WANTED: someone to transfer IBM 5110 BASIC programs to modern PC

[Christian Corti]

On Mon, 1 Dec 2008, steven stengel wrote:
> A gentleman from the East Coast contacted me to see if I can extract old 
> BASIC programs from his IBM-5110 8-inch floppy disks. I have a working 
> IBM-5120 with internal floppy drives, but the serial communications 
> option is not installed in my system.
>
> I think the best I can do is LIST the programs and photograph the screen.
>
> Any other ideas?

I have a 5110 with 5114 drive and also the Async. Communications 
Adapter. I have written a Kermit called KERM5110 so I can transfer single 
files to/from a PC. But this requires the Comms Adapter.
Along with the IBM Async. card comes a cartridge/disk with a serial port 
"driver" (I think it's called SIO8BIT). With that you can SAVE directly to 
the serial port (e.g. to a paper tape punch or to a PC in capture mode).

But I also have an 8" FDD attached to my multi media PC which handles 
FM and MFM. For this configuration I have written a DOS program to 
read/write/format/dump IBM 5110 diskettes and show/transfer individual 
files. I've put it on our FTP server, it's called ibmdisk.exe.
So if you have an FM capable FDC and an 8" drive you may choose this 
options.

BTW you need to SAVE SOURCE your 5110 BASIC programs in order to have them 
stored detokenized, i.e. in EBCDIC, e.g. SAVE "FILE1",SOURCE,D80 (or D40 
for the right drive).

> Anyone else with a serial port who can do it?

Yes, but I'm in Germany.

The simplest would be to create disk images with ImageDisk and send them 
to me in order to extract all the files in whatever format you like.

Christian

PS:
I have a working 5110 emulator that runs under X and has both APL and 
BASIC (it uses the original ROS images). I will release it as soon as I 
have cleaned up the code. This will allow you to run the BASIC programs 
and have the printer output (text only) in a file.