TRS-80 DOS - NEWDOS and NEWDOS+ (Apparat)

This page is about Apparat's first operating system: NEWDOS (also called NEWDOS 2.1, after the TRSDOS version it was built on) and NEWDOS+, the same DOS sold with a disk of utilities. NEWDOS/80, NEWDOS/86 and NEWDOS/90 have their own page, NEWDOS/80.

NEWDOS was the first replacement operating system to fix TRSDOS 2.1, the Model I DOS that Radio Shack shipped in 1978 and early 1979. It kept the TRSDOS disk format and most of its code, so programs and files moved freely between the two systems. On top of that it fixed the bugs and added features that users wanted: DOS commands from BASIC, renumbering, a variable cross reference, screen printing and keyboard debounce. With the utilities of NEWDOS+, and above all SUPERZAP, it became the standard DOS for serious Model I users in 1979 and 1980.

From APRDOS to Apparat

Harv Pennington, author of TRS-80 Disk and Other Mysteries, described the early days in the March 1981 80 Microcomputing. In 1978 and 1979, he wrote, TRSDOS 2.1 was all there was, and its error messages were as common as its prompts. Then "a couple of guys from Colorado" came along with something called NEWDOS. They wrote it only to make their own machines work. They had the same TRSDOS problems as everyone else, and the skill to fix them. Pennington said the DOS was first known as APRDOS and that you could not buy it: you could only get a copy from someone who already had one. Demand for a DOS that worked, he said, is what forced Apparat to form, "quite literally an accident."

A fuller account came from Apparat itself, through A. C. McFarling's "MicroNet Special," reprinted with Apparat's permission in the April 1981 80 Users of Houston News. The author was a professional who wrote systems for large mainframes and took up the TRS-80 on the side. He was dissatisfied with TRSDOS and with the tape-only Radio Shack Editor/Assembler, so he corrected both for his own use. The president of the new company Apparat then persuaded him, "after much pleading," to let Apparat release his enhanced TRSDOS. It was cleaned up, some of its unusual conventions were changed back to the usual ones, a display crediting the original code to Randolph Cook was added, and documentation was written. McFarling said that documentation was a compilation of the author's handwritten notes to himself. He also said that until NEWDOS 2.1 carried the credit, almost no one knew who had written TRSDOS. Apparat kept the author's name out of print: he wanted to spend his time writing code, not answering the telephone.

1979: NEWDOS and NEWDOS+

According to 80 Microcomputing (March 1981), Apparat produced NEWDOS around January 1979. The first notices in the magazines appeared that spring. The May/June 1979 80-U.S. Journal called NEWDOS+ "the most sensational item around here lately." It listed the NEWDOS part (directory from BASIC, renumber, a reference list of variables, automatic key debounce, and a screen print by holding down J, K and L) and the "PLUS" part (DIRCHECK, DISASSEM, EDTASM with disk I/O, Level I in Level II, LMOFFSET and SUPERZAP). Miller Microcomputer Services of Natick, Massachusetts, sold NEWDOS for $49.95 and NEWDOS+ for $99.00.

T. Dettman's review in the July/August 1979 80-U.S. Journal printed a directory of a disk labeled NEWDOS+ -- 03/15/79, so the package existed by mid-March 1979. Dettman called NEWDOS "essentially the same as DOS 2.1" with a large number of improvements. Some of the changes made it incompatible with TRSDOS 2.1 system modules, so you had to boot from the NEWDOS disk, not just swap disks. His verdict was that NEWDOS+ "may well become the 'standard' TRS80 DOS." Percom Data Company's 1979 news release offered NEWDOS+ only to owners of TRSDOS 2.1 and the Editor/Assembler. It came with 32 pages of documentation and was modular, so unused modules could be deleted from a backup to free disk space.

Radio Shack's own fixes came over the same months: TRSDOS 2.2 in mid-1979 and 2.3 in November 1979 (see the TRSDOS page). Pennington thought TRSDOS 2.2 a huge improvement over 2.1. He also offered the opinion that many of its improvements were "poor 'implementations' of NEWDOS 2.1."

The Copyright Question

NEWDOS was Radio Shack's code with Apparat's changes, and that raised questions from the start. Jake Commander asked them in "DOS for the 80" (80 Microcomputing, March 1981): would Radio Shack sue, after all it was their DOS, and would Microsoft? He said Apparat survived by requiring buyers to own TRSDOS, which held the only documentation for most of the system, so no one lost royalties. NEWDOS+ did the same with the Editor/Assembler: Apparat told buyers in writing that they had to buy Radio Shack's Editor/Assembler to use the modified one.

Randy Cook, who wrote TRSDOS 2.0 and 2.1, saw it differently. In "Randy Cook and the Thorny Path that Began with TRSDOS 2.0" (80 Microcomputing, March 1981) he said that NEWDOS "was version 2.1 TRSDOS plus a few patches" and had not been reassembled. He still wanted royalties from Apparat and claimed the copyright on TRSDOS "and all its derivative DOSs." As proof, he suggested booting NEWDOS, typing BOOT/SYS.WHO, and holding down the 2 and 6 keys: his copyright message would appear, beginning "This operating system was designed by and is the sole property of Randy Cook." On TRSDOS 2.3 the same keystrokes bring up a Tandy copyright message instead. Apparat's general manager, Edward Krahmer, said the company had left Cook's copyright in on purpose so people would know about the original product. He said Apparat had only supplied "patches and enhancements" to TRSDOS, had never marketed an operating system, had avoided selling to anyone who did not own TRSDOS, and had never had any contact with Cook.

Paul Wiener returned to the subject in the May 1982 80 Micro. He thought Apparat had "greatly contributed to the TRS-80's success" by making a flaky system reliable, but that the copy-enhance-don't-document approach had done Microsoft an injustice with the Editor/Assembler. Commander noted that NEWDOS/80 was a rewrite containing only Apparat's own code. The Apparat account says the same.

1980: Revisions, and NEWDOS/80

Apparat revised NEWDOS+ during 1979 and 1980. The Sydney 8th Bit Newsletter of October 1980 compared directories of an "original" NEWDOS+ dated 12/12/79 and a current one labeled NEWDOS 02/27/80. The main difference was SUPERZAP 3.0: the old disk had the BASIC SUPERZAP/BAS (55 sectors) and the new one a machine language SUPERZAP (65 sectors). BASIC1/CMD was renamed LEVEL1/CMD, and there were a number of smaller changes. Pitt St. Microcomputers, which sold NEWDOS in Sydney, suggested that owners send in their disks for a free update. Pennington's book called it "NEW DOS 2.1" and said the current release had no known bugs, corrected every known error in TRSDOS 2.1, and made "over 200 additions, corrections, and enhancements to TRSDOS."

In the spring of 1980 Apparat announced NEWDOS/80 at $149. H&E Computronics' advertisement said it was "not meant to replace the present version of NEWDOS 2.1 which satisfies most users." It was an upward enhancement, compatible with NEWDOS 2.1 and TRSDOS 2.3, and came with "all Apparat 2.1 utilities." NEWDOS 2.1 owners got a trade-in allowance: they sent the serial number of their NEWDOS 2.1 diskette, the price they paid and where they bought it, and in most cases that amount came off the price of NEWDOS/80 (80 Microcomputing, May 1980). The McFarling account dates NEWDOS/80's release to June 18, 1980. It was written by the same person, but this time it was entirely original code.

After NEWDOS/80

NEWDOS 2.1 did not disappear at once. Pete Carr wrote in the January/February 1981 80-U.S. Journal that it "quickly became the standard system for serious disk TRS-80 users" and still was a great system. The Creative Computing reviewer of LDOS in September 1981 advised anyone who only ran programs written by others to use NewDOS rather than NEWDOS/80, because it was faster, easier to learn and more compatible. Stephen Kimmel, in the same issue, said that if all you wanted was the utilities and freedom from TRSDOS's deficiencies, "then what you want is NewDOS+." But Apparat had moved on. The Alternate Source's Between the Issues reported in 1981 that "support for Newdos 2.1 both from the dealers and the company is dead," though it noted that several NEWDOS 2.1 users were still around and getting along fine.

In Britain, Molimerx was still supplying NEWDOS+ in its 1984 catalogue. It called NEWDOS+ "the first of the DOS's which worked" and said the four free utilities had first been included as a sales promotion and kept ever since. 80 Micro's August 1987 list of "TRS-80 DOSes we have known" included plain "Newdos" alongside NEWDOS/80 2.0.

Apparat did not number NEWDOS releases the way Radio Shack numbered TRSDOS. The DOS was generally called NEWDOS 2.1 after its TRSDOS base, and disks were identified by the name and date on the boot screen and in the directory. What the magazines record:

Copies of NEWDOS 2.1, NEWDOS 3.0 and NEWDOS+ 2.1, 2.2 and 3.0 survive. The magazines checked for this page give no separate history for a NEWDOS+ 2.2.

Dettman's July/August 1979 review listed the major changes NEWDOS made to TRSDOS 2.1:

• The DIRCHECK command, to test and list a disk directory
• Validity checks on most disk write operations
• All password checks disabled
• A 50 millisecond keyboard debounce routine
• A screen printout when the J, K and L keys are pressed together
• OPEN "E" in BASIC, to write starting at the end of a file
• A working APPEND command
• ATTRIB able to turn off the invisible attribute
• Listing keys in BASIC: period for the current line, down and up arrows for the next and previous line, shifted arrows for the first and last line, comma to edit the current line
• FORMAT on a disk that already has data on it
• DOS commands from BASIC with CMD, returning to BASIC
• Sector-level I/O to speed up BASIC LOAD and SAVE
• FORMAT and BASIC with all their parameters on one line from DOS READY
• COPY expanded to handle every disk copying need, including BACKUP
• The REF command in BASIC (variable cross reference) and RENUM (renumbering)
• L, E and D as abbreviations for LIST, EDIT and DELETE

The 80-U.S. Journal's November/December 1979 advertisement added the fixes it was proudest of: keyboard bounce, APPEND, end-of-file markers, LOC, the VERIFY command, the SYS3 bugs that crashed the disk directory, and several bugs that caused lost data. H&E Computronics' advertisements said NEWDOS corrected "over 70 errors and omissions" in TRSDOS 2.1 and disk BASIC. They also listed automatic loading and running of a BASIC program at power-up. Another 1979 advertisement summed it up as "30 corrections, 20 major new features."

Three system files were NEWDOS additions: SYS11 carried out BASIC's RENUM, SYS12 its REF, and SYS13 displayed BASIC's error messages in words. Pennington noted that NEWDOS needed SYS13/SYS at a specific place on the disk when it was present.

Two side effects show up in the period's letters. Lance Micklus's Microchess 1.5 misbehaved under NEWDOS's debounce routine. The answer was to hold down SHIFT and the up arrow while booting, which turns the debounce off (80-U.S. Journal, November/December 1979). And Electric Pencil's SHIFT-O reboot went nowhere under NEWDOS. Richard Miller of Miller Microcomputer Services published a three byte SUPERZAP patch to fix it (80-U.S. Journal, September/October 1979).

In the same March 1981 rebuttal ("Badinage and Discipline," 80 Microcomputing) Pennington printed a test program, KILLTEST, that opened, killed and closed files on a system disk ten times. Under TRSDOS 2.3 it clobbered the directory. Under NEWDOS 2.1 the system did not hang and DIRCHECK found no errors.

The "plus" was a disk of Apparat utilities:

NEWDOS/80 carried most of these forward: SUPERZAP 3.0, DIRCHECK, DISASSEM, EDTASM, LMOFFSET, LEVEL I and LV1DSKSL were all on the NEWDOS/80 disk in 1980 (80-U.S. Journal, January/February 1981).

• 80-U.S. Journal, July/August 1979 (T. Dettman): the best operating system then available for the TRS-80. RENUM and CMD from BASIC were the most used features, and the improved EDTASM would "tickle you to the pink." Strongly recommended the "plus" version.
• TRS-80 Disk and Other Mysteries (H. C. Pennington, IJG, 1979; excerpted in 80 Microcomputing, February 1980): "It works!" No known bugs in the current release. The 80-U.S. Journal called the book "THE technical backup for NEWDOS+" (March/April 1980).
• 80 Microcomputing, March 1981 ("DOS Talk," Stewart E. Fason and John Burgan): NEWDOS+ was "basically a reworked TRSDOS 2.1" and "basically bug-free," with a disk modification utility for applying any patches. Their comparison table gave NEWDOS+ a list price of $99, good documentation completeness but only fair clarity and fair command simplicity, a BASIC program load time of 4.5 seconds against TRSDOS's 8, and a system size of 17 granules against TRSDOS's 14.
• 80-U.S. Journal, January/February 1981 (Pete Carr): Apparat was the first company to improve on TRSDOS 2.1 and fix its many errors, and NEWDOS 2.1 "was, and still is, a great system."
• Creative Computing, September 1981: Stephen Kimmel and the LDOS reviewer both pointed casual users to NewDOS or NewDOS+ rather than NEWDOS/80.
• Molimerx catalogue, 1984: NEWDOS+ "saved a lot of people's sanity." Owners had blamed the hardware for TRSDOS 2.1's errors, and the hardware "suddenly started to work properly" under NEWDOS+.

Apparat sold direct and through dealers. In 1979 Apparat also sold small business software and hardware: disk drives, printers and memory expansion kits (80-U.S. Journal, September/October 1979).

• UltraDOS and MULTIDOS. Dave Welsh of AlphaBit Communications recalled that Vernon Hester "had zapped his copy of NEWDOS 2.1 operating system (itself a zapped copy of TRSDOS 2.1) until it didn't seem much like NEWDOS anymore." That became UltraDOS, sold by Level IV Products in 1980. Hester later rewrote it as MULTIDOS because UltraDOS was still too close to NEWDOS (Computer News 80, April 1991). Hester's SuperBASIC started from Apparat's modified BASIC. The 80 Microcomputing "DOS Talk" of March 1981 found ULTRADOS "almost completely command compatible with NEWDOS+." See the MULTIDOS page.
• DBLDOS. Owners of the Percom Doubler found that they could copy the NEWDOS 2.1 BASIC/CMD and SYS6/SYS onto a DBLDOS system disk. That gave DBLDOS NEWDOS features such as CMD"DIR :1" from BASIC (The Alternate Source, issue 8, 1981). See the DoubleDOS page.
• TRSDOS. NEWDOS and TRSDOS 2.1 read each other's files, but not every program was happy on both. Radio Shack's Scripsit worked properly only under TRSDOS until Apparat supplied zaps for NEWDOS 2.1 and NEWDOS/80 (80 Microcomputing, April 1981). Two 1981 sources (80 Microcomputing, April 1981, and The Alternate Source, issue 11) also point out a small incompatibility: NEWDOS 2.1, and NEWDOS/80 after it, handled the end-of-file (NEXT and EOF) fields of the file control block differently from TRSDOS.
• Screen print with graphics. The JKL screen print printed graphics characters as dots. A 1981 zap for the Epson MX-80 changed two bytes in the screen print routine of NEWDOS PLUS (track 0, relative sector 6, bytes 7F and 80 from 3E 2E to C6 20) so that graphics printed too (Kings Byte Newsletter, 1982, citing 80 Microcomputing, November 1981).

• NEWDOS/80 v3.0: Apparat's unfinished successor to NEWDOS/80 2.0. In 1989 Dave Huffman reported that Cliff Ide had said "NewDos V3.0 ... obviously never got out of Beta" (Bits and Bytes, June 1989). See the NEWDOS/80 page.
• Syntha NEWDOS 3.0 and 4.0: extensions of NEWDOS/80 2.0 for the Model 4 and 4P by Syntha Computers of Antwerp, NEWDOS 3.0 for 64K machines and NEWDOS 4.0 for 128K, sold in the Netherlands in 1984 and 1985 (Remarks, Dutch TRS-80 Users Group).
• NEWDOS/86 and NEWDOS/90: Warwick Sands' enhancements of NEWDOS/80 2.0, also on the NEWDOS/80 page.