Posted on 12/02/2023 10:27:55 AM PST by Signalman
Computer Chronicles was a show on PBS back in the 1980s. This episode features, among others, an interview of Gary Kildall, the inventor of CP/M, an 8-bit operating system which preceded QDOS and MS-DOS, both of which were based on CP/M. Kildall was the founder of Digital Research Inc. (DRI).
Actually there is a three-part series on Gary as “The man who should have been Bill Gates” that I highly recommend. Met Gary back in the 70s and spent a half-hour talking wi him. Very nice guy in addition to being brilliant.
CP/M powered my first computer, a Kaypro, forty years ago. Got my master’s degree with it. WordStar was a wonderful program. I still remember the keyboard commands.
About 30 years ago, someone gave me an old computer system that ran on CP/M. I had no idea what to do with it.
This is going to seriously date me, but my first computer was a Commodore 64, used to write programs in Basic on it. 64K of memory, backup was to a cassette tape. Still have that machine. Ah yes, the early days of being a software engineer.
Still have MSDOS 3.3, loaded in an old Thinkpad.
Off topic, but also loaded Borland’s Turbo C++. Working.
Yes I’m a Dinosaur.
my first pc was a dec Rainbow and came wi CP/M and DOS...
MS-DOS was not “based” on CP/M. There are similarities, just as there’s similarities between DEC and IBM systems.
If you wanted CP/M on an Intel 8086/8088 you got CPM-86, and some people did.
I ran my CP/M on an Osborne 1 and a Coleco Adam. dBase II used with Adam’s Digital Data Pack is NOT recommended.
I had a C64 myself. I believe the C64 OS was a proprietary OS used by the Commodore 64 had no direct connection with CP/M or QDOS (which later became MS-DOS).
I built my first CT home automation system on CP/M. Had a few North Star boxes — S-100 bus. Built I/O boards with discrete chips 74xxx. Had an entire board that was a real-time clock. Got it all done with 64k. Early 80s brought about ramdisk boards to replace floppy drives. DRC had a few. It was rather easy to take a 256k ramdisk board, upgrade the chips and viola you had a 1 meg ramdisk to boot. I even ran ads in Byte magazine one issue. Retired it all in 2006. 2007 brought me to Florida and its all on a Zotac running Ubuntu linux. Python.
I have no interest in trying to “impress” you. My first job out of college was converting IBM 1401 Autocoder to Cobol. I would imagine some of that code could still be in production.
I run DOSBox on both Windblows and Linux PCs so I can run a 30-year-old MSDOS-based recipe manager (because I'm not willing to key-punch the 4000+ recipes into a new recipe manager).
Sure runs snappier than it did on the 80286 I originally ran it on.
Watched a little bit of that channel. It makes those robot builders on Battlebots look normal.
Trash80.
If it didn’t lock up every 15 minutes you weren’t using it right.
Oh the 80286. What a POS compared to the 80386.
Neither did Bill Gates write it. He bought it from Tim Patterson, owner of Seattle Computer Products.
Which doesn't change the fact that Bill Gates is the greatest plagiarist since Shakespeare.
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