Re: 50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

yeti  <yeti@tilde.institute> wrote:

"internetado" <internetado@fanless.alt119.net> writes:
>

Had Digital Research, the company CP/M
creator Gary Kildall set up to sell CP/M, accepted the deal with IBM
to make CP/M the default operating system for the then newly-created
IBM PC, we'd be living in a very different world today.

You could get CP/M-86 with the PC for a small fee, or PC-DOS for free,
or a couple other options including the UCSD P-System.  Most people got
MS-DOS because they didn't have a need or know about the software available
already for CP/M-86.  Note that what was available for CP/M-86 was a tiny
fraction of what was available for CP/M 2.2 on the 8080, even if it was a
lot more than was available for CP/M-68K.

CP/M was reimplemented by Seattle Computer Products as "Quick and Dirty
Operation System"[0] and later Microsoft bought it and stripped the
"Quick and" and kept DOS as name.  Shouldn't that once and forever
explain how to read the "D" of "DOS"?  o;-)

I wouldn't call Q-DOS and the later PC-DOS reimplementations of CP/M.
The user interface was more or less modelled on CP/M but with a lot of
important things done wrong because the people who did it didn't really
understand CP/M and because engineers shouldn't write code.

It does have lineage from CP/M but less than the lineage CP/M has from
RT-11.  Notice that you use the PIP command to copy files in CP/M like
in RT-11 while PC-DOS introduces COPY, for instance.

I used CP/M-Z80 for a while and when MSDOS appeared, I avoided it for a
long time, but when I finally had to do some stuff on it, I immediately
felt kind of at home due to the similar structure of the OS function
calls.  That felt strange.  Maybe even a bit shady.

It's less like RT-11, sadly.  And the memory map is very strange to someone
used to writing CP-M 2.2 code.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."