OSI-tems Vol IV

[bxdanny]

Here are issues 3 and 4 of Volume IV. I don't have issues 1 and 2, but based on the Treasurer's Report on numbered page 3 (PDF page 5) of #3, I believe they were for February and March, with no January issue once again. (And I might have been the Treasurer who gave that report.)

These issues were apparently printed on paper whose top edge was not perfectly straight. The diagonal line seen at the upper right of odd-numbered pages in issue 3, and of several pages in issue 4, is the top edge of the physical paper. (Issue 3 was printed double-sided, and issue 4 was printed single-sided.)

Issue 4 contains the first ever mentions (on numbered pages 1 and 2, PDF pages 3 and 4) of the then-being-planned OSUNY BBS. And yes, it names the person who will be running it. He has generally not wanted his identity to be publicly known, so please don't post it on more general-interest sites. I hope that, by this point in time, he will not mind that these newsletters mentioning him are being reprinted on this forum. And yes, he is the "Allen" who that handwritten page of mine accompanying the SEB-3 board and its driver disk was addressed to. As stated in issue 4, he originally planned to run the BBS on a C8P, and I had heard that he wanted the system to have an 80-column display, so I thought he might use that board in it. But by the time I brought it to a meeting to give to him, he had decided to go with a serial CP/M system instead. Initial testing was done on a C3-S1, which I helped carry into his house, but I think that by the time it went online, he had already switched to a non-OSI system. The SEB-3 was instead returned to a representative from Grafix, who gave it to someone on Staten Island, who eventually sent it to the other Allen, the one Billdrom got it from.

[bxdanny]

Here are issues 6 and 7 of OSI-tems Volume IV (although both misstate the volume number, #6 in two different ways). I don't have #5.

Issue 7 contains my first new contribution in quite a while, and there are several typos in it, such as GOSUN content instead of GOSUB context, immediate node instead of mode, and JMP $ABC3 instead of the JMP $A8C3 [in the comments field; the actual code has it right]. It was typed on my father's 1930s-vintage (?) IBM Electromatic typewriter, which was the first generation of electric typewriter. Definitely without any correcting feature. There's also an error of fact in the first sentence: I know that neither PET nor Applesoft BASIC responded to null input by dropping into immediate mode. I'm sure it wasn't a response unique to OSI, but I don't know what other systems had it. KIM/SYM/AIM versions of BASIC? The original Altair BASIC (almost certainly)?

[bxdanny]

Here are issues 8 and 9 of Volume IV.

Or at least that is what I am calling them. The November issue (which i am calling #9) calls itself #8. That could simply be a mistake (it's happened before). Or it's possible that there wasn't actually an issue #5 for June that I am missing, and that the July issue incorrectly called itself #6, when it should have been #5. [The August issue, which I called #7, conspicuously lacks an issue number. The October issue (with the yellow cover reprinting an old Altair ad) does also, except for the obviously wrong "NO.3" which seems to be a relic of one-time plans to use that cover for the April issue.]

Speaking of that yellow cover, there is a yellow back cover as well, and I scanned and included the inside face of it, even though it appears blank. There are very faint impressions of what looks kind of like text on it, which don't seem to match what is on the page immediately preceding it. Just maybe, someone can apply some kind of image processing to the page, to see if anything can be recovered from it. Probably not. [Edit: it turns out what I was seeing there was actually a watermark in the paper which reads "Mountain Stream - 100% Recycled Content". But rather than a dash, there is a little drawing of mountains and a stream. At one point, I thought the stream looked like a snake, and the mountains like one of OSI's "tank" characters.] And contrary to the table of contents for that issue, Mike Cohen's piece on the OS-65D 3.3 keyboard routine occupies only page 17, while pages 18 and 19 are actually a separate piece, a GO program by John Kula.