lisabbs

Transfer files off of your Apple Lisa with a null modem cable using your favorite terminal program (as long as it supports YMODEM file transfers).

Screenshot

{V1.0} BBS: Next, Prev, Online, Chdir, Tag, Send tagged, send All, Misc, ?

 A)  Assembler.obj
 B)  ByteDiff.obj
 C)  Changeseg.obj
 D)  Code.obj
 E)  Codesize.obj
 F)  Diff.obj
 G)  Dumpobj.obj
 H)  DumpPatch.obj
 I)  EDIT.MENUS.TEXT
 J)  Editor.obj
 K)  Filediv.obj
 L)  Filejoin.obj
 M)  find.obj
 N)  FMDATA
 O)  font.heur
 P)  font.lib
 Q)  Gxref.obj
 R)  Intrinsic.lib
 S)  IOSFplib.obj
 T)  IOSPaslib.obj

Page 1 of -SLOT2CHAN1, 0 tagged

Status

Very early release. Plenty of bugs. Transfer one file at a time only. Developed in version 1.0 of the Lisa Pascal Workshop; compatibility with later releases is unknown.

Installation

• Copy TEXT files to an installation of the Lisa Pascal Workshop, but give them all the prefix XFER/. Thus, LIBSORT.TEXT becomes XFER/LIBSORT.TEXT.
• At the Workshop command prompt, type R <XFER/LisaBBS()i. The newly compiled binary is named XFER/LisaBBS_exe.Obj.

Usage

• Connect another computer to the Lisa via a null modem cable attached to Port A. Hardware handshaking (DSR/DTR) is required; for specific cable pinouts, refer to Appendix B of the Basic Lisa Utility manual.
• Configure the "remote" computer's terminal program for 9600 BPS, 8N1, hardware handshaking, no software handshaking.
• To start LisaBBS, at the Workshop command prompt, type R XFER/LisaBBS_exe.
• The interface shown above appears simultaneously on the Lisa display and on your terminal. Press SPACE or N(ext) to cycle through the directory listing. Press T to tag or un-tag individual files, and S to transmit tagged files from the Lisa using YMODEM. (NOTE: At the moment, multi-file send seems buggy---you'll have to tag and send files one at a time. But the bug could be in my terminal program's YMODEM, who knows.)

Downloaded files are not the "raw" file bytes on disk---instead, they are tar archives created on the fly with three files inside:

• an info file, a text file containing basic Lisa filesystem file metadata (modification times and so forth). This information is derived from the Fs_Info structure returned by Lisa OS's INFO system call (think struct stat on Unix).
• a label file, containing the 128-byte user- or program-provided "label" data associated with the file.
• a data file, holding all of the data within the file itself.

These archives are sometimes called "Lisa Archives" or "lar" files in the code. The Python program lartool.py provides a handy command-line interface for accessing these file parts. For Lisa-format text files (which are not like text files as we know them today), lartool.py can convert the information in the archive to ordinary text data.

Caveats

• Multi-file YMODEM doesn't work. Tag only one file at a time, and don't even bother with "send All".
• Some YMODEM bugs may require some packets to be resent, but so far all files seem to come through just fine.
• Protected files (e.g. Pascal.obj) can't be sent, because the files themselves can't be opened (the OS won't let you do that).
• No idea what happens when you try and send a named pipe. Probably something gross. Not eager to try.
• LisaBBS will not tell you what items in its file listings are protected or named pipes.
• The code that changes the working directory has a bug in its input routine. You probably won't be able to change directories.

Potentially useful elsewhere

LIBPORT.TEXT is a handy library for configuring and opening the Lisa serial port.

LIBSORT.TEXT is a generic Quicksort implementation in Pascal.