DOS Wedge

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DOS Wedge

The DOS Wedge was a popular piece of Commodore 64

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer released by Commodore International in August, 1982, at a price of United States dollar595. Preceded by the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore MAX Machine, the C64 features 64 kilobytes of Random-access memory with sound and graphics performance that were superior to IBM-compatible computers of tha...
system software

System software

System software is closely related to, but distinct from Operating System software. It is any computer software that provides the infrastructure over which programs can operate, i.e....
. Written by Bob Fairbairn, it was included by Commodore

Commodore International

Commodore, the commonly used name for Commodore International, was a United States electronics company based in West Chester, Pennsylvania which was a vital player in the home computer/personal computer field in the 1980s....
(CBM) on the 1541 disk drive

Commodore 1541

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Encyclopedia

The DOS Wedge was a popular piece of Commodore 64

Commodore 64

System software

Commodore International

Commodore 1541

The Commodore 1541 , made by Commodore International, was the best-known floppy disk drive for the Commodore 64 home computer. The 1541 was a single-sided 170 kilobyte drive for 5?" disks....
Test/Demo Disk (filename: "DOS 5.1") and also packaged with the C64 Macro Assembler (filename: "DOS WEDGE64"). The DOS Wedge was referred to in the 1541 drive manual as DOS Support and on the software startup screen as DOS MANAGER.

The Wedge made disk operations

Commodore DOS

Commodore DOS, aka CBM DOS, was the disk operating system used with Commodore International's Commodore International#Computers, 8-bit. Unlike most other DOS systems before or since—which are booted from disk into the main computer's own random access memory at startup, and executed there—CBM DOS was executed internally in t...
in BASIC 2.0

Commodore BASIC

Commodore BASIC, also known as PET BASIC, is the dialect of the BASIC programming language used in Commodore International's 8-bit home computer line, stretching from the Commodore PET of 1977 to the Commodore 128 of 1985....
significantly easier by introducing several keyword shortcuts. The DOS Wedge became somewhat of a de facto

De facto

De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning the fact" or in practice but not necessarily ordained by law. It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or technique that are found in the common experience as created or developed without or contrary to a regulation....
standard, with third party vendors such as Epyx

Epyx

Epyx, Inc. was a video game video game developer and video game publisher in the late 1970s and entire 1980s. The company was founded as Automated Simulations by Jim Connelley and Jon Freeman, originally using Epyx as a brand name for action-oriented games before renaming the company to match in 1983....
often incorporating identical commands into fastloader cartridges and other Commodore 64 expansion devices. COMPUTE!'s Gazette
COMPUTE!'s Gazette

COMPUTE!'s Gazette was a computer magazine of the 1980s, directed at users of Commodore International's 8-bit home computers. Publishing its first issue in July 1983, the Gazette was a Commodore-only daughter magazine of the computer hobbyist magazine COMPUTE!....
published several type-in

Type-in program

A type-in program, or just type-in, is a computer program listing printed in a computer magazine or book, meant to be typed in by the reader in order to run the program on a computer....
variations on the DOS Wedge, including a C128

Commodore 128

The Commodore 128 home computer/personal computer was the last 8-bit machine commercially released by Commodore International . Introduced in January of 1985 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas metropolitan area, it appeared three years after its predecessor, the bestselling Commodore 64....
version in its February 1987 issue (see External links, below).

The original Commodore DOS Wedge was a 1-KB

Kilobyte

Kilobyte is a unit of Computer data storage equal to either 1,024 bytes or 1,000 bytes , depending on context.It is abbreviated in a number of ways: KB, kB, K and Kbyte....
program written in MOS 6502

MOS Technology 6502

The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured central processing unit on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of competing designs from larger companies such...
assembly language

Assembly language

An assembly language is a low-level language for programming computers. It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture....
. It resided in the otherwise unused memory block $

Hexadecimal

In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal is a numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16. It uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols 0–9 to represent values zero to nine, and A, B, C, D, E, F to represent values ten to fifteen....
CC00–$CFFF (52224–53247) and worked by altering BASIC's "CHRGET" subroutine

Subroutine

In computer science, a subroutine or subprogram is a portion of computer code within a larger computer program, which performs a specific task and is relatively independent of the remaining code....
at $0073 (115) so that each character passing by the BASIC interpreter would be checked for wedge commands, and the associated "wedged-in" routines run if needed.

DOS Wedge functions

Any command that contains an @ symbol may substitute > instead, if desired.

/filename – Load a BASIC program into RAM
%filename – Load a machine language program into RAM
?filename – Load a BASIC program into RAM and then automatically run it
?filename – Save a BASIC program to disk
@ – Display (and clear) the disk drive status
@$ – Display the disk directory without overwriting the BASIC program in memory
@command – Execute a disk drive command (e.g. S0:filename, V0:, I0:)
@Q – Deactivate the DOS Wedge

See also

Comparison of computer shells
Comparison of computer shells

A command shell is a command line interface computer program to an operating system.ReferencesExternal links...

External links

- Jim Butterfield
Jim Butterfield

Frank James Butterfield was a Toronto-based author and computer programmer famous for his work with Commodore Business Machines microcomputers, and a longtime contributor to periodicals such as The Transactor and Toronto PET User's Group....
, COMPUTE!
COMPUTE!

COMPUTE! was an United States computer magazine that was published from 1979 to 1994, though it can trace its origin to 1978 in Len Lindsay's PET Gazette, one of the first magazines for the Commodore PET computer....
, October 1983.
,