ECS 4500 Disks & Software

Virginal system disks seem to be absent so it is necessary to construct a couple based on my best guess of what was on them.

There seem to be two main categories of operating system: 64k and FAST.  There are different versions of both. The FAST (File Access Storage & Transfer) uses the addition 32k above 64k to improve performance, eg by providing disk buffering.

The Checklist in the documentation is quite specific about the FAST files, so a disk has been prepared based on that list.  RUN.COM could not be found.

The 64k version described in the manuals is version 8.3, but the coverage is not comprehensive.  The constructed system disk is my best guess based on what is usually on a CP/M 2.2 disk.  There are three different formatting programs.

Fresh disk images were created using a pair of goteks.  This was mainly done for the FAST 2.22 operating system.  A clean OS disk was created and the used as seed for various other disks including basic, wordstar, dbase etc.  This was done using a pair of goteks running flashfloppy.

The new disks worked fine both as images and when written to floppy media, but it was not clear what speed flashfloppy would use for writing disks.  Looking at the images in the HxC software it seemed that it was writing at 281rpm sometimes.

Just to be completely safe the images were written to floppy media on the machine and then re-imaged at 285rpm.  These disks are numbered starting at 101.

A disk index is here:

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