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CP/M was wildly popular. Take a look at the DOS Technical Reference Manual and you will see that the DOS system calls are basically identical to the CP/M ones. The only real difference is that DOS uses INT 5 instead of CP/M's CALL 5 to invoke system services. This article describes the striking similarities and why they might exist.

There was no need to reverse engineer anything. cp/m isn't some lost system and you can even boot it up on today's pc's or in a virtual box. There are also free programs to open any cp/m files.

You can buy usb floppy drives for 8", 5.25", 3.5" sizes for archiving, extremely cheap, like $10-$20. There are MFM utilties to read damaged disks, as floppy drives are MFM based. Very easily done. It's not anything to brag about, a child could do it.

And here's all the free files, boot cp/m, or open any cp/m file, text, etc.
http://www.cpm.z80.de/binary.h...

the article is bullshit sensationalism lies.
no reverse engineering required, I hate fucking liars.

has anyone seen South Park?

This is a fucking advertisement for drivesavers, doing shit EXPENSIVE for what there are FREE TOOLS online you can do yourself.

Ads as articles, Fuck you slashcunt

Where did this idea ever come from? "Everybody knows" that Gates bought QDOS from Kildall and nobody ever claimed that QDOS was a "copy of CP/M," not even Kildall himself. What was in dispute was whether Kildall was literally out to lunch or flying, or whatever, brushing off the meeting and selling a license for what turned out to be a pittance. That's the legend anyway, but he's not here on this planet anymore to defend himself.

FFS. Want to know where DOS came from? Just read Tim Patterson's blog. http://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/

He discusses the design differences between the two and why he did what he did.

And if you're really curious and need to feed the inner nerd, go have a look at the CP/M source code.

http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html

--
BMO

I was a little behind the times (born in 82) but I first played ADVENT (and a lot of other games from that era) in ~88 on a Modcomp ZORBA. Modcomp was a minicomputer manufacturer that was experimenting with portable PC's. All the versions of Zorba as far as I know ran CPM. I still have a few in storage that I need to bust out to see if I can get them working again.

I found a link to some kind of ZORBA fan page:

http://www.zorba.z80.de/

And here are some photos:

http://www.zorba.z80.de/photos.htm

I was a little behind the times (born in 82) but I first played ADVENT (and a lot of other games from that era) in ~88 on a Modcomp ZORBA. Modcomp was a minicomputer manufacturer that was experimenting with portable PC's. All the versions of Zorba as far as I know ran CPM. I still have a few in storage that I need to bust out to see if I can get them working again.

I found a link to some kind of ZORBA fan page:

http://www.zorba.z80.de/

And here are some photos:

http://www.zorba.z80.de/photos.htm

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

I'll stick with my Telcon Zorba thanks very much.

um, not clear about "née"- but CP/M-86 was a different animal that did evolved into Concurrent CP/M, MP/M and other varients. DR-DOS was a clone made specifically to compete with MS-DOS (turn-around is fair play I guess) I beleive Caldera bought DR-DOS, but never had any rights to CP/M-86 http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html

I'm waiting for the MP/M LiveCD!

Kildall wrote PL/M -- a system-programming subset of PL/I -- as part of his academic work, and he did indeed use that tool to write some or all of CP/M.

After CP/M and Digital Research had been well-launched and had a wide customer base, when another kind of person would have been growing and diversifying the company, then Kildall went into his office and spent a lengthy period implementing the full PL/I language for CP/M. See examples and manuals at the Tim Olmstead Memorial CP/M Library

Digital Research sold the PL/I product -- but not much of it.

You simply could not be more wrong in your statement. If it weren't for Linus, the OSS movement would now stick to a free OS based either on 386BSD or GNU/Hurd - or some combination of these. Everything would look pretty similar to the real world as we know it.

Bill's case is far from obvious - if it wasn't him in particular, his place would be most likely taken by Gary Kildall. The history of personal computing would look entirely different, as Kildall was far from being a monopolist egomaniac like Gates and Ballmer. Kildall's company, Digital Research, could easily be the Microsoft of the 8-bit computers. Their system was just _the_ system for 8-bit machines, but Kildall did not try to use his advantage as a vehicle for building monopolist empire. Quite contrary, he was sticking to the principle that the company that makes OS should not take part in the application market. That's actually how Microsoft has found its niche - as a key vendor of the CP/M applications. So if it wasn't Bill, CP/M-86 would be the MS-DOS, and GEM Desktop would be Microsoft Windows - but there would be NO equivalent of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office, and that would be probably good news (we would have various competing office suites instead).

The case of Steve Jobs is even more obvious - Apple with Steve and Apple without Steve (1985-1997) are just different companies. No Steve - no iPod. Period.

Bah, who needs a CP/M emulator when you already have DOSEmu?

DOSEmu can run CP/M-86 just fine. You can get the actual OS itself free and legal here, while this site explains how to run it under DOSEmu.

8086 is 16-bit ;)

Interestingly enough I (in the past week) have thought about implementing Contiki on top of CP/M-86 4. CP/M-86 4 is a rather small OS, and can optionally run DOS programs (the infamous DOSPLUS), and I think, with tools I can easily find for free, I can code low-level stuff for it.

It can be done. IWBN, too.

-uso.

CP/M Repository

-uso.
I've tested CP/M-86 2.04 on a 486/133.

http://www.cpm.z80.de/manuals/mpm2ug.pdf or view as html http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:Y0TGJCQk3f0C: www.cpm.z80.de/manuals/mpm2ug.pdf+mp/m&hl=en&ie=UT F8

Anyway, the site looks very cool. Lots of interesting proggies, including full source to a shitload of programs.

I love the old school programs and programmers. Its simply amazing the stuff that they were doing with a 2 Mhz processor and 64k of RAM. I may even go ebaying to find a real system to run some of this stuff on, instead of simply emulating it.