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Lineo Frees CP/M
rbeattie writes: "The Register is reporting that the code for 'the first generic operating system for microcomputers' is now open source. It's interesting to see the final chapter for the code that could have been what was MS-DOS. The article includes the requisite background of CP/M from Gary Kildall's snubbing of IBM to its transformation into DR-DOS, later being sold to Novell then to Caldera who spun it off with Lineo who finally opened up the source in October." The original story is actually at NewsForge. Update: 11/27 22:13 GMT by T : Note, thanks to reader Greg Head, that DR-DOS source appears available only for money; the original headline implied that DR-DOS source was also now available at no charge.
I still like DOS
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I just heard some sad news on CNET radio. Ms. Dos, was found murdered in her home this morning. She was 21 years old. We are still looking for Mr. Dos. If you see him, please contact me immediately.
I used MP/M - a multiuser/multitasking version of MPM on what i think was an Altaire?? in High School back in the mid-80's
To think where the lowly PC would be now...
Its often easy to blame the arrogance of Gary for blowing off IBM -- but to some extent it was one of those golden opportunities
kind of funny...the arrogance of someone who thought they could say no --vs-- the arrogance of someone who thought they could say yes
Who knew?
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
I realise no-one cares, but I'm going to say it anyway.
CP/M stands for Control Program/Monitor. If it was Control Program for Microcomputers, it wouldn't have a slash.
Wow, it's been at least five years since I got to bore someone with that argument.
DOS was the last truly stable OS. In all the years I used it, it never crashed once. Although applications hanging was a different matter.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/5711/histor y.html
Altos 580
;)
there it is in all its glory
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
Gary named it CP/M in the same manner he named PL/M; Programming Language for Microprocessors. The slash was a take-off on Intel's PL/1.
It looks to be open source although there is one catch - the words "as part of the 'unofficial CP/M web site'". Does that mean that this license does not cover, say, putting CP/M into a product, putting it up on a different web site, or the like? On the face of it, that would seem to be so, but I can't help but wonder whether Lineo is going to open source it the rest of the way at some point - as has been pointed out, CP/M is hardly the focus of their business these days.
Since Lineo is the previous license holder and here they have effectively released all previous licenses, doesn't this put the CP/M technology in the public domain? I can't see anything that would suggest that any of the Free Software/Open Source licenses should apply, only that the previous ones are gone. Can anyone confirm this?
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Considering how far the Windows product line has diverged from it's MS-DOS roots, even the hope of finding code that's useful for interoperability with M$ systems is pretty slim. Sadly, I can see little practial value to this announcement other than academic and historical interest.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Neither the stories, nor the CP/M site referenced in them state anything about DR-DOS being freed...
The Newsforge article states that Novell dropped plans for DOS, which is funny, 'cause I have a copy of Novell DOS 7. Features above MS-DOS 6.22 included built-in Novell Netware support (I tried it once... plug in an NE2000 compatible NIC, turn on one setting in the configuration tool, reboot, log in) and multitasking including multiple consoles (not just task-switching). My memory is failing to come up with anything else. I tried the networking part and it worked great. IIRC, the multitasking stuff could even multi-task Win3.1. Not that my 40-Mhz 386 back then could do that very well. Just for the record, I used DR-DOS 6 before Novell DOS 7. DR-DOS 6 was also light-years ahead of MS-DOS 6. (Novell bought DR-DOS, I think.)
Besides a bit of values from a computer historical perspective, what else? Ok, maybe some embedded device still use the code, but I don't see any new project is going to go into that direction, when you have Linux and *BSD.
i followed cp/m well into th "ZCPR" era, the elephant's graveyard, Z-nodes, etc.
/.'ed, I hope the CP/M 68K source is there, too.
although the site is
I have an old Motorola 68K based Compupro box laying around, but I think the disks are bad.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
The real question here is who cares? There are already Multi-User Multi-Tasking OSes out there and retrofitting an old OS not designed to do these things would be a waste of time and a disaster waiting to happen.
The words CP/M and DOS invoke nice memories to me, but lets keep both of them where they belong - a computer museum.
Even better than CP/M was ZCPR, a drop in replacement with wheels and bells (e.g., modules), which, I believe, was more or less open source. I used this until I moved to linux. It was lean and mean on my Kaypro machine.
.... Bill will be able to find and remove those pesky copyright hotkeys from DOS?
Now someone has to wrap up the newly-open-source CP/M stuff, combine it with a Z80/8080 emulator, and make a Debian package that runs CP/M software!
Mod me down if you want. BUT. DOS WAS the last stable OS. Helluva lot better than windows... and let's face it, linux/unix simply was not there. If you knew what you were doing, you could make it dance. It didn't care about the novice user... you just used it, and it did what it was told.
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
CP/M was already released into the Public Domain by caldera ages ago. I was seriously considering porting CP/M to the gameboy, infact.
CP/M was written in z80 asm and rewritten in C. The z80 port would be transferable to the Gameboy, as it uses a cut-down z80 processor.
I hardly consider this new news.
And in the dark winter of the great white north of Finland, a hacker's mind is stirring. Will this signal the birth of a wave of open source CP/Mania? God, I hope not.
believe it or not, the actual MS inhouse source for MS-DOS 6.2 is floating around on a WarezSiteNearYou(tm). No idea how it got out, but it's out. It's interesting mainly for its comments and revision logs, and all the unfixed bugs they released it with (about 266, if grep ain't lying to me - they flag it with the string BUGBUG - and those are only the ones they know about!).
It's a 19mb (approx) tarball which blows up to 70mb. I got it as dos-6.0-src.tar.gz. About half of that bloat is the code for QBASIC and associated bits n bobs (edit, help) which are made with "COW" - Character Oriented Windows - hey, they tried for cool acronyms.
I've tried posting some of it here for the last 10 mins, but I can't beat the "Lameness filter - please use fewer 'junk' characters". If anyone wants to tell me how to get around it....
Meanwhile I'll leave you with a revision note from around 1983 or so:
REV 1.50
Some code for new 2.0 DOS, sort of HACKey. Not enough time to
do it right.
Would this have any use in an embedded system? It would probably be easier to boot/manage than Linux since CP/M was designed and used back when computers had severe limits on processor speed, memory size, and storage.
(Enter smarmy marketroid. Linus Torvalds typing at his PC in the background.)
;)
Here at Evil Inc., we're always on the lookout for the freshest evil money can buy. To that end, we've replaced Linus's 2.5 Kernel Tree with CP/M...Let's see if he notices!
(Focus on Linus at his PC)
"What the?!? What happened to the VM?!? Wait a minute! This isn't my OS! DAMN YOU GREG KILDALL!!!!!"
(Cut back to marketroid. Background switches between images of Linux developers screaming after installing 2.5.1-evil-herring)
Don't you just love the smell of steaming hot Evil in the morning? I know I do! Mmmm! Mm! Refreshing!
This message has been brought to you by the fine folks at Evil Incorporated.
I just want to take over the world...Why does that automatically make me EVIL?
I realise no-one cares, but I'm going to say it anyway. CP/M stands for Control Program/Monitor. If it was Control Program for Microcomputers, it wouldn't have a slash.
The article refrenced the comp.os.cpm FAQ, which has this to say on the subject:
Q3: Does CP/M stand for anything?
There are at least three popular answers - Control Program for Microcomputers, Control Program for Microprocessors, and Control Program/Monitor. The issue is clouded by authors of popular CP/M books giving different answers. According to Gary Kildall (the author of CP/M), in response to a direct question on the PBS show "The Computer Chronicles" following Computer Bowl I, the answer is: Control Program for Microcomputers. This is also consistent with DRI documentation. See, for example, p. 4 of the DRI TEX manual.
I agree that your argument makes sense, but the authoritive souces say "Control Program for Microcomputers
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''/me blows the dust off the old Zorba "portable", hauls out those ancient 5.25" floppies, and tries to remember how to run DDT and the assembler. :)
:) I even bought a used 10 meg HD from Randy, who said it had been used in his and Ward's BBS (one of many HDs they used over the years).
/. effect).
Gads, it's been too long! I grew up with CPM, and then MPM, ZCPR, Fidonet, MODEM7, all those oldies
It's great to see that the source is now available (well, once the site recovers from the
Lemon curry?
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.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Hooray! The Kaypro 10 will rise again! (And you road warriors can pull that Osborne 1 out of the closet.)
SIGFEH
Where would the world be today if IBM had made a deal for CP/M?
I almost die laughing when someone tells me that MS had revolutionised computing and did it all on there own....then I ell them that if IBM had picked CP/M rather than MS-DOS, then no one would care who Bill Gates is today....infact, I bet MS would either be defunct or be an ISV making software for a 32 bit CP/M derivitive with a GUI..........hey!! that would be a cool project..put a GUI on CP/M!!!
anyway, I don't think Digital woul be in the place that MS is currently since Digital had there hands in a lot of diffrent hardware. so actualy, if MS-DOS was not shiped on PCs in the 80's perhaps the "they" would have been right, perhaps we would all be using Unix today!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
In Robert X Cringely's book "Accidental Empires", there's a section where Cringely has Gary Kildall ranting about how MSFT ripped off CP/M - the quote is something about how MS-DOS uses '$' to mark the end of a string, and at MSFT, not even Bill Gates knows why. Can someone paw through the DR-DOS code and find out why?
We've got another little OS that kicks the shit out of DR-DOS and CP/M... It's called Linux.
Y'all let us know when you've got it ported to a 64k 8088, mmmkay?
Lately, the Z-80 CPU in there only gets to boot the machine and never does any other computing.
-----
It's called GEM. (The Atari ST used GEM-68k over TOS.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Oh wow. You're right. The whole story is...
Hey look! Oh, silly me!
The article says CP\M is free, not DR-DOS!
Heh... sometimes I just forget to read the articles and these things happen.
PS: The original article says DR-DOS is for purchase (includes source code). CP\M is free as the article states.
They bought the rights to DR Dos and then sued Microsoft for having using dirty tactics to limit the success of DR Dos back in the late 80s and early 90s. This was after DR Dos itself had been irrelevant for several years.
Caldera won something like $250,000,000 (I am too lazy to look up the exact figure) and besides a bunch of lawyers that got rich, Caldera got funding for their company.
So I guess that since Caldera purchased DR Dos simply in order to sue Microsoft, there is no reason to not open it now.
Lasers Controlled Games!
sigh. i remember running cpm because i needed to use a decent wordprocessor (Wordstar)for college. i picked up a cpm card from an obscure computer company in belluvue, wa (microsoft). it ran on my apple II. talk about convergence.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Actually I already had the sources of some of Gary's earliest CP/M versions. Allegedly they weren't much of an OS yet, but it was definitely source code (in PL/M, and it didn't look like an OS at all - it looked more like a stupid game from a 13 year-old 31337 h4x0r). But it's definitely nice to see the DR-DOS sources, for comparison with MS-DOS;)
One must notice, however, that it's hardly possible to write, for instance, a fdisk that's worse than the one for MS-DOS, source-wise...
First up: elf loading!
jk
(Unless you really think it's a good idea.)
(Then not jk.)
[code]
10 RUN DOS
.
.
[code]
Hmmm, so Microsoft swiped this, and evolved it, and now all MS OSes are based on it? Interesting...
[more code]
.
.
10000 X = Random(256)
.
.
[mode code]
I wonder if any of this ancient legacy stuff is still around in the new versions of Windows..
[even more code]
.
.
20000 IF( X = 128)
20001 GOTO 50000
20002 ELSE
20003 GOTO 10000
[even more code]
What an odd piece of code.. I wonder what it does.
[end of code]
.
.
49999 END DOS
50000 CRASH DOS
[end of code]
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
FreeDOS has been an interesting and successful project. Its kernel based. Now that DR-DOS is open, it'll be interesting to see what kind of projects and distros become of DR-DOS. DR-DOS is closer to *real* MS-DOS than FreeDOS. Does this mean that perhaps FreeDOS will be pushed aside for preference of DR-DOS, in such arenas as DOSEMU support of legacy applications? Just some points to think about. I'm sure FreeDOS isn't going away anwyay, because it rocks as much as DR-DOS, as much as DOS can rock.
Cool stuff.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Now I no longer have to pay the CP/M tax, and I can continue writing software for a FREE operating system.
It is nice to read that it is freely available now (its been about time).
But i havent seen any hints where I can actually find the code. Any known links??
Lispy
We've got another little OS that kicks the shit out of DR-DOS and CP/M... It's called Linux.
:)
I'd agree with you if Linux was half as easy as DOS (1. Plug in driver install disk 2.type a:Install 3. follow onscreen instructions) or if you could run linux on my old TRS-80, 8088, 286, coco3(TRS-80 Color Computer 3), or run half the number of applications available DOS under Linux, or if the bootup time for Linux or Windows was even twice what it was for DOS. DOS is even rock solid stable, especially when we are talking about protected mode apps. The apps may crash, but pmode apps will rarely take the system down, and a lot of regular apps had less to worry about, so they are inherently less buggy. If they did crash, nobody comes close to the swift bootups under DOS, so it doesn't matter as much as when an operating system which takes 5 minutes (or even 30 seconds) to boot up.
DOS has stayed fairly recent because of these things(or in spite of them), and there is even several web browsers (my favourite web browser for DOS is Arachne) for it, in spite of the obstacles faced when coding TCP/IP applications for DOS.
I find the best part though, is that DOS is a de facto cross platform standard. Many Operating Systems can run dos applications either natively or thorugh an emulator or VDM.
Now I'm going to stop fanboy-ing DOS, and get back into the real world.
It's been a long time.
I've heard rumors of people who are still using 286's. If true, there may be some poor unfortunate soul using an 8088.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The storage space and memory requirements are low enough that I really can't imagine an x86 or x86-clone based machine that would be unable to run freedos, but would still run CP/M. Remember, DOS was also designed to deal with severe memory constraints. Finally, I'd point out that there already are DOS embedded systems - CP/M users would have to reinvent the wheel ad infinitum.
I'm the stranger...posting to
You have to pay for the source, so I'd guess the answer to all of your questions is "NO!"
I'm the stranger...posting to
I've heard rumors of people who are still using 286's. If true, there may be some poor unfortunate soul using an 8088.
:)
I'm not thinking of desktops here (gawd forbid), but something you can carry around in your pocket. A PDA that could run (or emulate) DOS would kick some, IMHO. Lots of old utilities and games and apps you can run, and be perfectly productive in. Now if I can just get some wireless 'net feed hooked into a modem simulator, I could run - OPUS BBS! Yeah! Call my PDA and upload some software!
Short shameful confession: My current PDA, an HP Jornada 720, is running a DOS emulator and old DOS apps. So there.
This is a common fiction. Kildall actually had a deal with IBM, they simply went with MS because it was cheaper. When confronted with the fact that MS-DOS was possibly stolen, IBM offered Kildall a huge sum (at the time) of money, and Kildall accepted the appology, and the cash. This info from a highly reliable source, who attended Kildall's funeral.
I guess it makes it easier to swallow if we believe that Kildall missed the boat, rather than sold the farm.
Above comment is personal opinion. Poster is not a spokesperson.
Now I can port CP/M-68K to my TI-89!
Or, perhaps I can ressurect the Z-80 softcard in my old Apple II if I can find the box it's in. (The softcard was one of M$'s truly innovative products... made before they were a monopoly.)
Hmmmm...
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I find the best part though, is that DOS is a de facto cross platform standard. Many Operating Systems can run dos applications either natively or thorugh an emulator or VDM. Running an emulator is stretching the the "cross platform" story too far. If you dont have an 8088/8086 or it's descendants, forget it.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Before it came up with DOS, Microsoft sold a piece of hardware for the Apple ][ called the Microsoft SoftCard, which had a Z-80 processor and ran CP/M 80 (or the CP/M clone ZCPR--which was "open" long ago.)
Users plugged this card into an Apple ][ slot and booted into CP/M from a floppy disk. It was (is?) useful for running WordStar and dBase II, which were not ported to Apple's disk operating system, but you could not run both at once.
The next step ought to be for the Regents of the University of California to open up the UCSD Pascal operating system source used in Apple Pascal. The source has value for students even if it has been superseded by other operating systems now.
Then all three of the original 8088 operating systems for the IBM PC would be open--FreeDOS, UCSD Pascal, and CP/M 86.
I don't even need to look this one up... I still remember it. It's because CP/M BIOS call #9 which writes a string to a device, requires '$' terminated strings. In C, by contrast, the standard library wants '\0' terminated strings.
The answer lies in that MS-DOS has a set of INT 20h (or is it 21h?) function calls, the first several are damn near identical to CP/M, including #9, which, for some reason, wants '$' as the end-of-string terminator.
That is why.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
which, for some reason, wants '$' as the end-of-string terminator
Right. The point of Gary Kildall's griping was that Kildall knew the reason, and Bill Gates didn't. This, to Kildall, proved that MS-DOS had a shady heritage, possibly involving re-assembling (to 8086 object code) a disassembled CP/M (8080 object code).
There may have been some merit in Kildall's claims, given that he sued MSFT, and settled out-of-court.
What would it take to make a 32 bit DR-DOS distribution which could be stuck in a dos emulator like DOSEMU? If we could set that up, then who needs to dual-boot into Windows? Just run Windows on top of Linux whenever you want to use whatever applications.
Of course, we'd need to set up an emulation layer that Windows 95 sits on top of.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Lots of PCs were sold with 64K in them and had to run something. I'm sure you couldn't even boot Xenix without more than that, and you'd end up swapping floppies constantly.
DOS was DOS, and it was limited by IBM's original PC design, but spme really good coders wrote a number of really good programs that ran on it. Anyone besides me still fell pangs of withdrawl because you can't use Magellan?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I was attempting to be sarcastic with the "for some reason"
You can bet Gary had a valid claim, and EVERYONE who ever programmed in both CP/M and MS-DOS (as I did) knew it.
But, the main point of my answer was to the "why does the $ mean anything" implication of the original poster.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Back in the days when DR-DOS was stomping around, it was fairly customary to provide a character-mode menu. The idea was to get rid of as much OS as possible, to give games the space to run. The funny thing was that the DOS menu that came with my computer was more capable than the Windows Program Manager on the then just released Win31.
People who wanted more capable menus usually went out and bought third-party stuff, which was more capable than either DOSSHELL or VIEWMAX.
But I found that the DR-DOS gui mode stuff nastier than character mode stuff, especially when it's run in a window.
File Management in DOS on the other hand spawned a lot of third party stuff that is still copied to this day: eg XTree, Norton Commander.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I'm confused
When CP/M enthusiast Tim Olmstead died from cancer on September 11 this year,
Did he die from cancer, or was he in the WTC centers on 9/11. (Or was it just a coincedence that he died on the same day as that tragic event)
I used to work for the U.S. Navy, and we once negotiated with DR for rights to embed a custom version of CP/M in one of our systems. After months of painful haggling, we finally gave up when they wanted many many thousands of dollars (I dimly recollect in the neighborhood of $100K) for the source code, and just wrote what we needed for a fraction of what they were asking. They could have had a significant amount of money plus per-platform license fees, but instead chose to piss us off. Idiots.
From article:
...Accounts differ about what happened to situation normal, all fucked up that deal...
Can somebody please explain?
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
And I did downloaded source code for DR-DOS under the ABSOLUTELY NO-STRING ATTACHED condition.
Now... my question is - can I distribute the source to others?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
To add another point to the lineage.
... can make full use of up to 640 kilobytes of memory
From Concurrent PC DOS manual dated September 1984
Concurrent release 3.2 is a multitasking operating system that allows you to run both PC DOS and CP/M-86 applications simultaneously. Concurrent supports major popular applications--such as Lotus 1-2-3, dBASEII, WordStar, and MultiPlan Worksheet--and lets you run up to four interactive applications at once.
... supports up to four floppy-disk drives and two hard-disk drives (CP/M or PC DOS formatted).
forgive me if thsi has already been stated - but:
so if cp/m is open source - and *ALL* of MSFTs nifty little products are based on it, then would it make WINDOWS OPEN SOURCE?!!!
(I know it wouldnt - but the irony that the software that the MS empire is built upon is now open source just makes me smile....)
my father-in-law created a db for his small business using the old heathkit z-80. although he has a pentium III, he has found an emulator so he can continue to use his original db. i think it ran cpm too... we have interesting family get togethers.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
SCO Xenix 286, maybe. Linux and *bsd are out of the question.
--
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