ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Dude, we're gettin' a Dell ...

P.S. - Paul,


CP/M - as in the old CP/M Operating System???
The one that refers to the first fixed disk drive as "A:"???
The one that Microsoft was writing apps to run under??? The one that Visicalc ran in???

Have only seen glimpses of the command prompt for CP/M in documentarys (sp???).

I see these machines use the very versatle Zilog Z80 CPU also. What ever became of this Company??? Were they "Integrated" by the larger guys like Intel, Motorolla, American Micro Devices (AMD) or Cyrix?

Feel free to elaborate!

Scott

Scott,

I'm in the process of migrating my machine to XP. I chose to do a clean install on a new hard drive and am using a cd/rw to move files across.

I've been totally impressed with the OS' ability to recognize the hardware. Up to this point I'd boycotted XP because of the activation registration process, but gave in when one to many drivers became un-installable in 98.

Al,

That sounds a bit like that situation I was in with '98. Re-installing it had always straightened out issues in the past, but since IE6 came out it didn't help anymore, and I had to go to 2000 to fix things.


Bill

Hiya Scott,

Haven't heard from you in a while -- Been traveling around sunny California?

Yes, the CP/M operating system which was standard for many small 8080/Z80-based microcomputers in the 1970s. (CP/M stands for Control Program for Microcomputers.)

CP/M was written to run on the Intel 8080 originally. The Z80 was a later CPU which extended the instruction set, but was fully backward compatible with the 8080 -- i.e. all existing 8080 code would run on it just fine.

It would depend upon the configuration, but most CP/M micros had the two floppy drives set as A and B. C and D were often reserved for extra floppies, so it wasn't unusual for the fixed disk to appear as E, even on a system which had only two floppies.

The first version of DOS for the IBM PC was modeled on CP/M in many respects, with appropriate changes for the different CPU and system architecture. In quite a few respects, the DOS utilities weren't as versatile as their CP/M counterparts, e.g. the old CP/M PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program) utility could not only copy files from one disk to another, but could also carry out quite a range of filtering, truncation, etc. Compare it with the equivalent COPY utility in DOS, and the latter is very short on options.

CP/M had "user areas" to segregate files, which was adequate for the small size disks commonly used then. The user area feature never got copied into DOS 1, and it wasn't until DOS 2 that Unix-style directories were added -- But I digress!

Still going strong in micro-controllers and such like, as far as I know.

You might find this link interesting for more on CP/M stuff: http://www.gaby.de/ehome.htm