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Business card from 1981
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Misosys Software and Documents
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Misosys is Roy Soltoff's old TRS-80 software company. Roy has been out of the business for some years, and he has given me permission to put his TRS-80 software and documentation up for free dissemination on the Web. Many thanks to Roy for his generosity.
If you can help fill the remaining gaps in this collection,
or can supply a more up-to-date version of something we do have,
please email me at
<
>.
The software is all supplied as .zip archives, with a copyright permission notice as the zipfile comment. You'll need an unzip program to use them. Within some of the .zip archives is a .dsk file. This is an emulated floppy disk file that can be used by most TRS-80 emulators. Where possible these are exact images of the original distribution disks. Other .zip archives contain only the individual files from the original distribution. You can use these with an emulator by copying the files onto an emulated disk with your emulator's "import" program or equivalent; see the FAQ. In the future I would like to include both the .dsk file and the individual files in all the archives. Also see the FAQ if you want to use the software on a real TRS-80.
The original documentation for this software was supplied only in printed form. Some has been scanned and included below, but this is a time-consuming process and there is still more to be done. Most of the scans have been OCR'ed, proofread, and reformatted with MS Word, but there are also a few that are just raw scans. The raw scans are much larger downloads and are not searchable. For some of the documentation, Roy was able to find the original word processor source files in Scripsit format, so I have included them here. I've also run these files through Scripsit to make plain text versions. The plain text Scripsit output files have a couple of special codes in them that were meant to be interpreted by a printer filter. ASCII code 0x7f (DEL) means "toggle boldface". ASCII character ~ (tilde) or ` (backquote) means "toggle boldface and print a blank space"; which character is used varies from file to file. Boldface is always to be turned off at end of line.
To view the documents that are in DjVu format, you can use the free browser plugin from LizardTech, available for Linux, Windows, Macintosh, and Solaris. Also see DjVuLibre for a suite of open-source DjVu creation and viewing tools. I used DjVuLibre to create the DjVu documents on this page. Hint: if you need DjVu creation tools for Windows, the DjVuLibre command line tools can be compiled by Cygwin. LizardTech no longer offers their complimentary DjVuSolo program for download.
To view the documents that are in Acrobat format, you can use the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe. On Unix, the open-source viewer xpdf can also be used.
Roy Soltoff holds copyright or distribution rights to the software and documentation in the list below. Roy grants free permission to everyone to download and use this software and documentation and to redistribute it to others, provided this notice is retained. All other rights are reserved. Specific exceptions apply to files marked with an asterisk (*) and are detailed within those files. Hartforth is available with the permission of Andrew Graham. LDOS/LS-DOS are available with the permission of William Schroeder.
End of copyrighted software listing.
The material here comes from a variety of sources. Much of it was supplied directly by Roy Soltoff himself. Many thanks to Roy for digging through his basement to find copies and send them to me. Some material that Roy couldn't find was supplied by other helpful people, listed below. Many thanks to them all! A few items came from my own collection. Some of the material not received directly from Roy may not have been the final version.
Art McAninch supplied much Misosys software from original distribution disks. Douglas Beattie Jr. typed in all the commented LS-DOS 6.2 source code from Volume 1 of "The Source", a yeoman effort. Chuck Todd typed in the DiskDISK manual from a hardcopy. Irwin Burton supplied four additional Misosys programs and scanned in the documentation for three of them. Mark Fishman supplied Misosys Disk Notes II-IV and 7.3, and paper copies of some LDOS/LS-DOS manual updates. Gary Shanafelt supplied a small but nice modification to Super Utility 4. TRSCROSS came from Skip May's Web page. Stuart Lory and Michael Johnston converted documents to Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. David Sampson supplied the Model 4 version of The Basic Answer.
Pete Cervasio reconstructed the source code for LS-DOS 6.3.1H by running the Misosys disassembler over all the code on the distribution disk, adding the comments from "The Source" (all three volumes), adding some comments of his own on code that was not included in "The Source", and writing some additional tools to rebuild the distribution. Amazing! Pete also typed and/or scanned in the hardcopy manuals for LDOS, RSHARD, the Filter Collection, the Misosys Disassembler, and many other items. Finally, he converted several manuals to Word 97 format, so you can make reprints that look better than the originals!
Kim Watt sent me his old Model III, a hard drive, and 656 floppy disks, most of them cataloged. Kim was one of the principals in Breeze/QSD (a.k.a. Powersoft) and the author of many popular TRS-80 programs, in particular Super Utility. Misosys bought Breeze/QSD before shutting down itself, so Roy owns the copyrights to all the old Breeze/QSD products, and many of them are distributed here as well. I am still going through Kim's disks to find material that's not already here, such as source code and documentation for some of his products. Right now you'll find a nice edition of the Super Utility 3.x manual, prepared by Pete Cervasio from the original SuperScripsit source files, as well as the SU 3.1a source code. (Kim actually did not work on SU 3.2 or 4.0 -- they were released after he left Breeze/QSD -- and the source code for these versions has been lost.)
Rich Deglin (co-author of Misosys C and several other Misosys products) has given me a pile of interesting stuff from his collection, including a complete hardcopy set of Misosys Quarterlies, hardcopy documentation for nearly every Misosys product ever released, a hardcopy of The Source, original source code for Misosys C on diskette, and a few other items. I haven't found time to do much with this material yet. It would take many hours to scan in all the hardcopy, a daunting task.
Stan Slater of Computer News 80 sent me two boxes full of Misosys and Powersoft products that he culled from CN80's stock. I've added the Mark IV Collection below, and there are a couple of Powersoft products still to go.
James Brusewitz scanned two different editions of the LDOS 5.1 manual, and Daniel Srebnick scanned the XLR8er Operator Manual.
Of course, the people who originally wrote all this software deserve the most recognition! Misosys obtained products from a variety of sources. Some were written entirely in-house, some were written with outside collaborators, and some were purchased. I don't know the history of most of the software. In many cases the original authors were credited in the released software or the documentation, so you'll find their names when you download it. The early contributors to LDOS are listed in the front of the manual, and you can also read about the early history of LDOS from my personal point of view on another of my Web pages.