Service

NVG

The sam-users Mailing list is an email list set up at NVG and has been in existance since 1994.

Any subscriber can post, read by most of the people who have a current interest in the Sam. The amount of traffic varies quite a lot; at the time of writing it’s rather quiet but has been very busy in the past.

Discussions range from technical questions about details of the Sam’s architecture, to playing tips on old Sam games, announcements of any new projects, and behind-the-scenes insights on past events

Sam Mailing List On-Line Archives

There are three on-line archive of posts:

• January 1994 - Present from GMANE Archive, also offers an RSS feed for new posts.
  
• February 1994 - December 1999 from Ian Collier at http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/ian.collier/sam-users/
  
• 2001 to the current time is available at http://www.mail-archive.com/sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no/

Sam Mailing List Basic Instructions

To subscribe to the sam-users miling list, send the following command in email to sam-users-request@nvg.ntnu.no:

subscribe

If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list, send the following command in email to sam-users-request@nvg.ntnu.no:

unsubscribe

Or you can send mail to majordomo@nvg.ntnu.no with the following command in the body of your email message:

Format Publications

Formerly the INdependant DISCiPLE User Group then altered to be INDependant User Group following the release of the Plus-D and the expansion of Format Publications.

INDUG

Gloucester Sam and Speccy Shows sponsored by Format Publications.

Held Bi-Anuually in Quedgeley Village Hall in Gloucester (see Google Earth link as ‘disk image’) with a migration to The Weavers Arms upon finishing.

After first migration wave, a second migration wave usually followed… although often attempted, the real facts on the second migration will probably never be fully told, since the legends contain too many gaps - for which we may need a new section - but parked in trivia for now.

Pictures:

• Carol Brooksbank’s pictures.
  
• Simon Cooke’s pictures.
  
• Andrew Collier’s pictures.

PD

Gavin Smith

The start of the SAM Software Archive idea proposed in November 2004 by Gavin Smith that unfortunatly did not get fully off the ground.

Lots of work was done by various members of the Sam Community including the scanning of manuals by Steve Parry-Thomas and the NVG Dskification by Dan Dooré, Frode Tennebø and Edwin Blink.

This has not gone to waste thanks to World of Sam

Here is the announcement:

I’ve been thinking a lot about this software archive idea we’ve been talking about, so thought I’d write up a little summary of what my thoughts are.

Proposal:
A World Of Spectrum style semi-official archive for SAM software, housed on the web and built by the members of sam-users.

Reasons:
(1) So that warez style GoodSAMC collections are not needed
(2) To prevent software getting lost as floppies continue to deteriorate over time
(3) To allow people who didn’t experience the SAM at its (erm) “peak” to enjoy it now
(4) To allow us to get more use out of our SAMs by providing more software to run

In practice:
A three month period has been decided upon as a reasonable length of time to track down as many authors/copyright holders as possible - between us all, we should be able to cover the majority of the SAM back catalogue. For those first three months we would get the site established and start filling it with PD plus all software that permission has already been granted to distribute.

Nettverksgruppa (NVG) “The networking group” within Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim.

Known as ‘NVG’ after it’s location and custodians
ftp://ftp.nvg.ntnu.no/pub/sam-coupe/ is the original and still the most comprehensive repository of Sam software.

There are a number of ‘ROMZ’ collections such as the infamous GoodSamC on the Net but the difference with NVG is that it is maintained with intelligence after the NVG Dskification:

1. All the disk images are in a common format.
2. All the disk images are checked and working.
3. All the disk images are bootable.

Also home to the Sam Users Mailing List.

Wayne Weedon

When FDOS public domain was operating it sent out an “introduction leaflet” about the FDOS disks. It told you how to use the disks and what was on them, here is that information.

Public Domain

INTRODUCTION

It has been a long while since the first FDOS list of Public Domain & Shareware programs. I am sorry to say that I have been rather badly let down by some of my sources in the USA, but have (Hopefully) found more reliable ones, which I hope will enable me to get the next list out much quicker than this one.

As before some disks are not complete, but will still be made available to you at the full price, with a very favourable update policy. Pricing is very simple, being 2 pounds per disk (Unless stated otherwise) inclusive of postage and packaging. Updates to disks whose status is described as NOT COMPLETE are FREE if submitted with an order, otherwise return postage should be sent with the original disk.

If you are unsure of the Status of your own disks, please take a look at the file ‘-FDOSnnn.DIR’ (Where nnn is the disk number). This file is always the first file on the disk. The contents of the file consists of the descriptions of the programs as in the FDOS lists. but may be more up to date. Comparing these files with the contents of the latest printed lists should give you a good idea on how up to date your own collection is.

As before the CP/M LiBRary (Extension is LBR) format is used to store each software package into a single file on disk. It would have been easier to store each file on the disk as it was, but this can lead to some confusion over what program each file belongs to, which in a lot of cases is not very obvious.