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The Z-System Corner Jay Sage ****************************************************************** This article originally appeared in The Computer Journal, Issue Number 42 (Copyright (C) 1990 by Technology Resources), and is presented here with the permission of the author. ****************************************************************** A number of newer TCJ readers have commented that with this column they feel that they are coming into the middle of a very involved discussion that is hard to catch on to. Of course, one answer to that problem is for new TCJ readers to purchase back issues. I have been writing this column regularly since issue #25, and I am quite sure that all those back issues are still available. That solution notwithstanding, it is probably not a bad idea to stand back every so often and try to comprehend a larger picture. That is one of the tasks I will undertake this time. Detailed technical content will not be forsaken entirely, however, since I regard that as the primary purpose of my column. At this point, I suspect that I am too much of a Z-System expert to talk about very many topics at a level that is appropriate for beginners. To serve their needs, I have been very actively soliciting articles from other authors. In this issue, for example, we have the first of the columns I promised a couple of issues back on how to set up a remote access system (aka bulletin board system) under the NZCOM auto-install version of Z-System. Lee McEwen (aka Chris McEwen) has done a lovely job with that assignment. The technical discussion this time will focus on some issues that arose in trying to install ZSDOS or ZDDOS on an SB180 computer with the XBIOS enhanced operating system. Before you say "But I don't have an SB180," let me assure you that the techniques have more general applicability. The specific XBIOS problem is one that has come up often and has been the source of considerable frustration to XBIOS users. [They are in good company, by the way. Just as I was finishing this article, I got a call from Bridger Mitchell about this very subject!] I am only sorry that it took me so long to get around to working on it. Gene Pizzetta, a fellow Bostonian, was the squeaky wheel that finally got my attention, and he has contributed a number of his own ideas to the solution. Announcements Before we get down to business, I have, as usual, a few announcements to make. First I would like to remind readers once again about Bill Tishey's superb collection of help files for the hundreds of Z-System programs now available. Bill can now generate diskettes in many formats besides Apple (using his son's Commodore 128), and he is willing to fill your diskettes with the files for only $10. My column in issue #36 gave the following procedure to follow: (1) send enough formatted diskettes (plainly labeled with the format) to hold at least 1000K bytes (up from 800K back then); (2) use a reusable disk mailer or enclose a mailer suitable for returning the diskettes to you; and (3) enclose a return address label, return postage, and the $10 copying fee. Bill's address is 8335 Dubbs Drive, Severn, MD 21144. If you prefer (or if you need 96-tpi, 8" SSSD, or NorthStar hard-sector formats), you can send the diskettes to me as well. Second, I would like to make a special point of calling your attention to the GEnie RoundTable discussions that take place every Wednesday at 10pm Eastern time. The first such session of each month is devoted to Z-System, and I am the moderator, so this is your chance for a real-time dialogue with me. Go to page "685;2" on GEnie and enter "Room 2". There are several changes to report in the roster of Z-Nodes. Regrettably, Bob Paddock's node #38 in Franklin, PA, has gone off the air. To offset that loss, however, node #73 in the St. Louis, MO, area has come back to life after being down for several years. Sysop George Allen and co-sy sop Walt Stumper would be happy to hear from you at 314-821-1078 (PC-Pursuit MO SLO/24). The equipment is currently a Xerox 820-II with a 10 Meg drive, but the sysops hope to expand soon to a 30+ Meg Ampro. On the Z-Node front, I am also sorry to report that Z-Node Central (Lillipute) was downed by hardware failures on both computers! They have been off the air for a couple of months already as I write this, and sysop Richard Jacobson has just faced the truth: that it will not be coming back. Ladera Z-Node (#2) in Los Angeles will take over as Z-Node Central. Chicago area callers looking for Z support should check out the Antelope Freeway system run by ZDOS-coauthor Carson Wilson for CFOG (Chicago area FOG). This is one of a small number of remote access systems running under the Z3PLUS flavor of Z-System. The phone number is 312-764-5152 (PC-Pursuit ILCHI/24). We expect that its 'System One' will soon be a Z-Node ('System Two' supports MS- DOS). Finally, there have been some very significant developments with BDS C. Leor Zolman completed some major additions to the Z version (BDS Z), and the final release has just gone out as I write this column in mid October. Programs generated by BDS Z now have a full Z- System header and can be linked as type-3 programs to load and run at an arbitrary address. ZDOS coauthor Cam Cotrill has already released a substantial amount of BDS Z code for performing the functions in the SYSLIB, VLIB, and Z3LIB assembly-language libraries that are not already built into BDS Z. Leor has now turned over all of the marketing and some of the development responsibility for BDS C to me. Recognizing that the $90 price tag of the full package, however reasonable for what one gets, is an impediment to new users who want to experiment with C, we have prepared a low cost introductory package that (1) includes only one version of the code (either standard CP/M or Z-System), (2) contains only the essential files, and (3) comes with an abridged version of the manual (and without the fancy BD Software binder). This package will be offered for only $60. Other parts of the full package can be added later: $25 for the second version of the compiler, $25 for the support materials (RED editor, CDB debugger, and the parts of the manual covering them), or $40 for both at once. If the whole package is ordered at once, it comes complete with an attractive binder (also available with the introductory package for $5 extra). It should be noted that BDS Z generates programs that run perfectly well under standard CP/M. Naturally, they will not recognize Z-System features like named directories, but they will accept the now standard DU: extended drive/user syntax instead of the older U/D: format of standard BDS C. The only disadvantage of using BDS Z rather than BDS C on a standard CP/M system is that the programs carry Z-System overhead (about 800 bytes) that don't provide them with any functionality. What is a Microcomputer Operating System For? The basic function of an operating system is to make one's life -- one's computing life, that is -- simpler. When microcomputers first came out, the biggest burden was dealing with the hardware. It was no fun for the computer user and programmer (largely synonymous in those days) to have to deal over and over with the intricacies of the physical operation of the hardware, such as getting characters to and from the terminal or paper tape reader/punch, not to mention the dauntingly more complex task of managing data on a magnetic tape or floppy diskette drive. Gary Kildall's CP/M operating system provided a solution -- and a very good one (by and large) in my opinion -- to those problems. It did so by implementing a standardized and modular interface that handled the basic device communication tasks. CP/M, which stood (I believe) for "Control Program for Microcomputers," was the master program that one got running on the computer right after power up. It would then allow one to load and run other programs, with control always returning to the CP/M master program after each user program finished. Besides accepting and interpreting commands issued by the computer operator, an operating system like CP/M also provides resident code (always ready in memory) for performing certain functions that application programs will often want to use. The simpler functions are things like sending a character to the terminal screen; the more complex ones include fetching from or writing to a floppy diskette the information associated with a logical entity known as a file. With these functions implemented in the operating system code, application programs are easier to write and do not have to include the same code over and over. More importantly, they can run on a variety of hardware platforms, since the details of the physical hardware are handled by the operating system code, and the program can deal with things at a logical level. Logical vs. Physical Perhaps this is a good time for a brief aside on this matter of logical versus physical. We use the adjective "physical" when we are talking about things that are actually in the hardware. In the case of a floppy disk, for example, the physical items are the bits of data stored as magnetization patterns. These bits are grouped into sectors, and the sectors into tracks. In the case of a terminal screen, the physical items are the patterns of illuminated dots that we recognize as letters, numbers, and other symbols. On the other hand, we use the adjective "logical" to describe those things which are essentially the creation of our minds (and programs). For example, there is no such physical thing as a "file." No matter how you examine a diskette, you will never find a file on it (as such); you will find only sectors and tracks. It is our choice to organize the data on the disk in a way that associates groups of such sectors with a file names and to store the file names in a particular group of sectors on the disk. Modularity CP/M is modular in the sense that it divides up the functions of the operating system into separate packages. One part is called the BIOS (basic input/output system). This part, which lives at the very top of the memory address space, deals directly with the hardware. It reads and writes physical sectors from and to a diskette; it determines whether or not a key has been pressed on the keyboard and, if so, which key; and it sends characters to the screen. The BIOS is the only part of CP/M that is different for each hardware implementation of a CP/M computer. The second CP/M module is called the BDOS (basic disk operating system). It deals with logical constructs. We have already spoken of files. When a file is referred to, the BDOS figures out which physical tracks and sectors contain the data for that file. Another logical construct is lines of text. The BDOS has a function to send a complete line of text to the screen (as opposed to the BIOS, which can send only a single character), and it has another function to get a complete line of text from the user, allowing a limited amount of editing. These functions make it much easier for the application programmer to write his or her program. The last CP/M module is called the CCP (console command processor). It gets a command typed by the user at the console and takes the appropriate action to carry out that command. Some commands, such as DIR or ERA, are implemented directly in the CCP code. Others require that a COM file be loaded from diskette and executed. Command Processing Under CP/M For the most part, CP/M accomplishes the functions it was designed to perform in admirable fashion. However, it was so concerned with solving the hardware interface problem (the programmer interface) that it devoted relatively little attention to the user interface. To be fair, it was born in the days when 16K of memory cost about $500 (in 1970s dollars, no less) and occupied an entire S-100 card (bigger by far than a whole SB180FX computer with 512K). Today we might not think that 64K is very much (some say that OS/2 feels dreadfully cramped in less than 3 Megs!), but it makes a lot of things possible that 48K (or even less) would not allow. CP/M's command processor did little more than the minimum it was required to do, namely to run a few resident commands and to load external commands from disk. It did not provide many services to make the operator's life easier. You had to specify rather exactly the command you wanted performed; no leeway was allowed. And if you made a mistake, CP/M did not try to help; it just shrugged its shoulders and emitted a question mark. The Niceties of Z-System The Z-System has evolved over a period of nearly a decade now, but its goal from the very beginning has always been to make it easier and more convenient to operate the computer. My ideal is to have the computer do everything that it possibly can do for the user and leave to the user only those tasks that no computer could possibly figure out on its own. The command processor improvements I have introduced and the utilities I have written have all been directed toward that goal. I will now run through a short summary of Z-System features and try to indicate how they make the operator's life easier. This list is adapted from my book, "The ZCPR33 User's Guide." User Area Access CP/M introduced the concept of disk "user" areas, which allowed the operating system to group files into separate logical directories (physically the files are all stored in the same directory, but they are tagged to indicate the user area). Unfortunately, CP/M provided no practical way to access files across user areas, which made them almost useless. Back in the days when disks held only about 100K, there wasn't much need for this kind of organization, but today floppy diskettes commonly have a capacity between 350K and 1.3 Meg. Hard disks with many tens of megabytes are also inexpensive and common. Under these circumstances, a single logical drive can hold hundreds or even thousands of files, and some way to organize them becomes essential. Z-System makes it very easy and convenient to organize your files based on user numbers. Where CP/M allowed only a drive prefix to a file name (D:NAME.TYP), Z-System allows drive and/or user number prefixes (DU:NAME.TYP) so that files in other user areas as well as other drives can be referenced directly. In addition, Z-System allows meaningful names (similar to DOS subdirectory names) to be assigned to drive/user areas. This provides an interface that is far more suitable to the way people think and remember. With the DU: form, the operator has to think about the hardware (something he or she should not have to do, remember?); with named directories, the operator thinks in terms of function (TEXT: for text files, BDSC: for the C compiler, DBASE: for database files, and so on). Terminal Independence and the Environment While some would argue that the DOS hardware and software standards established by IBM's market dominance have resulted in an enforced mediocrity, there is no doubt that having a single environment in which to operate makes life much easier for applications programmers. Programs for DOS generally work right out of the box on any IBM compatible computer. Configuration is required only for fine-tuning. CP/M, on the other hand, was designed to allow programs to run on an extremely wide variety of hardware. In those days, "personal" computer took on a different meaning -- each person designed and built his own hardware. CP/M could be made to work with all of them, but elaborate configuration procedures were generally required, especially to match programs to the particular terminal used. To this day, we still have to deal with this hardware diversity. What CP/M could have but failed to provide was a means for conveying to application programs information about the operating environment. Z-System has several modules that afford such communication. An area called the environment descriptor (ENV) contains information about the system configuration. Another system area called the message buffer (MSG) stores information that one program can leave for another program that runs later to read. Part of the ENV is a section called the TCAP or Terminal-CAPability descriptor. The TCAP allows a program running under Z-System to determine the type of terminal in use and to adapt to the control codes it uses for special video operations. The ENV has information about the size of the screen and the printer's page. It also contains such information as the CPU clock speed and which disk drives are available (why allow attempts to log into drive C: if there is no drive C: -- it often just hangs the computer). The Z-System supports many optional operating system features contained in optional modules, and the ENV contains information about these modules also. The ENV and TCAP not only relieve the user of the nuisance of installing programs; they also make it very easy to change the installation. Suppose, for example, you want to print some files in 132-column mode instead of the usual 80-column mode. Under CP/M you might very likely have to get out a configuration program to redefine the printer setup. With a Z- System print utility, you would simply change the mode on your printer, run CPSET (console/printer set) to select the 132-column printer definition, and run the same print program as before. Command Processing Enhancements Under CP/M, you have to specify where the COM file to be run is located (otherwise the current drive is assumed). This is a perfect example of something that a computer can easily be smart enough to do for you, and Z- System does. As with modern versions of DOS (which took many years to catch on to this Z-System feature), you specify a list of directory areas that the operating system will scan for a requested COM file. If you wish (as you might when you know that your COM file is not on the search path), you can specify a directory using either the DU: prefix or the named directory DIR: prefix, and you are thus not limited to the current user area or the path. With Z-System one is also no longer limited to issuing commands one at a time (DOS has been even slower to catch on to this). A single line of command input can contain a whole sequence of commands. As a result, you do not have to interrupt your thinking to wait for one command to finish before you can specify the second and subsequent steps in a process. You can work out a strategy for what you want to accomplish and issue all the commands at once, before you forget or get confused. Many oft-repeated computational tasks involve sequences of commands (e.g., editing, assembling, linking, running; or editing, spell checking, printing). In such cases, the Z-System alias facility (similar in some ways to SUBMIT but far more flexible) can be used to define a new command name, which, when invoked, performs the entire sequence. This saves the user a lot of typing but more importantly eliminates the need to remember exactly what the sequence is. Basically, you solve the problem once and put the solution into an alias script. From then on, the computer is smart enough to take care of the complex details for you. I have given many examples of this in past columns. Conditional Command Execution There is only so much one can accomplish on a computer (or in life) without making decisions. Have you ever seen a programming language with no ability to perform tests and act in different ways depending on the results? Flow control (IF/ELSE/ENDIF) is unique to the Z- System command processor. Other operating systems that offer flow control at all limit it to operation inside a batch or script language. A special set of Z-System commands can test a wide range of conditions, and the command processor will use the results of the tests to decide which subsequent commands will be performed and which will be skipped. This allows the Z-System to respond in a remarkably flexible and intelligent way. The solution to a complex computing task, one that requires on-the-spot decision-making, can be worked out once and embedded in an alias command. Then you won't have to tax your brain the next time you need to perform this task, and novice users will be able to do things on your computer that would have been beyond their own ability to figure out. Command Processor Shells If you do not want to deal with the operating system at the command level or if you want to have a command processor with different features, the Z-System shell facility allows you to install substitute user interfaces of your own choice at will. They can even be nested within each other. Shells come in two common varieties: menu shells and history shells. The menu interfaces allow the user to pick tasks with single keystrokes and have the shell program generate the complex sequences of commands required to perform those tasks. The menu system shields the user from complexity, saves typing, and greatly reduces the chance of error. History shells are enhanced command processors that remember your commands and allow you to recall and edit previous command lines. I wish the Apollo Domain minicomputer system I use at work (not to mention my DOS computer) had a history shell one quarter as nice as Z- System's LSH or EASE. They work like powerful wordprocessors on your command history, allowing searching and extensive editing. What If You Make a Mistake This is one of the other areas in which most operating systems behave in an abominably primitive manner. When you issue a command that cannot be performed, they just issue an error message and then dump you back to square one. Often you are not even told what sort of error occurred (consider DOS's wonderfully helpful "bad command" message). The Z-System behaves in a civilized manner under these circumstances. When an error occurs, the command processor turns the bad command line over to a user-specified error handler. The most sophisticated error handlers allow the operator to edit the command and thus recover easily from typing mistakes. In a multiple command sequence, if subsequent commands were allowed to run after an earlier command failed, there could be disastrous repercussions, and an error handler is indispensible. The system environment even contains an error type, which the error handler can use to give you more specific information about what went wrong. It may be the familiar error of a COM file that could not be found, but there are many other possible causes for the difficulty. A file that you specified as an argument might not have been found (e.g., "TYPE FILENAM" when you meant "TYPE FILENAME"), or you may have specified an ambiguous file name to a program that cannot accept one (e.g., "TYPE *.DOC"). System Security Like minicomputer and mainframe operating systems, the Z-System is a secure operating system. This means that it has mechanisms for limiting what any particular user can do or get access to. Dangerous commands (such as erasing, copying, or renaming files) can be disabled when ordinary users are operating the system but enabled when a privileged user is at work. Areas of your disk can be restricted from access for storage of confidential or other sensitive information. These security features come in very handy in the implementation of a remote access system or bulletin board (see Lee McEwen's article in this issue). There is no need for additional security to be provided by the remote interface program (BYE). The Z-System already includes a full suite of programs for regulating and controlling system security. Summary To sum it up, the goal of the Z-System is to provide an operating system that can be tailored extensively to user preferences and that can be made to handle on its own and automatically as many computational details as it can, leaving the user free to concentrate solely on those aspects of computer operation that require human intelligence. Faking Out The System For the technical part of this column, I would like to talk briefly about some techniques for adding extensions to a Z-System that it was not designed to accept. The need for this trick arose in connection with the installation of ZSDOS and ZDDOS (and their clock drivers) on an SB180 computer with the XBIOS enhanced BIOS, but it can be useful in other situations as well. XBIOS is a very nice and flexible system. One of its main features is that it keeps much of the BIOS in an alternate memory bank, leaving a much larger TPA (transient program area) for application programs than did the standard BIOS from MicroMint. The configuration and loading process, however, is somewhat unconventional (a forerunner in some ways to the NZCOM and Z3PLUS techniques). The XBIOS system is loaded not from system tracks on the disk but from a file. This file is generated by a special utility program called SYSBLD (SYStem BuiLD) that allows one to define in a rather flexible way the configuration of one's personal Z-System, including the names of the CCP and DOS files to be used. Those component files, however, must be available in REL format, and the new Z-System DOS components are supplied in ZRL format only (because they have hooks to other parts of the system that can be resolved only by that format). Changing Systems Using JetLDR JetLDR is a lovely little utility written by Bridger Mitchell that knows how to load almost any module in a Z operating system. It is much faster and more careful than its predecessors, LDR and LLDR, and it is not limited to the non-code Z modules -- such as the NDR (named directory register) -- or to code modules preassembled for a fixed system -- such as an RCP (resident command package) module FIXED.RCP. It can load code modules assembled in ZRL format to whatever address that module occupies in the current system and with all the hooks to other Z-System modules generated at load time. Thus MYRCP.ZRL, assembled once, can be used in any system configuration that allocates enough room for an RCP of that size. Most remarkably, JetLDR can load even main operating system modules: CCP, DOS, or BIOS. Special adjunct configuration files (CFG) are used to help it in some of these specialized tasks (a little more about that later). JetLDR's internal help screen is reproduced in Fig. 1 so you can see the whole list of modules it can handle. It is available from the usual Z suppliers for $20. So, the obvious solution to the problem of getting ZSDOS or ZDDOS running under XBIOS is first to generate and boot a standard ZRDOS system (ZRDOS.REL comes with the SB180) and then to replace ZRDOS with, say, ZDDOS using the JetLDR command: JETLDR ZDDOS.ZRL ZSDOS can be loaded just as easily. On my system I have ARUNZ aliases that swap DOSs in a jiffy this way in case I want to perform some experiments. There's The Rub Now comes the problem. It's very nice that we now have ZDDOS or ZSDOS loaded and running, but if we want to take advantage of its wonderful time and date features, we must find a way to load its clock and (for ZSDOS) stamping module, too. The ZDOS utility SETUPZST makes it very easy to create the required loader, LDTIM.COM; the problem is: where can LDTIM put the driver code? [Aside: For those who own it, I am told that the DateStamper BSX module will work with ZSDOS, but I have not tried this myself. It requires no memory to load.] In an NZCOM system, the MKZCM system definition utility allows one to specify a "user buffer" area in memory, and this is just perfect for the clock/stamp module. ZDOS even has special facilities for taking advantage of this buffer. LDTIM can automatically determine the location of that buffer and install the drivers there, and a special patch to NZCOM (included with the ZDOS package) gives NZCOM the ability to reconnect the drivers automatically after a new DOS is loaded. XBIOS's SYSBLD utility, unfortunately, does not support such a user buffer (this is true even in the 1.2 version that is able to load ZRL files). There is a way to trick the system into making some room for extra memory modules. This is to assign the extra memory space needed to one of the standard modules, such as the RCP. For example, if you use an RCP of the usual 2K (16 record) size and need one page (two records) of memory for a ZDDOS clock driver, you simply specify an 18- record RCP space. Then, when SETUPZST asks you for the address to which the clock driver should be loaded, you give it the starting address of the last page of this RCP space. Once these steps have been followed, ZDDOS should be running with date stamping. ZSDOS could be installed similarly except that even more extra space would have to be allocated to the RCP. Although what I have described so far will get the system running, there is some danger that an oversize RCP could be loaded by accident and overwrite the clock driver. To prevent this, the ENV module should be patched to indicate that only the actual 16 records (10H) are available. For those who do not face the problem of installing ZDOS on an XBIOS- equipped SB180, there are other uses of this kind of trick. For people who do not have the necessary tools (e.g., MOVCPM) to move the BIOS down to make room for special drivers (such as RAM disk drivers and special I/O boards), this same trick can be applied to open up protected-memory space for them. Other people may find it useful for quick experiments with special drivers before going to the trouble of moving the operating system around. There is one final refinement I would like to mention. It is something I learned from Gene Pizzetta, who took my general recommendations above and worked out the details (see his file, ZD- XB11.LBR, available on many Z- Nodes). I have usually used either the IOP or RCP modules for this trick, but Gene recommended using the NDR instead. The reason for this is that the IOP, RCP, and FCP get allocated in 128-byte chunks, while the NDR gets allocated in much smaller 18-byte chunks, the space required for one name. If your clock driver takes, for example, 270 bytes (10EH), you would have to allocate three extra records, because the driver is a tiny bit over two records. If you steal space from an NDR, you can add just two records, but reduce the number of names in the NDR by 1. Changing Command Processors Generating a new CCP using JetLDR is a little trickier than changing the DOS. JetLDR could, as it does with a DOS or BIOS module, load the new CCP into its operating position in memory, but this would be of questionable value, since the CCP would survive only until the next warmboot. So, instead, when processing a CCP ZRL module, JetLDR normally writes the resulting absolute-code CCP to a file ZCCP.CCP (in the root directory, I believe). This is where CFG files come into play. They are special code modules that JetLDR uses to perform special processing (see the file JLTOOLS.LBR on Z-Nodes for more detailed information). For example, CCPCFG.ZRL is one that tells JetLDR how to deposit the absolute CCP code that it generates directly into the XBIOS ram image of the CCP in banked memory (from which it is loaded on each warm boot). A similar CFG file could be written to tell JetLDR how to install the new CCP onto the system tracks of the current drive-A disk, but so far no one has done this. I would be happy to provide the CCPCFG module to XBIOS owners who would like it or to others who would like to use it as a model for writing other CFG files (send me a formatted disk with your copy of JetLDR, return mailer, etc.). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JetLDR for Z-Systems (ZCPR3), Version 1.00 Copyright (c) 1988 Bridger Mitchell Syntax: JetLDR [du:][library][.lbr] member1.typ member2.typ ... or JetLDR [du:]file1.typ [du:]file2.typ [du:]file3.typ ... ENV - environment FCP - flow commands IOP - input/output RCP - resident commands NDR - named directories Z3T - terminal capabilities ZRL or REL - module in SLR or MS-relocatable (REL) format with member name: RCP, FCP, IOP, CCP, CP3, DOS, DO3, BIO, CFG or BSX Notes: If first file is a library, extract remaining files from it. An ENV file must be the first loaded. Preceed special modules (DOS, RSX, BSX, ...) with appropriate CFG file. Use Path: YES Root Only: NO Scan Current: YES Explicit Directory: A0: ------------------------- Figure 1. This is the internal help screen displayed by the command "JETLDR //". It shows how flexible a package loader JetLDR is. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor's Note The Computer Journal is published six times a year. It covers a broad range of computing topics, ranging from discussions of the new and esoteric to good old CP/M. I highly recommend it. For a subscription, send a check for $18.00 US drawn on a US bank to: The Computer Journal 190 Sullivan Crossroad Columbia Falls, MT 59912