back to article 50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Late in the summer of 1974, CP/M first started running on hardware. It became one of the first cross-platform microcomputer OSes, and revolutionized the hardware and software industries. You can now legally run the raw unbridled power of CP/M 2.2 anywhere you like You can now legally run the raw unbridled power of CP/M 2.2 …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

    Good article. In 1982, near the end of Digital Research and CP/M-80, a reasonable IBM PC cost somewhere in the £3000 to £4000 range.

    .....but Adam Osborne was shipping the Osborne 01 (with CP/M development tools, Wordstar, SuperCalc, CBasic, MBasic) for £1500.

    I got a three year loan from the bank and bought an Osborne 01. The Osborne and CP/M got me from idiot to competent in my spare time.

    Buying dBase-II for CP/M in 1983 was also a huge help!!

    Aside: The Osborne had 64K of main memory. The top 10K was where the CP/M OS resided. So all my programming work had to fit into around 50K.

    If you look at the dBase-II memory image, dBase could not fit into 50K. So dBase had two blocks of memory: a core block in memory, and an overlay block which was swapped in and out elsewhere in memory.

    Aside: if I can do word processing with Wordstar in a 64K memory machine, why am I using hundreds of megabytes for LibreOffice in 2024??

    1. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

      Aside: if I can do word processing with Wordstar in a 64K memory machine, why am I using hundreds of megabytes for LibreOffice in 2024??

      Because (and I am going to drag an acronym word from the depths of my memory) "WYSIWYG".

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        @werdsmith

        OK....WYSIWYG..........

        .......but if I was writing a modern replacement for "War and Peace", surely I'm interested in the words and not the fonts?

        Just saying!!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!..LibreWrite mostly very low use code

          Actually everything LibreWrite does (and a whole bunch of stuff its still cannot do properly) we were doing on a (never released) word-processor on a 1 Meg MacPlus in 1988. LibreWrite has no excuses for its immense memory footprint.

          Due to a severe problem with the codebase architecture of LibreWrite a whole shopping list of very basic long document features likes true Master Pages etc cannot be added. I looked. I did a deep dive, I know exactly how this stuff works on the bare iron, and trying to retrofit the missing features would be waste of time. Faster to throw out core and rewrite as a pure wp / doc layout editor engine. Not the current Frankencode.

          Still use LibreWrite/OpenOffice/StarOffice to write long documents. As I have for 25 years. Just finishing up a 300+ page doc. (MS Word is still pretty much the clusterf*ck it was in the 1980's/1990's..those bugs..all those bugs..) But honestly its almost as much work to make LibreWrite do exactly what you want as using WriteNow running on a 512K Mac back in 1986. When I wrote several 200 page product manuals. And WriteNow was less than 100K of code with basically no memory footprint apart from your document data.

          So not a lot has changed in the last 40 years. Do Adobe still sell FrameMaker? That had some very neat features.

          1. Snake Silver badge

            Re: LibreWrite mostly very low use code

            "Actually everything LibreWrite does (and a whole bunch of stuff its still cannot do properly) we were doing on a (never released) word-processor on a 1 Meg MacPlus in 1988."

            I might be very, very wrong with this but that might not be a fair comparison: I believe the MacOS library handles quite a bit of the heavy lifting in programming and designing a WYSIWYG interface. In comparison, LibreWrite, being Windows, has to do a lot of descriptive programming to handle windows & actions. Visual programming on Windows is far more intrinsically code intensive than on Mac.

            1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

              Re: LibreWrite mostly very low use code

              "LibreWrite, being Windows"

              Windows? Oh, does it run there too? I thought it was primarily a Linux office suite. It's nice that Windows users get to play with it too :-)

          2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

            Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!..LibreWrite mostly very low use code

            [Author here]

            > Actually everything LibreWrite does (and a whole bunch of stuff its still cannot do properly) we were doing on a (never released) word-processor on a 1 Meg MacPlus in 1988.

            FWIW: there is LibreOffice, and it has a module called Writer. There is no app called "LibreWrite".

            It is big but LibreOffice is a modern version of MS Works, really (as far as I can tell) -- it's one giant executable that can do all these separate functions, but it's really one app.

            (The database bits used to be farmed out to some other code, but nothing much else.)

            There is one alternative worth a look: AbiWord.

            http://www.nl.abisource.com/

            I mean, there are lots, but AbiWord is a couple of megs in size, runs on Linux/BSD etc., and FOSS.

            It is a better comparison than LibreOffice, is what I am getting at here.

            1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
              Thumb Up

              Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!..LibreWrite mostly very low use code

              Abiword is also better than LibreOffice at rescuing damaged Word files, in my experience.

            2. keithpeter Silver badge
              Windows

              Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!..LibreWrite mostly very low use code

              Sigh

              OT but I can't resist replying

              Abiword is almost all I need but the absence of any kind of mathematical formula component handicaps my use of the program. Even something like groff eqn running in a little window so you could type your equations in and then have them processed into the current document would be good -in fact that would be superb. The earlier version 2.x releases of Abiword claimed to have a formula editor but I could never get it to work.

              If anyone is doing pure text (novels, polemics &c) or moderate technical stuff with a few images and some tables, Abiword loads fast and runs nice, and exports to odt.

              Gnumeric the associated spreadsheet is worth a look. Interesting approach to charts, and very fast recalculation. As I have mentioned before, Gnumeric can also make use of GLPK, the GNU take on a subset of AMPL, for solving large linear programming models. Niche but impressive.

              (As an alternative to LibreOffice, there is TeXmacs for maths and technical documents but it is a heavyish application)

          3. druck Silver badge

            Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!..LibreWrite mostly very low use code

            Nothing can touch Impression Publisher on RISC OS back in 1990. It was a full desktop publishing package, but could be used as a mere word processor too. There were I things I could do on that, that I wouldn't have a clue where to even start on modern software. Unfortunately it was written in assembler for performance on 8MHz ARM2 processors with 1MB of memory, although apparently some is still working on modernising it.

            1. timrowledge

              Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!..LibreWrite mostly very low use code

              It ran very nicely on my prototype ARM3 machine. I used it for a lot of business paperwork and eventually even my part of a mildly successful programming book. Computer Concepts did quite well with it.

        2. williamyf

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          You yes, you only care about the words.

          The marketing analyst writing a memo, the secretary writing a letter, or the person running a flyer for the church group do care about the font and positioning.

          As a matter of fact, so many people care about font and position that, before the advent of WYSIWYG, LaTex was invented...

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto

            WYSIWYG was around long before LaTex saw the light of day. Long before.

            LaTex was based on what was already available elsewhere for quite some time. But now in difficult to decipher scripting form.

            The Xerox Alto was first shipped more than a decade before LaTex and people like me had been WYSIWYG'ing on a daily basis in MacWrite, WriteNow etc for several years by the time LaTex shipped in stable form

            1. Vincent Manis

              Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto

              Some corrections. LaTeX (notice corrected capitalization) is a macro package that runs on Donald Knuth's TeX system, which he started developing in 1977. At that time (Xerox PARC and a few other places aside), people did word processing on character terminals, and printed the result out to see what it looked like. The Mac did not exist; in fact, the Apple ][ went on sale a month after Knuth's original notes on what would become TeX. Furthermore, LaTeX itself is based upon an earlier typesetting program called Scribe, by Brian K. Reid, circa 1980.

              TeX itself has quite modest memory requirements, and has not grown substantially in many years, though nowadays I and many use the LuaTeX engine, which is a bit larger than Knuth's classic. It is true that a modern TeX distribution would overflow a CD (about 5.5GiB currently), but that is all the macro packages, ancillary programs, fonts, and other miscellanea provided. You do need a text editor and a PDF viewer for actual work, but nowadays those are pretty much provided with a base OS.

              My own view of modern TeX/LaTeX systems as tools for writing long-form, complex documents with math and embedded code echoes Winston Churchill's comment on democracy: “the worst form ... except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto..."notes"...you're joking?

                So Knuth had some "notes" in 1977 and that proves it "came before" the Alto, Star etc? In 1977 I was doodling "notes" about faster than light photon drives so they must have existed...

                I take it you are not a commercial software developer then. You're someone who believes that just because someone wrote a paper about something that this is the same as having shipping software. That works. That can be used. By people. On their own computers.

                An academic perhaps?

                The first version of TeX was written in a language that only ran on DEC 10's/20's. Remember those? I do. Learned PASCAL on a DEC20 although was more of a PDP 11 man myself. Until seduced away by Vaxes.

                The first version of TeX that could actually be run anywhere else (although you had to compile it yourself) was in 1982. Written in PASCAL. In the summer of 1982 we were drooling over the Xerox Stars we saw at trade-shows. Running SmallTalk80 and some very nice WYSIWYG editors.

                The LISA shipped six month later. It had even better WYSIWYG editors.

                In 1986 shipped LaTeX. At least one that worked without a lot of faffing about. But faffing there was. The early X Windows releases from 1984 onwards were just as flakey as the early versions of X. Got the official hardware vendor build - great. If not. You were usually out of luck.

                So in 1986 I wrote several long tech manuals on a Mac in WriteNow. Did all the page layout on screen. Did final layout on a (prototype) Radius Full Page Display monitor. Then printed it out on a LaserWriter on nice white 90 gram paper and sent that off as the camera ready finals to the printer. For the first 5K print run. By printer I mean the guy with a building full of big noisy offset litho machines. With metal plates on drums. Machines often inked up with builders spatulas. I do love the smell of Swarfega in the Morning...almost as nasty as napalm

                Still have those manuals stored away somewhere. They still look pretty professional. Even if I say so myself.

                Try doing that in 1986 with LaTex. And how long it would have taken you? 10x longer? 20x? Just because it could layout fancy math equations for your thesis or paper without too much hair pulling back then (which few were going to read anyway) doesn't mean it was actually all that "powerful". It wasn't. And isn't. For anything other than very niche specialized small scale layout tasks. Very niche. Like complex equations in footnotes. For which it is the perfect tool. As with all Domain Specific Languages. Which is what TeX is. A DSL.

                Other than that TeX is basically the chorded keyboard of large document layout. Which came out in its first usable form several years after the rest of us went WYSIWYG .

                1. Vincent Manis

                  Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto..."notes"...you're joking?

                  I think you misunderstood my comment. I mentioned that WYSIWYG existed at PARC then (I visited PARC in 1974, and saw what I think was an early version of Bravo). I suspect that Knuth knew something about it, given the distance between Stanford's CS building and PARC, but he was trying to build a program that would typeset his books the way he thought they should look, and WYSIWYG just didn't cut it in those days. I suspect he also knew about the Bell Labs pic/eqn/troff toolchain, too. The guy does encyclopedic research.

                  As for writing a paper versus shipping copies of software, we were looking at when these various tools were designed, in other words, the intellectual roots, as shown in papers, etc. If that makes me an academic, guilty! I'm retired now, but taught software engineering not only in universities, but also to industry. But shipping things has nothing to do with what's possible: a lot of defunct word processors shipped lots of copies, but really were not very good. Re WriteNow: I'm glad it satisfied your needs. Many people find MS-Word or FrameMaker satisfies theirs. But I doubt that WriteNow, in 1986, could have produced a paper that, say, the American Mathematical Society or the Association for Computing Machinery would have accepted as camera-ready copy. That was Knuth's goal, even though it may not have been yours.

                  As for that document I produced with it, it was a user manual for a simple programming environment I wrote for first-year students. No math at all, but lots of structured text (e.g., command reference descriptions). I can confidently say that no other software accessible to me at the time could have done the job, as at that time TeX could drive a laser printer and nothing else I had could. Admittedly, I wasn't using TeX for the purposes Knuth intended, but it satisfied my needs.

                  I can also say that LaTeX at that time did not satisfy my needs, primarily because its font support was primitive. I co-authored a book in the early 1990s, and used a format I developed that looked LaTeX-like, but handled my font needs (I too was aware of Scribe). However, font handling has vastly improved in LaTeX, and I stopped using my custom format long ago.

                  As for 10x the work, I was forced to use FrameMaker for one project when I worked for $BIGCOMPANY. I found it adequate for the job, but it took me about the same amount of time as a comparable job done in LaTeX. Any of these systems (even MS-Word) has a significant learning curve. I used to give my students the task of creating a style sheet in Word for their documentation; they found this a real challenge. But once one has the tools, actually knocking out documents is quite easy.

                  I did not understand your comment about flakiness. Knuth is famous for logging every bug ever found in TeX; I found even the prereleases fairly solid, and once it went into release, it was very solid. LaTeX may have been buggy in those days, though I never used it until the late 90s. Even if it was, my reply is simple: Windows 3.0 shipped a lot of copies, and it had a few bugs.

                  I fully understand that you perceive no need for TeX, and agree that it has limited domains (e.g., you wouldn't do newspaper layouts with it).On the other hand, it has been used to typeset many books. Pandoc uses it as a backend when you convert HTML or Markdown into PDF. It has been used in industry for everything from railway timetables to producing telecom bills. There is a real difference between “I don't need this” and “this is useless”.

                  1. Anonymous Coward
                    Anonymous Coward

                    Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto..."notes"...you're joking?

                    As you may or may not have have guessed I have a very deep history with commercial WP and DTP software starting in the 1980's. As in lead programmer / tech architect level history. One of the positions I turned down (odd company politics) was lead for one of the products you mentioned.

                    What interesting about the last almost 50 odd years of the history of this product category is just how little influence TeX / Metafont seemed to have had on the commercial ISV software developed over the decades. For shipped products. About as much influence as emacs from what I saw over the years.

                    I think that is a good analogy. With Emacs. Emacs just like TeX has a hard core very loyal (and small) user base for whom it is very productive. Very productive indeed. And emacs like TeX has less of a learning curve than a learning cliff. I remember breaking open "Computers & Typesetting" soon after it was published and even though I knew inside out the codebase for a high end WYSIWYG WP with serious DTP features Knuth had me scratching my head with WFT is this guy talking about on more than one occasion. I went looking for useful ideas. All I found was basically academic effusion. For someone who was looking to architect / rearchitect exactly what this guy was describing it read a bit like a sex manual written by a virgin. Too many academic books are like this I'm afraid. Although some are absolute goldmines for useful ideas. If only inadvertently.

                    Maybe its because I have seen way too much of the low level mechanics of page-layout/typefaces/pre-press (plus I know exactly how all this worked before computers came along) that its very obvious to me at least when a book / paper has been prepared using TeX. For a start the leading usually looks "wrong". Leading in WP/DTP land ultimately came from the pre-press world. What look "right" to the pre-press guys of decades past is what became the standard way of doing things, Which is why even really old WP software that had a really crude concept of leading still looked better when published than so much of the TeX output I've seen. Unless the person using TeX really knows what they are doing. What looks "right' to most people is what looks like everything else they are familiar with. As the Color Management people discovered the hard way.

                    And that's just one example. Its just very easy to tell. For someone in the business.

                    But as I have always told people - if it works for you then use it. But when it comes to whether something like TeX or emacs etc has any relevant for 99.99% of software end users the answer is none at all. So that's why despite what its academic mindshare may be in certain parts of academia TeX has been pretty much irrelevant in the wider world of people getting work done.

                    As for any "flakiness". I was referring to versions of LaTex that were kicking around in the mid / late 1980's. Which was mostly on X-Windows from what I saw who was actually using it at the time. It was hard to tell where the problem was but generally the stability of what was running on X depending on where the X build came from. Any kind of "official" release from one of the workstation vendors like Sun, Apollo, DEC etc and it was usually OK. Relatively speaking. Other builds, very hit and miss. But as always. It got much better with time.

                    But back to the original point. Literally millions were doing WYSIWYG document creation and publishing the year Knuths first book was published. And not hidden away in some monograph from almost a decade earlier that could only be found locally in the Stanford or UC Berkeley library. The same year that the first useable version of software based on his work was widely available to others than a very narrow academic community. Precedence (I thought of it first) may be paramount in the academic world but out in the real world its who shipped the first useable end-user software for a wide audience that actually matters. Which is the world I have worked in since the 1980's. So a very different perspective on history of the area.

                    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

                      Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto..."notes"...you're joking?

                      I was referring to versions of LaTex that were kicking around in the mid / late 1980's. Which was mostly on X-Windows from what I saw who was actually using it at the time.

                      LaTeX, as a package of macros for TeX, does not have a user interface; and TeX's UI is text only. So X11 (not "X-Windows") has never had anything to do with it. These days there are a number of LaTex and TeX implementations, some of which include GUI utilities and possibly GUI front-ends; but no 1980s implementation that I'm aware of had any X clients.

                      Comments like that don't help your arguments, as they don't show much understanding of the TeX / LaTeX toolchain.

                      1. Anonymous Coward
                        Anonymous Coward

                        Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac ... TeX cranks

                        One thing that has not changed over the last 40 years is that TeX people are some of the greatest bunch of pedantic cranks you are every likely to meet. Almost as bad as emacs people. And yes, I first used emacs on a Symbolics 3600. It was hate at first sight.

                        Let me explain. I wrote wp/dtp shrink-wrap software that sold by the many 100K's SKU's (know what they are) to people who wanted to get work done. Ordinary people who wanted to layout and print pretty nice looking documents. In as short amount of time and with as little heartache, frustration and exasperation as possible. For a market that is 10's of millions of computer users. Every day.

                        Guess what. No one and I mean no one but a crank wants to learn some half assed and totally arcane language and badly designed toolset so that they can produce results in at least ten times the time (once they have invested a huge amount of time learning it in the first place) that 95% of time look worse than the default MS-Word output. Yes, the typical TeX output I've seen over the decades looks pretty damn ugly. Sometimes almost 1983 monospace dot matrix Multimate output ugly.

                        So I cannot remember minor details about tools I had a quick look and quickly discarded as utterly useless 35+ years ago. Well whoop-de-doo. Some us were leading dev teams and had very tight schedule to hit so why waste time of the pointless useless scratchings of some academic. Which is what it was. And what it remains after 40 years of not making any impression on the wider world.

                        Lets see. Ever strip an off-set litho machine and ink it up? Burn plates? Then guillotine, trim, stich and bind. Why do I think no. How about layout by hand camera ready with rulers, scalpels etc and a few sheets of Letraset? A few dozen pages. Every week. The world that was automated by DTP. That's what informed my attitude to how wp/dtp software should works. To reduce the time consuming drudgery. Thinking about who was going to be using the software. Normal people. The 99.999% Not the very tiny minority who got a kick by learning yet another pointless language. Which is exactly what TeX is. A very complicated solution to a problem that was solved much better many decades ago. A solution that everyone (i.e ordinary users) could actually use. A solution that worked even before TeX saw the light of say in any kind of useable form.

                        Sorry to be blunt but TeX is just yet another example of the academic Comp Sci circle-jerk that characterizes about 95% of the published research papers. The academic books tend to be a bit more useful. As for Knuth despite his academic reputation TeX had zero impact. GUI WYSIWYG content creation software / PostScript won that war. Because it was good enough and it worked. Metafont was an even bigger failure. PostScript Type 1,3 fonts / TrueType won that war. And his supposed magnum opus "The Art of Computer Programming" I found of so little use in the real world of commercial software dev that not once did it provide a viable useable (shippable) solution to a real work problem in 40 years. While books by people like Robert Sedgewick (one of the 5% really useful in the real world academics ) have come up trumps with useful solutions again and again over the decades. My 1990 copy of Sedgewick's book was the best $45 I ever spent. Still sitting on my bookshelf with his other books.

                        As long as there are cranks who insist on doing things the hard way there will always be a market for something like TeX. A very small demographic. Long may you have fun with your toy and may it give you much amusement as you try to make it do what you want. The hard way.

                        Now back to work. I've got code to debug and a product to ship. Do you?

                  2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

                    Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto..."notes"...you're joking?

                    WYSIWYG just didn't cut it in those days.

                    And still doesn't, for anyone who wants things actually typeset, rather than just slapped on a page. Things like "overfull hbox" is a feature, not a bug; it's saying there isn't any satisfactory way to justify your text within the constraints you've specified, and you need to tweak the text if you want good layout. And anyone who's ever looked closely at, say, Word's kerning knows that WYSIWYG word processor isn't a what-you-see-is-what-you-ought-to-get formatter.

                    I suspect he also knew about the Bell Labs pic/eqn/troff toolchain, too.

                    And its forerunners in CTSS RUNOFF (1964) and IBM Script (1968).

                2. timrowledge

                  Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto..."notes"...you're joking?

                  “Running SmallTalk80 and some very nice WYSIWYG editors.” Small point of pedantry here “Smalltalk-80”. We were doing nice font properly spaced documents around 1972.

              2. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto

                Knew a professor who wrote everything in emacs and used LaTeX for publication. this was around 1995. he had access to perfectly good word processor and computer. Philosophy and religion, so i don't think equation formatting was a requirement.

                1. Vincent Manis

                  Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto

                  Actually, TeX has quite a following in the humanities, because of things like good footnoting, figure placement, bilingual parallel texts, and bibliographies. I can't speak to why a philosopher might find it useful, but no doubt he had his reasons.

          2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

            Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

            [Author here]

            > before the advent of WYSIWYG, LaTex was invented...

            You've got your timeline wildly out.

            The first version of LaTeX was June 1984, about 6 months _after_ the first Apple Macintosh, three years after the Lisa and about a decade after Bravo on the Xerox Alto.

            https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/16/the_xerox_alto_50_years/

            So, not even close, no. TeX itself is a decade older, and contemporaneous with the Alto, but TeX is not even slightly WYSIWYG.

            1. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

              "TeX itself is a decade older, and contemporaneous with the Alto, but TeX is not even slightly WYSIWYG."

              But they weren't saying that it was. They were saying that it was a non-WYSIWYG way of writing when you care about the visual design, rather than just writing down words, pointing out that, even without WYSIWYG software, people wanted to do that. Most of the LaTeX software isn't WYSIWYG either, though they've now got some that render instantly.

              1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

                Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

                > But they weren't saying that it was. They were saying that it was a non-WYSIWYG way of writing when you care about the visual design

                Hmmm. I have reread williamyf's post, and that's an interpretation, I suppose. I still think it's wrong:

                * LaTeX is not TeX

                * Neither LaTeX nor TeX is WYSIWYG

                * TeX and WYSISYG are very loosely contemporaneous -- it's before WYSIWYG was common, certainly

                But once we disentangle these things, we're left with "there were text-formatting layout tools before WYSIWYG". Well, yes, we know that. TeX wasn't the first by a _long_ shot

                Early Unix had `roff` from ~1971. That was a Unix version of RUNOFF which goes back to ~1961 or so.

                So the statement is empty, ISTM.

                WYSIWYG came after non-WYSIWYG. Yes, we know that.

                There was text formatting before WYSIWYG. Well obviously or showing it on screen wouldn't be a big deal.

                There was style-based non-user-determined formatting before user-based formatting. Yes, that is what I'd expect, yes.

                What is the core point here apart from making a wrong statement by getting a date a decade wrong?

                1. First came offline rules-based formatting.

                2. Then came user-defined formatting which wasn't rules based.

                3. Then came tools that showed it to you as you did it.

                4. After all of them came tools like LyX (1995), which is kinda sorta LaTeX but WYSIWYG.

                1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

                  Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

                  And good luck to anyone wanting to do really complex layout such as splitting a map across facing pages using rules based layout. They're either going to have to be very, very good at applying the rules in their head or else use a lot of proofing runs to get good results. For that sort of writing using WYSIWYG is the equivalent of moving from punched cards and batch compiling to programming in an IDE.

                2. doublelayer Silver badge

                  Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

                  "What is the core point here apart from making a wrong statement by getting a date a decade wrong?"

                  We agree that the dates are wrong. Their point, which is mostly irrelevant to TeX, how powerful it was, and when it existed, is that some people care about the visual layout. They said this in order to respond to someone who did not care about the layout:

                  AC: "if I was writing a modern replacement for "War and Peace", surely I'm interested in the words and not the fonts?"

                  Their main point was that people do care about layouts sometimes, and they are the reason why WYSIWYG tools existed, and before WYSIWYG tools were practical, non-WYSIWYG tools which handled more than just the words of a document were used. Incidentally, they never claimed that LaTeX was WYSIWYG as it was specifically their example of a non-WYSIWYG tool. They got the tool wrong in that description, but their core point, although it has mostly been lost to smaller details, is correct. Some people do care about more than the words. They are the reason why WYSIWYG editors have existed, and that is at least partially the reason why LibreOffice has so many features that take up so many resources.

          3. Ian Johnston Silver badge

            Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

            LaTeX makes it almost impossible for the users to specify where a word is placed and the style file specifies the font. That's the point of it.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @AC - Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          In that case, you could just use Vim (Windows or Linux it's your choice).

          And then pay someone to arrange it for printing (fonts, formatting and all that stuff).

          A long time ago (yes, I'm grey bearded), I translated a book so I typed it using EDT on RSX-11 running on a local (East-European) flavour of PDP-7. Then printed everything on an Epson dot matrix printer.

          Do you still want to go there ?

          1. DexterWard

            Re: @AC - CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

            W Richard Stevens wrote the first edition of “Unix Network Programming” using vi, and typeset it using troff. That’s pretty hardcore

            1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

              Re: @AC - CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

              I wonder how many proof runs it took to get an acceptable layout. The original Unix development was effectively financed at Bell Labs as a means of WP of patent applications. A networking textbook is more hardcore than that.

              OTOH try a book which has maps and photographs, keeping the text describing them onto the same or a facing page as far as possible. Add the complication of some of these being split across facing pages. That's harder core. And wondering why adding a few words at the op of a page has suddenly left a white gap at the bottom until you realise that there was no longer room for both a footnote an the paragraph that referenced it.

              Complex layout is tricky. The advantage of WYSiWYG is that your proofing happens continuously on screen in front of your eyes.

            2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

              Re: @AC - CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

              I wrote my undergraduate thesis, which admittedly is a mere 47 pages single-spaced, in vi using roff. Wasn't difficult.

              My master's thesis, actually a bit shorter at 77 pages but mostly double-spaced, I wrote in LyX, with some tweaking of the LaTeX in vi to comply with the exacting and arbitrary requirements of the Graduate School for depositing. Also not difficult.

              Much of my academic writing in my first stint in graduate school I did in WordPerfect, which was OK. A number of those essays are longer than either thesis.

              If I'd had to use Word, or anything running on a Mac, I'd have given up. I've used Word and Macs.

        4. Terry 6 Silver badge

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          if I was writing a modern replacement for "War and Peace",

          I think that would be rather a smaller market than the one for LibreOffice/Open Office/MSWord/Mac What ever they use/etc/

          And pretty fonts do come in handy when you are making a sales leaflet, a menu, a letterhead etc.

        5. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          ... and you'd probably be using something like Scrivener, something that is designed to actually help write long books and scripts.

          1. werdsmith Silver badge

            Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

            ... and you'd probably be using something like Scrivener, something that is designed to actually help write long books and scripts.

            Scrivener is good at the organisation and construction of a long publication. Keeps track of it all.

            It still goes into DTP for the layout. For me lately I go from scraps of text to Scrivener and from Scrivener to Affinity (or to Scribus if it will handle it).

        6. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          if I was writing a modern replacement for "War and Peace", surely I'm interested in the words and not the fonts?

          If you were writing it for self publishing you might well be more interested in fonts etc. Even more so if you were writing non fiction with a need to provide headings, sub headings, insert images and tables, keep track of references to these in the text etc. Alternatively you could use a plain text editor and then something like Scribus or InDesign to separate text from layout.

          A word processor is more than a simple text editor. Both have their uses.

        7. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          W&P written with a quill and bottle of ink. As were A Christmas carol, Pride and Prejudice, the 3 musketeers. More recent classics written with typewriters. easier in some ways. Remember a writer saying that his productivity dropped when he started to use a word processor because he kept editing and re-editing where with a typewriter he just decided enough was enough. Word processor just made it too easy to tweak things.

          They may have had real pens with metal nibs for many of those stories, copper nibs possibly pre 79 ad.

      2. heyrick Silver badge

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        "WYSIWYG"

        A had that, in 1990, with a DTP package that ran on a 1MB Archimedes with only floppy discs. So... point still stands.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          I was going to say the same but on an Amiga.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

            Ditto, even earlier on a BBC micro. It came with a mouse too, since few people had even heard of a mouse back then :-)

            AMX mouse with AMX Pagemaker (long before Aldus took the name for it's own DTP system)

      3. Ian Johnston Silver badge

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        I used to run LaTeX on an Atari MegaST 2 with a single floppy disk drive. Wrote a thesis that way. A LaTeX install is now 6GB.

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          You can create a stripped-down LaTeX installation that's quite a lot smaller, depending on what packages you're actually going to use, and what LaTeX implementation you use.

      4. TReko Silver badge

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        Multiscribe, a word processor for the Apple 2e and 2c did full WYSIWYG in 128kB on a 1MHz 6502.

        The original MacWrite did the same in 128kB.

        Modern software is many layers of inefficiency and no-one cares as hardware is cheap.

      5. Christian Berger

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        Actually it can't be WYSIWYG since on the C64 you could get GeoWrite which offered WYSIWYG there... in 64k... on a much worse CPU.

      6. LybsterRoy Silver badge

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        "WYSIWYG"

        I'm dubious about that answer, depending on the full definition of "using hundreds of megabytes" I had an Amstrad PC1512 which had WYSIWYG DTP so less than 512 MB in use.

      7. Wayland

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        I remember in the '90's I was writing library code in C and they wanted us to write documentation for each function as we went.

        The project leader had set up a word perfect template in the text version of the WP. Simply by using the correct paragraph tags perfectly structured manual pages could be printed on the laser printer. I've never worked on such a well set up WP system before or since.

      8. Jeffslater

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        No WYSIWYG came along on the original IBM PC and that had a maximum of 1 megabyte RAM.

        We did manage to produce useful software on 64k machines.

        It used to be fun finding ways to make stuff quicker and smaller occasionally dropping into assembly language. When I finally retired it was all boring java (and the like) Lego programming (which relies on massive amounts of memory and fast processors) and efficiency is a dirty word (it costs money)

    2. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

      Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

      Libreoffice does a lot more. There's nothing stopping anyone using Wordstar on a modern system with a small amount of effort, or for that matter early versions of WordPerfect, but few people do.

      Even at the time I was using both an Amstrad PCW and a 286 PC, the PC was far more functional. Supercalc just wasn't comparable to Lotus 1-2-3 at the time. WordPerfect did an awful lot more than Locoscript, Protext, or Wordstar.

      CP/M is a good system, and I still have a few computers that can run it (PCW, Agon Console8, Spectrum Next, NC100 and NC200, RC2014 when I get around to building it), but if you start using DOS it shows various advantages very quickly, even on an 8086. Depending on your needs, potentially insufficient advantage for the increased price at the time, but it is a more powerful platform.

      I do have a very large soft spot for the PCW, it was my first serious computer, and for the price and the capabilities was one of the best, if not the best, CP/M machine (although granted, Locoscript isn't a CP/M program, and programs such as Micro Design 2 are not exactly very portable, running only on the PCW and CPC)

      1. BenDwire Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        Before the PCW was around, there was a thriving business in IBM-XT Clones, and my company ponied up £3k for a twin disk model in 1985 for my new PCB design system. I ended up using Jim Button's Brown Bag Software who had a version of PC-Write which was much simpler to use than Wordstar (which I used at home on my CP/M machine). There was also a spreadsheet (PC-Calc ?) which worked as well as the spreadsheet on the Apple //c machines we also had.

        The whole shareware scene in the 1980's was amazing, and to my credit I bought proper licences as I was using them for commercial purposes. Yes, I even bought PK-ZIp back in the day ...

        1. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          PC_Write!

          TFTM

    3. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

      Ditto. Wordstar on a Amstrad CPC6128 did my degree dissertation.

      This meant that when I was nearly late for the submission deadline, there were no photocopy places open. So I just printed the entire thing out 3 times on my Canon PW1080a dot matrix, in NLQ mode. I did get the 3 copies onto the counter at the bindery with 30 minutes to spare!

      1. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        Er, why yes, I still own both the CPC6128 and the printer!

      2. Martin an gof Silver badge

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        Wordstar on a Amstrad CPC6128 did my degree dissertation

        A friend did all his degree and postgrad work on a PCW8256 with dot matrix.

        Another friend had a ?286? at home but no printer, so brought me raw PCL5 files I could stream to my Canon LBP4. Very posh.

        My sister did all her degree work on a Canon Starwriter.

        I did a PGCE on a Psion 5mx and an old HP Inkjet. Saved a lot of space in my room in halls and immune to power cuts.

        I still write emails in plain text with a monospaced display font where possible :-)

        M.

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

          [Author here]

          > I still write emails in plain text with a monospaced display font where possible :-)

          All the best people do.

      3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        "Ditto. Wordstar on a Amstrad CPC6128 did my degree dissertation."

        Pampered kids!

        Typewriter, editing with scissors and stapler.

        And back in the day, publishing involved galley proofs and page proofs where edits had to preserve the line length to avoid having to reset entire pages. However it did save the day when I was given somebody's page proofs to read and realised there were errors converting imperial to metric (or possibly the other way about) which really mattered because it dealt with sea-level changes. They had been missed in his thesis by both his supervisor and the external examiner, by the journal editor and reviewer and in the galleys.

    4. BenDwire Silver badge

      Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

      We had a couple of Superbrains tucked away in room adjacent to the design lab, and they both ran Wordstar for us engineers to write up reports. Being young, ernest and skint, I bought a "Matmos PC" from the back pages of a computer magazine for about £200. Twin floppy discs, one Z80 and a very odd keyboard all running CP/M. Originally made by the German typewriter company, Triumph Adler, they were sold off cheap as they were so slow.

      However, I managed to PIP Wordstar from a Superbrain via the serial port to my Matmos, and that was officially my first dodgy copy of any software. Slow as molasses, but at least it worked well enough until I could afford something better.

      1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        Mention of TA and weird keyboard reminded me of the (pretty much identical*) TA Alphatronic machines we had at university in the late 80s - they'd been repurposed as terminals for the campus network.

        * https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/sec/5078/Triumph-AdlerAlphatronic-Matmos-PC/

    5. Chris Gray 1
      Go

      Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

      I didn't remember dBase-II swapping like that, but now that you mention it... I still have a dBase-II directory here on my Linux box, and I see a file called "dbaseovr.com" - that might be the overlay.

      I used it to write 3 different store and/or inventory systems for local small companies. And looking, I see that I still have the source for all 3. Me, a pack rat? :-) Two have files like "012085$i.dbf" - I'm guessing those are test database files.

      I also have 3 commercial games: Adventure, Enchanter, OrbQuest, and my own "Explore" game system - way better!!!

      I used "VEdit" for editting. But, a friend bought a kit (which I helped build) for a CP/M computer. She didn't have an editor, so I wrote my Ded (Draco EDitor) for her. Not sure she ever used it much, but I switched to using it - I had seen microemacs able to handle multiple files in memory, so I made Ded do that, and that was enough to make me switch. It "compressed" files you editted - turned runs of spaces (like in source code) into a count.

    6. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

      [Author here]

      > Aside: if I can do word processing with Wordstar in a 64K memory machine, why am I using hundreds of megabytes for LibreOffice in 2024??

      Just for what it's worth, before this was published, I have an article coming on WordStar, getting it today, and how to run it on a modern OS. With a screenshot of me writing the copy, in real live WordStar, on macOS 12...

      1. Ian 55

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        Can we have NewWord instead?

        A better WS than WS 3 to the point that they bought it and rebranded it as a later WS version from memory.

    7. mevets

      Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

      In 1983, RAM was about $2000 / MB; thus $125 / 64KB.

      In 2024, RAM is about $0.00128 / MB; thus $0.00008 / 64KB

      So, if your modern electronic typewriter is using:

      100MB the cost is $0.12

      200MB the cost is $0.24

      ....

      1000MB the cost is $2.40

      ...

      98 000MB the cost is $125

      Whereas, in 1983, if your electronic typewriter is using

      64KB the cost is $125

      So, your 2024 electronic typewriter is about 60 times more efficient than your 1983 model.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

        about 60 times more efficient economical

        But a good point non-the-less.

    8. MacroRodent
      Boffin

      Overlays (Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!)

      > So dBase had two blocks of memory: a core block in memory, and an overlay block

      Overlays is how many large programs worked, also on MS-DOS. The Microsoft linker had support for specifying which object files were part of the fixed block, which could be swapped in when functions in them were called. I never did CP/M development, but I suspect it had tool kits that did the same. After 32-bit 386 and its successors became common, large MS-DOS programs started using DOS extenders instead of overlays. Much easier for the programmer, and more efficient.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Overlays (CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!)

        Turbo Pascal 3.0 also included an overlay mechanism, IIRC. That was useful since it only generated .COM executables, which were limited to a single segment of code.

    9. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

      Way to derail a thread on post 1.

    10. Uncle William

      Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

      The Osborne and dBaseII were the start of a business for me. Program and Constants file on Drive A, data on Drive B. Shortly afterwards we made it sort of work on MP/M (which has been mentioned in these responses). A bit of a dog's breakfast especially with the hardware then available. The system was for a newspaper group c1985 and was quickly re-written in RM-Cobol which on NCR's CP/Net Modus system provided proper record locking and the business took off. CP/M had Level 0 to 9 (?). Anything in Level 0 was available to all other levels but the other levels were private to eachother so we could have different routines, utilities, software in different levels.

      I've still got the Osborne though it's not been fired up for year or ten.

  2. Mockup1974

    According to https://eylenburg.github.io/os_familytree.htm there used to be a CP/M descendant called "4690 OS" that was still being supported until recently. It's probably this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System

    So I guess nowadays only FreeDOS remains as a spiritual successor to CP/M.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      [Author here]

      > a CP/M descendant called "4690 OS"

      Yep, it's one of the last offshoots of FlexOS, which came from Concurrent CP/M. I mentioned it this time last year:

      https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/the_many_derivatives_of_cpm/

      1. ghp

        For most of us, 2023 lasted a whole year too.

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
        2. heyrick Silver badge
          Happy

          What, you mean this isn't 2020-and-a-bit?

  3. Gene Cash Silver badge

    My 1st yobbish was MP/M 8-16

    I've mentioned before that my first job was tending a network of CompuPro MP/M 8-16 boxen, which was CP/M with a very small hack that could take advantage of CompuPro's 8088/8085 dual CPU board, and a very large hack that did multitasking.

    I don't remember the details of why, but I remember feeling DRI was kind of a bag of dicks.

    1. Chris Gray 1
      Go

      Re: My 1st yobbish was MP/M 8-16

      I had one of those boards in my system. It was a *very* expensive system - 20 slot S-100 box, dual 8" floppy box, Epsom MX-80 printer and a small terminal (Adds Viewpoint?), 1200 baud modem. I didn't have MP/M, but I remember trying it out at a local computer store.

      I don't really know why, but I wrote an 8080 emulator for the 8088 side, and it actually ran some of the CP/M programs I had. A couple of games didn't work - maybe they used undocumented BIOS stuff. My Draco stuff *did* work, so maybe I was thinking about make an 8086 version of it - never did, though.

      1. Chris Gray 1

        Re: My 1st yobbish was MP/M 8-16

        Grr. Epson, not Epsom. I'm an old salt.

        1. Ken Shabby
          Windows

          Re: My 1st yobbish was MP/M 8-16

          Or a punter.

        2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: My 1st yobbish was MP/M 8-16

          Sitz and ponder your mistake.

          (The judges would also accept "that near-homophone is a pain in the arse".)

  4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    We had an S-100 box using cards from SD Systems. The OS was S-DOS. I'm not sure whether it was a CP/M clone, a ripped-off version or a licenced version re-branded but whatever ti was it did everything CP/M did, ran everything CP/M ran and was functionally indistinguishable. We also had a Microsoft FORTRAN compiler for it.

    Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Microsoft “licensed” QDOS from SCP

    Microsoft licensed it from SCP, renamed it MS-DOS, and licensed it on to IBM, while retaining the rights to sell it on to other companies. The rest is history.

    __21: Unknown error Dave:__

    SCP might have assumed they had licensed QDOS. But the terms of the agreement allowed MS to wriggle out of that. Effectively, Microsoft outright bought QDOS (MS-DOS) from SCP and licensed it in a non-exclusive contract to IBM. IBM unknowingly provided the finance up-front for the purchase. Curiously enough ClippyAI has this to say on the subject: "IBM agreed to fund Microsoft’s purchase of QDOS"

    ref:

    “This license agreement is made and entered into this 6th day of January, 1981, by and between SEATTLE COMPUTER PRODUCTS INC, a Washington Corporation (hereinafter referred to as SCP), and MICROSOFT, a Washington general partnership (hereinafter referred to as MS)”

    Joint developement agreement between International Business Machines corporation and Microsoft Corporation

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Microsoft “licensed” QDOS from SCP

      [Author here]

      That PDF says August 1985 on it, which would place it early in the development of OS/2.

      IBM and MS didn't really co-develop DOS, AFAIK -- IBM just added small tweaks until DOS 4, and that wasn't all that massively different, really.

    2. Ian 55

      Re: Microsoft “licensed” QDOS from SCP

      My memory is telling me that Microsoft started by licensing it and then, once they realised the legal implications might stop them making a shit load of money, bought it outright.

      They ended up paying more later, didn't they? Something around not bothering to mention things like "we're gonna resell it to IBM"?

      1. IvyKing Bronze badge

        Re: Microsoft “licensed” QDOS from SCP

        I seem to recall that M$ paid SCP due to SCP taking advantage of having the rights to MS-DOS for their own CPU's. SCP had started selling an NEC chip to the replace the 8088 in IBM PC's and then stating it was an SCP supplied CPU. M$ sued SCP to stop this practice and apparently ended up with a lot of egg on their face.

      2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: Microsoft “licensed” QDOS from SCP

        > My memory is telling me that Microsoft started by licensing it and then, once they realised the legal implications might stop them making a shit load of money, bought it outright.

        I _think_ the chronology went:

        1. MS pays SCP to design the Microsoft Softcard, for running CP/M on an Apple ][. Developer: Tim Paterson

        2. SCP designs an S100 bus 8086 card. CP/M-86 was already announced but not finished or shipping. The board runs MS Standalone Disk BASIC.

        3. Some ~6 months later, still no CP/M-86 yet, Paterson writes QDOS, re-implementing CP/M-80 on 8086 but using the MS BASIC disk format

        4. MS pays $25K to licence what is now called 86-DOS.

        5. ~6mth later, MS pays another $50K for full rights, but SCP keeps an unlimited license to sell it on its own boards, and does so. Eventually it sells "Seattle DOS" with just a CPU chip in the box.

        [IBM launches the PC]

        6. ~6mth after the PC, DR launces CP/M-86. IBM charges $40 for DOS or $240 for CP/M-86.

        [Time passes. Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.]

        6. Paterson leaves SCP and ends up at MS.

        7. Paterson writes MSX-DOS for the MSX micros: CP/M compatible but with the DOS disk format and commands.

        8. MS buys 86-DOS outright for another $925K.

        1. IvyKing Bronze badge

          Re: Microsoft “licensed” QDOS from SCP

          I would modify "3." to read "re-implementing the CP/M-80 API on 8086".

          Since Intel designed the 8086 to be largely source code compatible with the 8080, it was in SCP's interest to make porting CP/M-80 code to 86-DOS as easy as possible. Hence 86-DOS having an utility for translating Z-80 assembler to SCP's assembler syntax and another utility for reading CP/M formatted floppies. The names of some file operations were chosen to be easier to understand, e.g. COPY and ERASE (which was the original 86-DOS command for erasing files). One other difference between CP/M and 86-DOS was the latter recording file size as actual number of bytes.

          The general point of the article is correct with respect to why CP/M was so important. Having a standard API for software greatly increased the market for both commercial and "free" software, which then led to a wider variety of software.

          I do remember picking up a Digital Research flyer at the First West Coast Computer Faire - along with an original Apple II flyer.

          1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

            Re: Microsoft “licensed” QDOS from SCP

            > "re-implementing the CP/M-80 API on 8086".

            Yeah, OK, I will happily concede that. :-)

            I still don't think it's a _clone_ of CP/M. It's a compatible re-implementation for a different CPU, partly because it took DR _three years_ to ship CP/M-86.

            I have long preferred DR's products to MS's, but even so, ISTM the company got complacent, sat there collecting the cheques and not doing a lot while the market shifted underneath and around it. The IBM PC wasn't the first 8086 machine. (Heck, IBM's own DisplayWriter used it over a year earlier.)

            It then, belatedly, got busy and had some modest successes, but not as great as it deserved.

            If you read the "Oral History of Brian L. Halla" I link to you will find another surprising fact about Dr Kildall...

  6. Luiz Abdala
    Holmes

    Theseus Ship

    I wonder how much of the C/PM syntax would make sense for a modern user of MS-DOS, as the thing was gradually being changed in a MS product in the "7.0" version inside windows.

    And how much of proprietary code MS slapped on top.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Theseus Ship

      pip had the source/destination the other way around from copy.

      I had a stupid idea once to write a CP/M command interpreter for mobile. So, to send a text message, compose it using ED then enter:

      pip <phone number>=message.txt

      to send the message. To do a voice call:

      pip <phone number>=PHONE:

      IMs:

      pip <phone number>=CON:

    2. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

      Re: Theseus Ship

      Some of it, but you'll quickly run into the use of PIP vs COPY, the lack of almost any built in commands, absence of directories, and time stamps until CP/M 3.0. I think if you'd started with DOS 6/7 and never experienced early DOS releases you'd struggle.

      An early programmer of DOS would note a number of API similarities.

      There was also no standard in screen addressing, and GSX wasn't exactly widely used for graphics. For DOS at least text mode had a defined API, and there wasn't a need to enter terminal types or impenetrable control codes to patch programs to do cursor addressing.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Theseus Ship

        "For DOS at least text mode had a defined API, and there wasn't a need to enter terminal types or impenetrable control codes to patch programs to do cursor addressing."

        Yes, well, for the time period, there was only MDA and CGA. It's a lot easier to target a single system architecture than to target multiple different type of hardware from multiple vendors in a time before compatibility was seen to be a potentially good thing.

        Of course, there were other systems that ran MS-DOS and were NOT IBM compatible, so addressing the screen and/or displaying something required different methods, a different version of ANSI.SYS. And like CP.M, a custom IO.SYS and maybe MSDOS.SYS (equivielnt to BIOS and BDOS) to suit the underlying hardware. My own experience was the Apricot F1, which didn't even have a text mode as such, only a graphics mode. No playing in BASIC and POKEing a value into the C800:nnnn page to put characters on the screen.

        1. IvyKing Bronze badge

          Re: Theseus Ship

          86-DOS was running on a variety of machines BEFORE the IBM PC was officially announced in 1981, and there was no API for cursor addressing in MS-DOS, my recollection was that API was an IBM ROM BIOS call using one of the software interrupts below 20H that Intel explicitly warned against using and thus made a mess with the 80286 transition. Conversely, the IBM PC implementation did not correctly implement the MS-DOS get time call, where on an SCP machine the time was reported to 0.01 second.

    3. Hairy Wolf
      Linux

      Re: Theseus Ship

      I guess that not much, but its legacy is still very evident in Windows. Where *nix used - for command line switches, CP/M used /. So when Microsoft added directories and nabbed *nix commands it used \ as the folder separator.

      And of course MS-DOS got its 8.3 file name format from CP/M. When I had some Linux files with a character that Windows did not like, it did not just substitute that, but fell back to the Windows95 8.5 name substitution.

      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: Theseus Ship

        [Author here]

        > its legacy is still very evident in Windows.

        True.

        > Where *nix used - for command line switches

        True.

        > CP/M used /.

        *Not* true. CP/M did not have command line switches as standard.

        That was the point of my link in the story, where it says:

        «

        (This influence from DEC OSes is still visible in Windows today.)

        »

        1. Chris Gray 1

          Re: Theseus Ship

          Ah, thank-you for verifying that CP/M didn't use command-line switches. That raised a bell when I read it. There was nothing stopping an individual program from using them, I expect. I can't recall how a program received command-line arguments, and I'm not going to go look at old Draco sources! I'm busy with more important stuff - watch that web directory in a few days.

  7. itzumee

    Thanks Gary

    I was very very fortunate that the first ever home computer I got to use when I was a lad was a DEC Rainbow 100 which came with CP/M, but not just any old CP/M but CP/M-86/80, needed because the Rainbow had 2 discrete processors, a Z80 and an 8088, so it could run the 8-bit applications written for the Z80 and the 16-bit applications written for the 8088, with the OS seamlessly switching which processor executed the running application. The rationale for this architecture was that there wasn't a lot of software for the Intel 8088 but there was loads for the Z80, so you'd have a lot of choice of applications straightaway. It was a typical DEC product: superbly built, innovative technology but sadly not PC-compatible. There was nothing like it at the time and whilst all my friends had Sinclair Spectrums, Amstrad CPCs and Commodore 64s, the Rainbow 100 couldn't play games and so wasn't much fun for a teenager until I got my hands on some programming books and over time learned BASIC, then Pascal, dabbled in 8088 assembler and then C.

    CPM as on OS was very basic, didn't support directories as such but there were up to 16 "user areas" which were essentially "partitions" that segregated files. The default user area was zero and others ranged from 1 to 15, you'd switch between them using a CP/M command (that I can't recall or be bothered to look up) and the DIR command would only show files in the current user area - files only, no support for folders and IIRC, there was no way of copying or moving files between user areas. As soon as MS-DOS became available with it's modern folder support, CP/M hardly got a look in from me, still though, it was a fairly easy intro to OSes and I learned a lot from it so I'm very thankful.

    In my professional career, I even got to use PL/M (it was PL/M-86) to write and support firmware for the ticket machines and automatic gates that were introduced to the London Undeerground in the late 1980s so again, my thanks to Gary Kildall.

    1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

      Re: Thanks Gary

      That Rainbow sounds a fair bit of a beast, I definitely need to look into it!

      I can understand not wanting to bother with old knowledge, but work is over now, so let's have a quick decompress looking at old computers. What's needed for this is Digital Research's 'CP/M Plus User Guide' (Google reveals various PDFs).

      Changing user area you can either type in 'user 3' , 'user' then 3 when it prompts, or just 3a: (assuming drive A: ). Once in a user area it applies across all drives, so you can't be in 3a: and 2m: simultaneously.

      For PIP the option is G

      i.e. PIP M:[G0]=A:PIP.COM[G3]

      You cannot, however refer to a file in one user area from another. i.e. sit in an empty user 3 area and do '0A:PIP M:=A:PIP.COM[G0]' . What a huge pain!

      Built in DIR can't list user areas other than the one you're currently in, the separate DIR.COM can use either [user=all] or [user=<n>]

      The non DR documentations is poor - various documentation claims that PIP's G option only works on a destination (untrue), and the PCW manual doesn't list the G option at all (but it works)! It only lists [user=all] for DIR.COM, but I guessed user=<n> would work before confirming it in the official DR guide.

      It's entirely possible CP/M 2.2 is even more limited. A quick look seems to show G in PIP still exists, but I don't have a Digital Research code based CP/M 2.2 system sitting around (apart from the PCW, the remainder I think are cpmish or more modern hacked alternatives).

      There was the ZPM replacement for the CCP and BDOS, but they tend to concentrate on scripting and development (plus built in character positioning which I can understand), rather than user focused quality of life improvements. CP/M is very limited on memory space, and most systems didn't have the minimum 256KB of memory found in the PCW.

      1. Ian 55

        Re: Thanks Gary

        In practice, you didn't bother with different 'user numbers' to separate things out - you just used a different floppy.

        1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

          Re: Thanks Gary

          Yep. The one exception is a reasonably obscure hard drive for the PCW that's shareable among multiple machines, and uses user numbers as the intended way of declaring storage for each PCW.

      2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Thanks Gary

        "That Rainbow sounds a fair bit of a beast, I definitely need to look into it!"

        LSI did a similar beast. The one I used also had a 4 port RS232C board in it through which we attached 4 dumb terminals for 5 users. The main console also had, IIRC, 4 virtual consoles accessed via CTRL 1-4 (or something, I forget now) but as per the Rainbow, seamlessly ran 8-bit (.com) and 16-bit (.cmd) programs in multi-user. ISTR there was a CP/M-86 for the PC and if you swapped out the 8088/8086 for a NEC V20/V30, it could also run 8- and 16-bit CP/M programs because the NEC V20/30 chips included the Z80 instruction set. (Very vague memories of this, corrections welcomed!)

        1. itzumee

          Re: Thanks Gary

          Funny how the various executable file extensions were used in a variety different OSes, though the following mightn't be 100% correct, but

          CP/M - 8 bit executable was a .COM file, 16 bit was a .CMD file

          MS-DOS - an executable that limited itself to a 64KB address space was a .COM file, otherwise it was a .EXE file

          VAX/VMS - a .COM file was a Digital Command Language (DCL) script, .EXE was an executable

          Windows - .EXE is an executable, .CMD is a CMD.EXE script (CMD.exe also recognises the .BAT extension for batch files)

          The early versions of Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS generated .COM files, later versions .EXE files and IIRC Turbo Pascal for CP/M only generated 8 bit .COM executables

    2. TReko Silver badge

      Re: Thanks Gary

      Ah the DEC Rainbow. I was thinking about it the other day when assembling an expensive PC case. I remember the 5mm thick aluminium case it had. It was so well built. Even premium cases these days are puny in comparison.

    3. Displacement Activity

      Re: Thanks Gary

      I ran a small department in 83/84 that got CP/M running on my own Z80 hardware. It was a fantastic buzz when we got WordStar up (not to mention C and Fortran compilers). It really did feel like the world had changed at the time. IBM eventually screwed us, of course, because people still remembered who they were back then.

      I've done a huge amount of hardware since then, from bit-slice to ASIC to quantum, but nothing really compared with that.

  8. David Given

    Also on the 6502

    Thanks for the name check! Interested parties might be interested to know that a year or so so I did a complete rewrite of CP/M for the 6502 --- it now runs on most mainstream 6502 micros including the BBC Micro and the Commodore Pet. It works really nicely, and includes relocatable binaries, a (rather bad) assembler, a port of Atari Basic, a version of a 1970-era Pascal compiler/interpreter, and a few other things. I ended up making a few changes to the CP/M API but the core concepts translated very well. Now I'm wondering about an 8051 port...

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Genius Was Poorly Compensated In Those Days.............

    CP/M Gary Kildall

    dBase Wayne Ratcliff

    BDS-C Leor Zolman

    C Dennis Richie/Brian Kernigan/Ken Thompson

    MS-DOS Tim Paterson (apologies to others!)

    yacc Stephen C. Johnson

    .....and now we get Elon Musk asking for fifty BILLION dollars in personal compensation!!!!

    1. Bebu Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: Genius Was Poorly Compensated In Those Days.............

      It wouldn't be drawing a long bow to propose that this hasn't changed.

    2. Version 1.0 Silver badge
      Angel

      Re: Genius Was Poorly Compensated In Those Days.............

      In the days when CP/M was invented and released, everyone was just working to help users start to use and understand the computer systems, originally making money was only seen as a bonus, not a requirement. I had a friend who worked to setup an S-100 system in a clinical analysis laboratory, only trying (and succeeding) to help the physicians document how children were walking with problems so that they could be surgically fixed.

      Once he had his plans working, he gave the details to other organizations working to help get the kids walking better. All of today's computing is a mainly a result of those early days years ago with everyone just trying to get everything being fully usable and working well for everyone else - I am so impressed and happy with everything I was taught back then by virtually everyone, but so many of my associated people in that world are deceased now - technicians, physicians, physical therapists and surgeons.

    3. Binraider Silver badge

      Re: Genius Was Poorly Compensated In Those Days.............

      None of the older products were purpose built as advertising engines.

      Or worse, advertising engines that persuade users to pay to use it on a subscription basis

  10. fromxyzzy

    When I started getting in to building hobbyist computers a few years back, the CP/M version in ROMWBW was the only real way to go, so I have several such systems sitting around. I don't have much use for them (the building was the fun part, fighting with CF card formatting was not) and there seem to be far more options now, but I still keep a little Easy_Z80 plugged in via USB-Serial just to poke at it now and then.

  11. AustinTX

    Alternate origin story

    Interesting. In the early 1980's, when I was using CP/M on a TRS-80 COCO, the story was that CP/M was really just a hastilly cobbled-together demo OS created to help sell some model of hard drive. That people loved it so much that Gary decided to expand it.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Alternate origin story

      > cobbled-together demo OS created to help sell some model of hard drive.

      *Floppy* drive, maybe. It predated hard drives on personal computers.

      It could be true. Maybe he, or the company, didn't want to own up to that?

      But while CP/M-80 _was_ extremely small and minimal, I think we need to bear in mind 2 things:

      1. It had to be. The early CP/M machines only had a few 10s of kB of memory, because it was so expensive, and one or two floppy drives holding ~100-200kB.

      2. This was perfectly normal for OSes in the early 1970s. The DEC OSes that inspired much of CP/M also ran in single- to low double digits of RAM from media barely holding triple digits of kB, so they too were tiny simple things, a few kB in size.

      DEC OS-8 for the PDP-8 took up 256 words of RAM.

      DEC RT-11 on the PDP-11 ran off 2 x 250kB disk drives, and in 56kB of RAM supported 8 concurrent users.

      RSTS/E on the same machine supported 16 users. Max program size, 16kB.

      By the standards of mid-1980s DOS PCs, they were tiny and toylike, but in 1970 they were production-grade pro systems.

      RSTS/E,

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Alternate origin story

        "By the standards of mid-1980s DOS PCs, they were tiny and toylike, but in 1970 they were production-grade pro systems."

        In this entire discussion, that it probably the best takeaway point, especially for our younger readers. Even at the time that CP/M was a mature OS, home computers still generally came with 8 or 16KB of RAM at best, with the option to upgrade to 32K or even <gasp> 48K! They normally had a ROM BASIC plus i/o & video RAM taking up chunks of the memory map too, so getting 64KB to run CP/M often wasn't even an option in those early days of microcomputers when comparability was rare and everyone was inventing their own way of doing stuff because each one was a "first" in the field (or at least a variation.) There was no "proper" or "expected" way of doing stuff. It was only when the microcomputer market was relatively mature and ways of doing bank switching (and RAM pricing) became economically viable to get 64KB of RAM and CP/M running on Z80 based micros other than hugely expensive business machines. Fun days when a single individual person could actually understand all of the underlying hardware and the code the ran on it.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Alternate origin story

          "Even at the time that CP/M was a mature OS"

          Yes, CP/M was a mature, serious OS, not just a toy. The whole microcomputer revolution was a marvel for those of us who had a use for which, up to then, a mini would have been the answer but no budget for one. People like myself, working in a lab and with previous experience with FORTRAN and punched cards on mainframes. In fact it was likely that not even a mini would have done the job that could be achieved with an S-100 box. There were all sorts of cards available such as ADCs to aid interfacing with instruments. I build a microspectrophotometer and, realising that the 9-bit ADC wasn't enough, added another 4 bits with an op-amp and a 4-bit CMOS switch and a stepping motor controlling the continuous interference filter. Microsoft FORTRAN had I/O equivalents to POKE and PEEK (PUT and GET IIRC). I'm not sure one could have added the necessary interface cards to a mini.

          Some of my colleagues went on a computing course which taught Pascal so I changed to UCSD Pascal which ran on the same H/W but subsequently on an IBM PC clone. Maybe another subject for an article Liam?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Alternate origin story..PDP-8.. minor corrections

        The PDP-8E used 12 bit word core memory. So power on and the previous memory contents were still there. Not sure of the exact memory map of the 16k words PDP-8E we used in the mid 1970's but from what I remember a small bootstrap monitor was bundled with whichever language you were loading on the paper tape.

        We had no bootstrap ROM. At least not with the 8E. You had to manually start the bootstrap process with the front panel toggle switches. Imputing 4 octal value words to make up a word then manually incrementing the PC. So just like hand-crank starting cars in the old days. God I'm old. I remember people doing that.

        Basic feature monitors were tiny back then. Measured in several hundred words max with maybe a dozen words used for state / scratch values. DEC sold "full featured" monitor programs which is what CP/M was. Apart from the small footprint for each of the new hardware specific command they would be low K word instruction count size.

        The language interpreters were tiny too. The BASIC interpreter we used ( based on published sources for 6502/Z-80 interpreters ) could have been no more than 4K.

        With magnetic core memory you just loaded the tape with monitor / language interpreter on it and it could be weeks/months before you had to reload it again from scratch. Using the front panel. Turn off the computer every night. Turn it back on in the morning. Everything still there. In fact if you turned off the computer mid routine it would usually just continue where it was when turned off. On more than one occasion the teletypes fired up again printing on power on because someone had not waited for a program to finish printing the night before.

        I think the last computer that shipped with any kind non-volatile memory was the Sharp PC-5000 laptop with bubble memory in 1984. From what I remember it did seamless continue on power on. Which is very different from hibernate. Heavy, small LCD screen, but actually could (and did) use it to write in cafes. I remember the Sharp had a really nice keyboard. Much nicer than most later laptops. It also had a printer built in too. Which is why it was 11 lbs. But it fitted in my daypack. Just.

        So I must have been one of the first of those annoying people who hung out in cafes tapping away on their laptops.

    2. Chris Gray 1

      Re: Alternate origin story

      Hmm. You sure about CP/M on the COCO? COCO generally referred to the Radio Shack Colour Computer, which had a Motorola 6809 processor (it had an 8x8=>16 multiply!). I don't recall CP/M being ported to anything other than 8080/8085/Z-80. I had a COCO for a while, and it essentially just ran BASIC and games. The 6809 was a couple years after the 8080.

  12. Andronichus

    Pretty good as a business OS

    My first real programming job was on CP/M. Having spent a few years at uni on DEC machines I created a multi-user game on the uni's two CP/M micros using a shared floppy drive. Coordination was by locking a file as if it were a semaphore and the code would then act as leader or follower. Fun times, but on the strength of that landed a part time job creating a stock and invoicing system. The real issue was a non-technical sales manager that piled on creeping featurism so that every version we sold was different ... cue maintenance nightmare and me leaving to find a job in mainframes. Early micros were cantankerous physical machines but much less sanctimonious than the whole priesthood thing that was growing around the larger boxes. MP/M was floating around, but no-one could really see a use for it.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And in the midst of all that there was GEM too

    …though wordstar on a SuperBrain was the bees-knees at the time

  14. navarac Silver badge

    Amstrad 6128

    The Amstrad 6128 came with both Dos 3.0 and CP/M: on floppy disks. Happy days.

    1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      Stop

      Re: Amstrad 6128

      ITYM "CP/M+" (really CP/M 3.0 with minor tweaks for Amstrad) and CP/M 2.2 (most people only ever used them to format discs though).

    2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Amstrad 6128

      [Author here]

      > The Amstrad 6128 came with both Dos 3.0 and CP/M: on floppy disks. Happy days.

      I think you are confusing different machines.

      The CPC range did not have a DOS as such, and definitely could not run any form of MS-DOS or anything like it. (Although the BASIC ROM could access disk drives in a CP/M compatible fashion.)

      They did optionally support CP/M, though, and so did Amstrad's ZX Spectrum +3.

      I never owned either but I think it was CP/M Plus, which is CP/M 3.0, the final version, which supported file timestamps and a RAMdisk made from banked memory.

      Perhaps you were conflating the CPC with the much later Amstrad PC1512 and PC1640, which were 8086-based PC-compatibles. They came with both DR DOS-Plus and MS-DOS.

      1. Chris Gray 1
        Thumb Up

        Re: Amstrad 6128

        RAM disk from banked memory? I guess its inevitable that someone else did that. I was quite proud of my version (no, it was never released - it depended on the DMA of the specific floppy controller, and the bank register of the specific dual-CPU card). And, it made using the machine much better - sooo much less disk drive whirring and thunking (mine were big 8" ones)!

      2. navarac Silver badge

        Re: Amstrad 6128

        Yes it was CP/M+ and the version of DOS was called AMSDOS. I still have the machine and disks (!) - non-standard 3 inch floppys. Useless for any other machine; talk about lock-in. After the Speccy the keyboard was a great improvement, which isn't saying much.

  15. 45RPM Silver badge

    The biggest ballache

    I had a CP/M machine back in the dim and distant past. The first was a Newbrain and the second an Apple IIe with a Microsoft Softcard. And CP/M made them compatible - but only sort of. Yes, they could run the same software (although sometimes, as with Wordstar, it was necessary to run a configuration program to set up the screen correctly first) - but, astonishingly, they couldn’t actually use the same disk format. So to copy files and programs from my old Newbrain to my newer Apple I needed to squirt everything over serial. Despite both having 5.25” disk drives.

    I was incredibly envious of those lucky so and sos who had an Amstrad PCW. Yes, Amstrad, purveyor of all kinds of tosh and nonsense also made the best CP/M machine of them all - and given that the disk formats weren’t compatible anyway it didn’t matter that it had an odd 3” disk drive.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: The biggest ballache

      "Amstrad ... made the best CP/M machine of them all"

      That would depend on what you wanted to do with it but I don't think you could add the sort of interface boards that some of us needed. I suppose the difference is between a machine built around CP/M as opposed to a computing machine which could run CP/M as its OS.

      1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

        Re: The biggest ballache

        The PCW had a pretty wide selection of interface boards, but its major limitation is that it only had one expansion slot which expansions needed to be piggy backed on to. Expansions included :

        serial/parallel ports (but typically only *one* port)

        extra memory

        faster CPU

        light pen

        mouse (at least three types)

        hard disk

        networking (bit rare and non standard though)

        graphics tablet

        scanners

        soundcard (generic YM) and joystick port

        I *think* it may have had some ADC converters too

        There are expansions that provide multiple slots rather than piggy backing, but that's all hobbyist.

  16. Dr_N

    My First Laptop ...

    An Epson PX-8 running CP/M with Wordstar that was on a PROM, on a plastic chip carrier, you inserted in one of two chip slots in its underbelly.

    Probably the most/longest used piece of kit I owned.

    Until the Psion Series-5 rocked up.

  17. steelpillow Silver badge

    The exception that proved the rule

    Buiding on top of CP/M, Locomotive Software wrote a wordprocessor which could do around 92 characters per line, more than the standard 80 for cheap monitors and enough for a full line of text - halfway to WYSIWYG - by playing games with the characteristics of the cathode ray tube's hardware. It could do the same for a dot-matrix printer. Another feature was the large number of dedicated function keys, a bit like a PC keyboard with half a Speccy grafted alongside. So it incorporated its own specialist hardware drivers and had to run a customised CP/M on equally custom hardware.

    They called it LocoScript, sold it to Alan Sugar and the Amstrad PCW became the first mass-market office wordprocessor, cheap and easy enough for every SOHO klutz. All the other hardware makers wanted it - but their universal 80-column 640x480 screens castrated it. Without portability, this particular embedded CP/M-like OS struggled on in the PC market for a while, but its lack of hardware portability - the very reason CP/M was created and so much copied - was its undoing. You could boot real CP/M on the PCW and run the usual stuff too, but that was a level of expertise above the average office typist and competed in the main market, where better machines - and MS/DOS PC's - could be had. Even wild success could not overcome its USP's lack of portability.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: The exception that proved the rule

      [Author here]

      You are misremembering badly and getting a lot of details confused.

      The Reg has done a great and encyclopaedic history of the CPC range:

      https://www.theregister.com/Print/2014/02/12/archaeologic_amstrad_cpc_464/

      And of LocoScript and the PCW:

      https://www.theregister.com/Print/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/

      So, to pick a few nits:

      > Buiding on top of CP/M, Locomotive Software wrote a wordprocessor

      Nope. It didn't run on CP/M or any OS. Locoscript booted on bare metal.

      > could do around 92 characters per line

      90 × 32 text, 720 × 256 pixels.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW#Technical_design

      PCW hardware standard. CP/M and its apps ran in the same res.

      Compare with the Hercules Graphics Card mono res: 720 × 348

      > this particular embedded CP/M-like OS struggled on in the PC market

      (?) CP/M didn't struggle in the PC market, and LocoScript also ran on top of MS-DOS.

      https://archive.org/details/locoscript-pc-v-1.06

      But while it was excellent, it appeared just when Windows 3.x was killing the market for DOS apps.

      1. Version 1.0 Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: The exception that proved the rule

        Thanks Liam, I see many thoughts resulting from my "misremembering badly and getting a lot of details confused" these days too, any every time they make me rethink what I remember doing originally. I suspect this environment is just a result of all us early workers recording very little documentation originally and having to work in so many different operating system environments as they all started to appear ... I was using CPM at home, RSX11M at work for our customer support, while the company accountants needing their Apple and MS-DOS problems fixed most days too. - but I was initially only employed for electronics device development so it was just new things for me to do.

        This was originally a fairly common messy working world everywhere for everyone as operating systems started to appear (the icon is my memories).

      2. steelpillow Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: The exception that proved the rule

        >[Author here]

        You are misremembering badly

        Not this time. I was there.

        > Nope. It didn't run on CP/M or any OS. Locoscript booted on bare metal.

        Oh yes it did. It incorporated a modified form of CP/M in its codebase. That was how it could do things like manage processes and access disc drives. Richard didn't code /everything/ from scratch.

        (?) CP/M didn't struggle in the PC market...

        Well, it didn't exactly outshine MS-DOS takeup. But my point is that the customised CP/M underbelly of Locoscript fared even worse.

        ...and LocoScript also ran on top of MS-DOS

        Locoscript PC had to be castrated down to 80-column display to fit VGA, ruining its full-page-width semi-WYSIWYG qualities. And of course the standard PC keyboard didn't have enough function keys to remap everything cleanly. It was for these reasons that Locomotive took so long to decide to do it anyway. Had PC hardware been up to a full-featured Locoscript, history would have been very different.

        You should be interviewing me not dissing me.

        But thanks for the interest, anyway.

        1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

          Re: The exception that proved the rule

          The fact Locoscript has modified CP/M in its codebase is news to me, but makes sense and answers some questions I had about why Amstrad spent effort porting CP/M in the first place (although it did make a fair bit of sense).

          I have to question other assertions though. Given the PCW only has four function keys (F1-F8 using shift) it is clearly possible to remap AT keyboard keys, albeit possibly slightly awkwardly, but that's always a limitation of custom hardware (or at least a custom keyboard).

          I do wonder how well an 8086 Hercules or VGA PC would run Locoscript PC as the PCW benefited from its implementation of roller RAM.

          Leaving that aside, whilst Locoscript was a decent package it was not revolutionary (sorry!) and at least for version 1.x - which is what I wrote a lot of college work on, not stunningly fast either. It was easy to use and relatively feature complete.

          The whole PCW package with bundled Locoscript and CP/M was a compelling proposition at its price point. Lots of decent, well priced software on a system architected to render text quickly (and with roller RAM, bold and italic are possible), lots of memory for an 8 bit, an OS with plenty of historic software available, high resolution graphics, and expandability.

          It's arguable if the 8086 PC offered sufficient advantages over the PCW given the price disparity and functionality, it really depended what software was run. By the time the 286 arrived it was substantially more clear cut in favour of the PC.

          I don't think history would be substantially different if Locoscript had been released earlier on the PC (unless Amstrad could produce a similarly priced cheap PC/printer/software bundle), but Amstrad, Locomotive, and Creative Technology have a lot to be proud of.

          1. steelpillow Silver badge

            Re: The exception that proved the rule

            The PCW also had about 10 dedicated function keys for all kinds of common wordprocessor actions. Like the Speccy these were named, so mappings to the PC keyboard's F9-F12 and [Ctrl]-x were not immediately obvious.

            Locoscript and the PCW hardware were tightly integrated. So things like display output had to be completely rewritten. By the time Locoscript PC appeared, the PC had already moved on a generation or two, so things were not quite so dire.

            Don't forget the integrated printer. Same proposition; direct drive, no standard interface chippery, cheap and easy enough for any typist to use. A lot of offices never booted true CP/M, just used the wordprocessor bundle as the office typewriter.

            Locoscript PC was never going to fly until SVGA introduced 800 x 600 display. But by then it was far too late.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    CP/M-80 Interoperates With MS-DOS

    So......my CP/M-80 machine had a tool called "MediaMaster"................................

    MediaMaster could write floppies in a gazzilion different formats....KayPro, MS-DOS.........

    So....I would write dBase programs on my Osborne 01....and test them elsewhere on an IBM PC!!!!

    1. Uncle William

      Re: CP/M-80 Interoperates With MS-DOS

      Ref "MediaMaster": And when all else failed transferring to another format there was software such as BSTAM(?) and an RS232 cable. Still got a break out box to quickly match the pin-out settings.

  19. Grunchy Silver badge

    Still got my C128, still never ran CP/M

    I still never even booted up the Z80 processor onboard, although I'm told that every power-on causes the Z80 to check something & then transfer control to the 8502. I been running it since 1985!

    (I saw on youtube somebody logging their C128 into CP/M and even with a hardware-emulated disk, it's ponderously slow. Plus, what could you run on it? Furthermore, you know what, I never had the 80-col capable monitor anyway!)

    Nobody can deny Kildall's triumphs, contributions, and unwarranted downfall.

    Nevertheless today I am far more impressed by KolibriOS: really amazing stuff!

  20. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    wide variety of hardware

    The fascinating part of the CP/M systems was the wide variety of hardware. Even for a serial port (let alone the floppy or hard disk controller, if you had one) you could have a polled system, one with interrupts, all the way up to full DMA (yes even serial ports with DMA on a few models). Since you had a BIOS the vendors were free to make as "cost optimized" or high performance of hardware as they wished to.

    And since the BIOS was nicely seperated they even had network filesystems -- no ethernet yet so these tended to run on a multi-drop serial setup. Given the systems had like 64KB RAM anyway the relatively slow performance of filesystem at serial speed was not as big a deal as it sounds like it would be.

    I'll be honest, i used one once for a few minutes as a child, and have a friends kaypro in storage (but no software) so I have no first hand experience, but nevertheless find the variety of hardware they had refreshing.

  21. Crabro

    CP/M on a Superbrain

    I was very lucky to have the opportunity to develop some comms software on a CP/M 8 bit Superbrain to capture the output from a PDP 11 (running a traffic control system) and save the output to floppy for later analysis. As my knowledge of CP/M grew I discovered there were a few bytes of the memory map unused. So I pranked a colleague's machine by inserting some interrupt driven code that inverted the colours on his (monochrome) screen once every minute. His reaction? Just carry on as though nothing had happened!

    I suspect that would be frowned upon nowadays...

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