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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 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.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/5711/histor y.html
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"?
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.
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!
Her husband was Dr. DOS (whereabouts unknown) - there is speculation that the murderer entered and left through the broken Windows.
Ms Dos' twin P.C. Dos was unavailable for comment.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be construed as a monopoly preservation tactic.
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.
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.''A stable operating system allows you to keep operating the system when an application crashes. If an application can crash the OS, it ain't stable.
I have to agree that DOS was relatively stable compared to Windows. I ran AutoCad (versions 10 thru 13) under DOS and crashes came only every few months. As soon as I began running AutoCad under Windows, crashes and lost data became almost a dayly occurence.
I ran OS/2 for a while at home and it was as stable if not more that DOS
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?
The lineage is like this:
DR-DOS was essentially an upgraded version of CP/M-86 that was made to be (sorta) MS-DOS compatible.
It was sold as a retail product (before MS/IBM DOS was) with the primary benefit being peer-to-peer networking in the box. It was significantly cheaper than "LANtastic" or the MS/IBM solution.
Novell went insane and among other things, ended up buying DR (for a lot of money, about a year before Win95 was released. MS's OEM relationships were widely understood at the time, too.). They renamed the product Novell DOS. Again the primary sell was peer-to-peer, but it also had Novell compatibility without an additional client install. NetWare also require(d|s) DOS to boot, so the product was somewhat useful to Novell.
Novell spun off Caldera, as both a Linux business and as a vehicle to sue Microsoft over DOS marketing issues. Caldera renamed the product back to DR-DOS.
Caldera (after winning a chunk of change from MS) spun off Lineo so they could buy SCO and go and focus on whatever SCO does.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Still wrong... and here's why.
That would be IBM's PL/1. You know, the people who brought you RS/600, OS/2 and AS/400. The slash thing is sort of a theme at IBM. It was also a convention at Digital, which is where Gary probably borrowed it from moreso than IBM. RSTS/11, RSX/11, etc. were all PDP-11 OSes. CP/M was greatly influenced by PDP OS design.
Lately, the Z-80 CPU in there only gets to boot the machine and never does any other computing.
-----
Then what is this CP/M that I had z80 assembler source to ? :)
I'll see if I can dig it up somewhere, doubt it however.. I haven't done any gameboy programming in a long time.
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.
Yes, DOS was/is "stable", but only because requirements for the modern OS were much lower than nowadays.
a) if bad behaving applications can cause crash with modern OSes, OS is considered to be unstable.
b) Modern OSes must support lot more different hardware and any combinations of different hardware.
c) Modern OS must do multitasking, multiple, good memory management, handle different priviledge levels, support multiple users
d) Modern OS (kernel+core libs) must support lot of different APIs, executable formats, abstract away direct hardware accesses etc..
It's _relatively_ easy to code 'dos'-size program to be efficient and (mostly) always working when the requirements aren't very demanding. When the program size / number of features grow the number ways things can go wrong increases dramatically (O(n!) interacting parts (in theory)).
If' it's actually CP/M, it's 8080 code--the Z80 was backwards compatible. It's also possible that the customization for the particular machine was in Z80. Additionally, there was a clone (ZP/M ?) that was for Z80 only. But if it's actual CP/M source, it can't be Z80, as that would not run on the 8080 machines.
hawk
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
That's one of the stupidest things I've read today.
DOS is a thin file-access and memory allocation library, with a very small and weak command shell, on top of the BIOS routines. Applications mostly serve as their own OS, or use the BIOS.
The reason DOS "itself" crashes little, is because there is almost none of it!
In fact, applications crashing the entire machine is exactly the reason DOS is completely unstable. It is the responsibility of the OS to ensure system stability.
Now I no longer have to pay the CP/M tax, and I can continue writing software for a FREE operating system.
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.
No. DOS was never stable.
C:\>TSR1.COM
C:\>TSR2.COM
C:\>TSR1.COM
---crash---
Handled properly (with certain 3rd party tools like mark/rel, 4DOS, norton utilities, etc.), DOS could be almost enjoyable, but then the same can be said for Windows (gasp!)...
Oh, and DR-DOS was always better than MS-DOS, even with the Win 3.1 warnings of incomatibility...
The CPM source can be downloaded from http://www.cpm.z80.de
CLARIFICATON, DR-DOS is not OPEN, however the source is for sale if you'd like to purchase it.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
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
Dohh... that should be RS/6000...
FLASH! Murderer apprehended!
Dr. DOS confesses after being driven mad by laughing penguin!
In his first statement since capture Dr. DOS further said that the Devil made him do it.
I'm probably being trolled, but...
Assuming you're using the standard conventions, MTF stands for Mean Time to Fail. ("to" sometimes being replaced by "between" and Fail with Failures). In that case I can wholeheartedly agree with your statement, using a single tasking OS in a multiuser environment will decrease your MTF significantly, especially if your users have service level agreements.
I read the internet for the articles.
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
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 disagree with the characterization of DR-DOS as an upgraded CP/M-86. It was a virtually complete clone of MS-DOS. It hit the market, as I recall, during the late-'80s boom of MS-DOS 3.x. DR-DOS 3.31 was the first release I was familiar with, being a work-alike of MS-DOS 3.3. But it wasn't a clone. Unlike MS-DOS 3.x, DR-DOS code was re-entrant, so it could be run from ROM. This gave it a niche in embedded systems.
DR-DOS 5 added a bunch of features, and DR-DOS 6 had more. I bought DR-DOS 6 around 1990, when I bought a 286. It included disk compression (SuperStor, I think) before DOS did; that helped a lot with my 20 MB drive! It had a lousy graphical shell that I never used. DR's GEM was no gem either; I was using an Atari ST with DR's buggy GEM-based TOS for several years before moving to the Inteloid Dark Side.
Novell had bought DR by the time V7 came out, hence the name Novell DOS. Caldera had the good sense to go back to the DR-DOS name.
Mickeysoft buggered Windows 3 to detect DR-DOS and fail for no good reason. This sort of stuff led to a big legal victory for Caldera a couple of years ago, when Caldera was the holder of the DR heritage.
DR-DOS is a clone of MS-DOS, and MS-DOS is a knock-off of CP/M.
I've never had netscape crash a Linux box, but I've had Netscape crash on several occasions, occasionally causing X to hang. If you've got access to a terminal (you do have a way of getting into the machine "remotely", right?) there's no problems.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.