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.
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.
Watched a little bit of that channel. It makes those robot builders on Battlebots look normal.
Like many others here, my first computer was a Commodore 64. It was actually my older brother’s before he passed. I still have that machine and several other models besides (I collect them, and my prized version is a great condition SX-64).
What’s interesting is there are still folks out there making games, utilities, and even new hardware for the thing. There’s still a lot of life in it yet! And what’s more, you don’t have to worry about the issues that plague modern computers, either. Sometimes old tech has its advantages.
I prototyped an RCA 1802 motherboard board in 1976. I was an RCA industrial/military distributor salesman. I got lotsa free samples. It had great easy sensor ports and DMA dump access. Anyone here go to the first Computer Conference in San Francisco?
Been in ‘data processing’ back before ‘information systems’ became a thing, LMAO, yep I’m old. First PC was a Tandy TL1000. I wanted to get more memory, went to the Radio Shack (remember them?) where I bought it. The manager did not want to sell me a hard drive because he told me they were too complicated to install and that one of their male technicians should do it. I caused quite a scene because he basically came out and said that women couldn’t understand the technology. Yeah, my job was working with IBM mainframes and peripherals in a room bigger than his store, but I didn’t know technology, riiiight. Needless to say I did walk out of the store with my purchase which was successfully installed. Kept that machine running for about 8 or 9 years, then moved on to something newer.
I liked CP/M.
While at Intel, built an sdk 85 from a reject pcb and down graded components. Worked good.
Wrote a lot of code with CP/M.
I remember CP/M from way back in the early 1980’s when it came standard on Air Force computers, Zenith Z-100’s. Talk about nostalgia. There was an Air Force MSgt who actually had CP/M and MS-DOS 2.1 dual booted on her computer. Can’t tell you how many times I screwed up one of those when I tried to edit the “Command.com” file. LOL This was right about the time Gates stole it and repackaged it as MS-DOS.
I recently put Win 98 on an old Compaq that I scrounged because I have software that won’t run on anything modern.
It was a struggle to find a image viewer that would be compatible, but I found FastStone which works great on 98 and everything else I’ve tried it on. I recommend it and it’s free!
My brother had an Altair 8800 back in the day.
Digital Research was originally Intergalactic Digital Research, which I rather liked.
I also used DR-DOS for quite a while. Really preferred IBM-DOS, which had REXX in addition to standard DOS batch files. IBM really screwed the pooch by getting in bed with MS for OS/2.