Author: rou021@gmail.com

The documents and software here represent what might have typically come with a GRiD Compass. The documents cover an overview of the Compass hardware, the GRiD Operating System, and GRiD Management Tools. The software contains GRiD-OS, GRiD Management Tools, and associated tutorial files, as well as a collection of terminal emulators.

Getting Started is a tutorial for using GRiD Software. It contains multiple interactive lessons completed with various programs from GRiD Management Tools. While I didn't have the right version of the tutorial files disk, I was able to recreate most of it. The new disk image I made should have all of the necessary files, with two exceptions. The first is the GRiD Central sign-on file. I managed to find one on an old Compass and have included it, but I can't verify it's the same version as referenced in the book. The second is the one for the Dow Jones News/Retrieval Service. I don't have that file at all and I'm not able to recreate it. Given that GRiD Central and Dow Jones NS have been offline for decades, both files would be largely useless anyway. Nonetheless, the other files will allow you to complete most of the Getting Started Tutorials.

GRiD Management Tools is a software suite for GRiD-OS that usually includes a database (GRiDFile), a spreadsheet (GRiDPlan), a graphing program (GRiDPlot), a text editor with basic word processing abilities (GRiDWrite), and macro software (GRiDRecord/GRiDPlayback). Early versions also included GRiDBASIC. 

I've included a floppy disk image of GRiD Management Tools 3.1.0. Keep in mind the version of GRiDPlan here (3.1.0) requires an 8087 coprocessor to work or it will crash. This shouldn't be a problem for Compasses as an 8087 came standard, but they were optional on GRiDCases. GRiDPlan 3.1.5 or newer, however, will work without one.

Since I currently don't have an original disk for GRiDTerm and GRiDReformat, I've made a compilation disk image of various GRiD terminal emulators. On it, I've added older versions of GRiDTerm and GRiDReformat that are more appropriate for this software/document package.  

I didn't have an original copy of a GRiD-OS 3.1.0 disk either, so I've included an image of one from Dave Dunfield's website. I know one's already in the files sections, but I figured it'd be more convenient to add it here as well. From what I can tell, Dave's disk image seems to come from an official disk too (though I don't know for sure).

The two versions of GRiD-OS (CCOS) I've provided work on two different version of the GRiD Compass. Version 3.1.5D will only boot on the 113x series, but not the earlier models. Version 3.1.0 will boot on all of the other models, but not on the 113x. In addition, 3.1.5D features multitasking, while 3.1.0 doesn't. You can replace the Executive on 3.1.0 with the one from 3.1.5D to enable, but the feature may not work very well on models with 256K of RAM.

All the disks here are for GRiD-OS. As such, you will need to format the floppy disks you want to use with the GRiD-OS disk formatting utility (Initialize Media) before writing to them in ImageDisk.