Serious use of the Z88 - what can you actually achieve?

[Journeyman]

Hello all.

I've had my Z88 for a couple of years now, and there's much to love about it. It's a fantastic piece of design and there's much about the OS and software that's really nifty. Pipedream is a very versatile and flexible piece of software, and I've enjoyed using it. I can print nice documents using my Brother EP-44, and if I want to run off a short business letter, I'll often do this.

However, for certain tasks, the thing feels very frustrating. It seems unnecessarily difficult to transfer and convert file formats, and I've never really managed it successfully, besides getting plain text with carriage returns in all the wrong places from the Z88 to the PC. I have a stock original version of OZ, and it seems riddled with annoying practical issues in terms of file transfer etc.

Can these issues be solved or improved upon, and what can actually be achieved with the right hardware mods and software at the PC end? Can I create a Pipedream document and transfer it to a PC with formatting intact, converting it into a modern format? Can files easily be transferred from the PC to the Z88? It's such a nice machine I'd love to use it for writing on an everyday basis, but at the moment it just isn't easy enough shifting data about. I find my TRS-80 Model 100 much better for that, despite the OS being very stone-age in comparison. It seems to support data transfer so much better and I've never had any issues with it.

So...hold my hand, people. What can I actually do to make my Z88 easier to use as a machine for serious writing? Is it actually possible and viable to use it on an everyday basis to produce something that can be got into Word without too many hoops to jump through?

[1024MAK]

Well, many years ago I was very interested in a public inquiry. I wanted to try to keep up with each days sessions. I was going to read these on the train using a Psion. Because of the format that the downloaded files were in, I had to use a BASIC program (GWBASIC I think) on the PC to strip out the large number of unwanted extra spaces, remove unwanted control characters and adjust the line feed and carriage return control characters.

Microsoft Word is now a de facto standard, but it was far from the best word processor years ago. And every word processor used its own file format.

Even so called plain text files use different end of line/next line control characters on different computer systems.

There may be an existing application that can carry out a conversion.

BTW, Pipedream was also available for the PC running under MSDOS. A more modern version is here although I have no idea if it would be of any use with Z88 files. Note that this version runs under RISC OS not directly on a PC.

Mark

[okto]

I’m going to answer this point by point, bear with me.

I have a stock original version of OZ

This will set you back somewhat. 3.0, the last released version, has some bugs and general lack of convenience features that were addressed in 4.0, the last Cambridge-developed version which was never installed in production machines.

Can these issues be solved or improved upon

Yes! There is an incredible community of developers who have reverse-engineered the OZ OS and not only fixed all the bugs, but extended functionality significantly. There are more features than I can remember, so head over to the Z88 Wiki to find out all about it.
Be prepared for a bit of frustration; the documentation is a shambles, something I am trying to correct. The information is all there, it’s just non-intuitive to navigate and a lot of the images are broken.
There’s also a Telegram chat, which isn’t my fave platform and I’m going to try to push for it to be moved to Discord, the de facto standard at the moment.
The current stable release is 4.7.2, if that tells you anything about how far OZ has come.

what can actually be achieved with the right hardware mods

So much. Rakewell sells Flash and RAM storage cards that turns your Z88 into an Expanded Machine (which gives you more functionality in a bunch of the onboard apps) and allows you to run the newer versions of OZ. If you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can also replace the internal RAM and ROM to give you 512k of Flash (so OZ 4 can be loaded from the internal ROM instead of a card) and 512k of RAM in Slot 0.

software at the PC end?
Can files easily be transferred from the PC to the Z88

Yep. EazyLink 2! It’s a file transfer program for the PC (and Linux, and macOS) that allows you to browse files on the Z88 and transfer to and from, with file translation so you don’t end up with carriage returns in weird places.

Can I create a Pipedream document and transfer it to a PC with formatting intact, converting it into a modern format?

Transfer yes, as above, convert a PD doc to a modern format that retains the internal formatting, yes, but not in one operation. I haven’t personally don’t is so take with a grain of salt, but there are a couple conversion utilities that will spit out an RTF or CSV document.

It's such a nice machine I'd love to use it for writing on an everyday basis, but at the moment it just isn't easy enough shifting data about. I find my TRS-80 Model 100 much better for that, despite the OS being very stone-age in comparison. It seems to support data transfer so much better and I've never had any issues with it.

I have a Model T as well, and also love it for its dead-bang simplicity. I would love to see more mods to the firmware to bring it a little more up-to-date. Maybe longer than 6 chat filenames; rip out all the phone-dialing features from TELCO
(which actually take up most of the code for that app), add Xmodem transfer, use hardware flow control instead of XON/XOFF; remove ADRSS and SCHDL, since all they do is open a regular TEXT file (although this only saves a couple hundred bytes, since they’re actually wrappers to the TEXT code).
Oh, also! If you’re going to use your T for anything that matters, you should get a REX#. It’s a Flash Option ROM chip that gives you a bunch of extra banks of RAM you can swap in and out, lets you load and swap Option ROM software on the fly, fixes the Y2K bug, and adds Rename/Kill/Size commands in the index view. You can get info on it on either Tandy.wiki or the Slabtops Discord server, which I’ll DM you an invite to.

Is it actually possible and viable to use it on an everyday basis to produce something that can be got into Word without too many hoops to jump through?

I use mine to journal every day and write rough drafts of documents for work. I find it pretty straightforward to transfer via serial to a modern machine, but I am also a tech enthusiast so what seems like standard procedure to me could seem like a real pain in the butt to others. It will never be as simple as syncing a PalmPilot, but with a little work you can put together a functional workflow and use it as a wonderful little text-editing machine.

Let us know if you have more questions! The community is small, but it is pretty active and there is a lot of knowledge.