First post

 Well I went and bought a 4p off ebay about a month ago. Way back this was my third computer I owned. My first being bought in 1980 a Model 1. I started out with that as a 16K cassette system when I was stationed at Fort Knox while serving in the Army. I expanded that with the 32k expansion interface with 4 floppy disk drives.

After that my second purchase was a Model 4 with 128K ram. I ran an old BBS system off that system for a few years. I upgraded that one to have have DSDD drives. So I went from 180K disks to 360k! That was huge back in the day.

Then one day I traded that system for a Model 4p with a friend who did not want to portable version he wanted a desktop. While I wanted the portable.  The only stipulation was that I would take out my upgraded drives and put back in my old drives and return it to stock. So I moved the DSDD drives to the 4P. This was a sweet system. It was about this time I shutdown my BBS and just was doing my computing thing. Back then if you had a computer and wanted to do something different you were also a programmer. My BBS software was written by myself all in Z80 assembler.

I did buy on closeout a 5 Meg hard drive for the 4p which was unbelievable storage for the 80's

Somewhere along the way the old 4mhz computer was abandoned and I went like everyone else into the IBM PC era.

But now I caught the nostalgic bug and after several attempts on ebay I won an auction for a reasonable amount. It came with a old floppy disk with LSDOS.  So that was a big score. People must have been sleeping as I was able to get this for the price of a turns on system. Which when they don't show this screen with the "The Floppy Disk Drive Is Not Available". I don't actually believe it turns on. Yes maybe the red light in the power switch comes on but that means nothing other then ac power is present.

So when this showed up it was  a good score. It booted the floppy but alas it was not LSDOS 6.3.1 Which can be patched to show up to year 2079. This was LSDOS 6.3.0 which the patch won't apply on, So the next time I will go over how I went to LSDOS 6.3.1 with the year patch. At least this will have a year I won't be able to outlive.

It is not in pristine condition what 35+ year old computer ever is. But it works and runs fine. Both drives can read/write/format floppies. I even found the compete source code online for LSDOS 6.3.1L and that includes everything to compile the source code under a z80 emulator. I will delve more into where I am today with this system in the next blog entry.

Thanks for following along as I explore this retro computing scene.

Jim