Saturday, January 30, 2016

Minor DOS Disaster

Last night, I was putting the final touches on my Applesoft BASIC HTTP parser to act as a webserver when I had a pretty big set-back. I was getting pretty good working in DOS 3.3 and saving my BASIC programs regularly. I previously saved a small BASIC program to initialize the settings on the Apple SSC to communicate with the USR-WIF232. That way, I could just run the program and all of the settings would be restored after a <ctrl>-<reset>. Unfortunately, I named it INITSSC. The DOS command to initialize a disk is INIT. (I'm sure you can see where this is going.) Anyway, instead of typing RUN INITSSC I mistakenly just typed INITSSC (following the UNIX convention), and as I was keying back to correct my mistake, I accidentally hit the <Enter> key. WHAMO! Disk grinding and spinning, no response from the keyboard... It took me a few minutes to figure out what had just happened. My disk was initialized with no DOS on it. So I lost my programs, and I can't even run DOS, and that was the only floppy I have available.

The good news is that I was experimenting with dumping out the BASIC listing of my web server program as part of my webpage. So, I have all but a few lines in my terminal program's buffer. I just have to copy and paste it back to the Apple IIe and work around not having a usable disk.

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