 sec. in DOS 3.3.  I suspect that FDOS does a
full track(s) read, and then picks up needed sectors from RAM.
Also, it might use buffering similar to ProDOS.

	The problem is that FDOS works o.k. on an Apple with 64K of
memory for reading, but not writing to disk.  FDOS wipes out the
catalog when attempting a SAVE/BSAVE on an Apple.  I wonder if the
Franklin LSI controller chip has something magic inside that is
different?

	Anybody have any experiences or care to comment?  The
Ace-1000 really was't a bad knock-off of an Apple, provided that
you got one that didn't have the ROM-less soft-boot version.  We
had a soft-boot that never would actually boot, so we de-kludged it
and put copies of the original ROMs back in, and all was fine.

Bill
NEOUCOM
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