What do we use Bluetooth for on Altair-Duino?

[Rick Fadden]

I hope no one is bothered by my question.

I'm here ready to post my question and I just realized I should probably look in the manual.

Well... as I jumped on Google Groups: Altair-Duino, the system tried to say I haven't posted since 2020.  Wow, well I think the rule is: one can ask a dumb question once every five years.

It's not like I've been pestering you guys.

My workstation/PC doesn't have Bluetooth and I remember ordering a USB Bluetooth adapter so I could do this "thing" with my Altair-Duino.  (I think my USB Bluetooth adapter arrived about 4.95 years ago.)

What do you guys use a Bluetooth connection for?  Moving files to and from the PC or something?

Want me to go look it up?

Cheers!

[fridtjof.ma...@gmail.com]

I use bluetooth, serial and usb-serial to provide 3 serial ports for my altair-duino.

The ports are used for:

bluetooth: terminal (9600 baud, 1000 cps)

serial: modem (hayes emulator) (speed varies, usually 300, 1200 or 9600 baud)

usb-serial: cp/net transport (38400 baud, 4000 cps, as fast as floppies were "back in the day")

I don't really like the wifi modules as they do NOT properly do telnet . This may cause enormous grief when using xmodem protocol.

The bluetooth module does proper serial, so no problems with xmodem. Would bluetooth serial go faster? Maybe, but I don't

care. The "period correct" speed is ok.

-Fred

On Saturday, March 15, 2025 at 8:33:00 PM UTC-4 John Galt wrote:

it was another way you could connect to a terminal if you used putty or tera term.

you could also use it as another way to transfer files back and forth.

bluetooth i guess was replaced later with wifi as the little wifi modules started to get cheap and easy to get.

[Rick Fadden]

I just re-read Fred's reply above and he mentions a number of very interesting features of his setup.  I hope my questions are not just repeats of queries that have been made multiple times...

The "usb-serial: CP/net transport (38400 baud, 4000 cps)" -  What is that?  I have seen some sort of reference to CP/Net and it seemed like a later generation version of CP/M where a CP/M OS has been advanced to the point where it allows communication over Ethernet (possibly back in the day).  It could have emphasized allowing Telnet connections or something like this, or it could have been gaining access to external file systems over a network connection.  I suppose it could also have been using Serial ports to communicate with some other computer which hosted the Network File System.  I don't know...  are any of my guesses close?

So at this point I suppose a good engineer would go immediately to a web search, or even an AI assisted search to find out the scoop on "cp/net transport."  

One guess is that this has been discussed in great detail many times and the more experienced folks might be tired of answering the same questions repeatedly.

So what is this "cp/net transport?"  It sounds like the kind of thing I would like to set up on my Altair-Duino.

Anyone care to answer?

I also want to set up the same Bluetooth connection that Fred is using.

Another possibly naive question:  The serial port "serial: modem (hayes emulator)" that also sparks curiosity.  Is that actual use of a modem?  To dial out, or to receive a modem to modem call-in?

Or is that use of a modem protocol to transfer files from a local computer?

Thoughts?

Thanks!

[udo....@freenet.de]

Rick Fadden schrieb am Samstag, 26. April 2025 um 18:40:30 UTC+2:

One guess is that this has been discussed in great detail many times and the more experienced folks might be tired of answering the same questions repeatedly.

Correct. Read here: https://www.icl1900.co.uk/unix4fun/z80pack/cpnet/cpnet.htm 

[Richard Fadden]

Yes, I read and skimmed all of the material on CP/Net that Udo Munk cited, and interestingly I had read this same material long ago (so it all came back to me quickly) thanks to his amazing gathering of practically everything you would ever want to know in the universe of CP/M...

Udo's collection of material is phenomenally great.  A different way of putting this:  My Altair 8800 is my prized possession my favorite computer and Udo's Z80pack web page has just everything a person would want.  What I'm seeing (and I've marveled over it in years past) is just a tremendous collection of valuable information - so well organized, so impressive, I doubt I've seen any other site with CP/M or Altair related information that is as impressive.

Thanks to Udo for this, I now have everything I would want to know about CP/Net and much more.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Related Story:

If anyone here happens to be tired of replies that always match expectations (after enough years with things all being predictable this can be tiring, or boring):  here is my unusual take:

Reading vast amounts of material on CP/Net I poured over a lot of material but in the end I had this experience of being sad.  I lived/worked through these years (the years when CP/Net was being developed) and at work I experienced the whole sweep of technological progress, starting on Minicomputers (PDP-11/20, 35, 40, 45, 55) extending through networking being installed, VAX, Unix Workstations, and on [and I had used my Altair at home before all this] and I followed everything going on in personal computers, microcomputers, etc. while working on the truly big iron all through these years (dozens of cabinets of digital logic, custom special purpose computing logic for real-time flight simulation)...  

When they were developing CP/Net and the other components they were trying to create the future, but starting with 8-bit microcomputers.  The future that we all did experience, the way networking occurred - the goodness of what we experienced, the technology that really helped our productivity, developed on Unix Workstations (and computers like the VAX) that was what these 8-bit microcomputer specialists were trying to accomplish.  They made a working system and for the time, the work (I think) was really great.

But the problem is: these guys and their efforts were doomed because they were trying to do this thing with their 8-bit microcomputers.  If I worked at Digital Research at the time I would have been wholly into the cause...  but you can look back and see why the effort was sadly wasted.   During these years I had coworkers who went off to make their fortune or continue with their engineering careers in this new exciting field of small or personal microcomputers, and roughly everything these guys were off trying to do went out of business, closed down after a certain number of years.

The winners in the business were the Unix Workstation companies, and one reason was:  they adopted 32 bit microprocessors as soon as they were available and they stayed on that track with ever more powerful microprocessors becoming available, and they made maximum use of these, but at the same time they standardized on Unix and that had so much goodness included in it, Unix was the key to them being able to create our actual future.

So those who tried creating this future by writing network operating system code in 8080 Assembly language...  I feel sad because they were doomed to fail, to go out of business.  The niche was 8-bit (I personally love playing with 8-bit, with an 8080A for example) but this technology was never going to keep up with the alternative.

In contrast on an awesome Unix Workstation everyone is writing in high level languages like C, with the benefit of a stable Operating System with the world's best fundamentals (Unix was/is the best choice).

So as I see man-years worth of effort in CP/Net and the other related networking components, I'm actually seeing quite a lot of their 8080 Assembly Language to implement these components, and it is sad.

Productivity in 8080 Assembly Language is so incredibly low when compared to using a Unix Workstation of the mid to late 80's then early 90's, developing in C (and later in C++) on a machine with Memory Management, Memory Protection, Virtual Memory.

So the CP/Net system is amazing but it was doomed during the time they were writing it.   I lived in 'that other world' of so much higher productivity and I saw how fast everything developed... and it was good.

Sad.  Our 8-bit stuff is great, for a hobby, it's fun, but no one develops in that environment unless it's part of the hobby.  Modern workstations are where you work in order to maximize productivity.

So that's my story.  Seeing all of this 8080 assembly language to implement networking made me sad.  Sad for the dudes who worked on it back in the day.  They did some impressive work but they couldn't compete.  They didn't stand a chance.

Cheers!

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[udo....@freenet.de]

You would have to implement MP/M II first on the AltairDuino before you can implement a CP/Net server. MP/M requires a tick interrupt source, is there one in the machine?

What you likely can do is implement the CP/Net client on the machine, this can be done on anything already running CP/M 2, you only have to write the transport layer part, similar like a CP/M BIOS. Still you need a CP/Net server you are able to talk to, likely via serial.