Talk:CP/M
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Hmmm, the name for the copy command on the old PDP-11 (or possibly PDP-8, I'm not sure which) was "pip", n'est-ce pas? What is the connection there?
Do you know what OS on the PDP? I think PIP in CP/M stands for Peripheral Interchange Program, but I am not sure, will look up at some point (I think I set a set of Digital Research CP/M docs somewhere). --drj
There were several OSs on the PDP. I myself used RSTS/E on a PDP-11/70, and it used PIP. --Alan Millar (nice reference --drj)
The "pip" command (indeed standing for "Peripheral Interchange Program") was the swiss army knife of CP/M -- it could do copys, moves, and several other file operations. It was designed to know all about the various peripherals (hence the name) and how to copy, etc. to each of them. -- NickelKnowledge
- Calling the "pip" syntax "obscure" *grrrr* It does not copy, it assigns, which explains the Pascal-like assignment syntax. The result of such an assignment actually can be a copy but it's a slightly different point of view -- Volker
Why not simply CP/M? We don't have to my knowledge any convension that says put operating system to all of articles of operating system. -- Taku 23:43 Apr 4, 2003 (UTC)
PRESERVED HISTORY OF CP/M (pre-merge and rename):
(cur) (last) . . 13:11, 26 Sep 2001 . . 194.129.101.xxx (Revision as of 13:11, 26 Sep 2001)
CP/M stands for Control Program Monitor and was an
early operating system for Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 based computers.
It was normally distributed in its raw form on 8 inch floppy disks.
CP/M could be implemented on most new 8080 and z80 based systems by writing an interface layer, called the BIOS, for your particular computer then using the largely generic rest of the operating system largely unchanged. It was thus fairly portable amongst different machines with the same CPU; this made it popular, and much more software was written for CP/M than for operating systems that only ran on one brand of hardware.
Hundreds of different brands of machines ran CP/M.
WordStar, one of the first widely used word processors, was written for CP/M.
Later a version of CP/M for the Intel 8086 (CP/M-86) was written; it was an alternative to DOS for IBM PC's. DOS proved to be much more popular.
In many ways CP/M was a predecessor of DOS, many internal mechanisms of early versions of DOS were clearly inspired by those of CP/M.
The user interface of DOS however was a bit more friendly. Compare for example CP/M's copy command.
PIP <destination filename> <source filename>
to DOS's more intuitive
COPY <source filename> <destination filename>
(cur) (last) . . 13:16, 26 Sep 2001 . . 203.25.148.xxx (unfortunately, slashes in titles cause Wikipedia to create a sub-page. moved to CPM operating system. -- Bignose)
(page blanked - cut and paste move)
(cur) (last) . . m 15:43, 25 Feb 2002 . . Conversion script (Automated conversion)
REDIRECT CPM operating system
See also : CP
(cur) (last) . . 00:13, 8 Jun 2002 . . Uriyan
REDIRECT CP/M operating system
END PRESERVED HISTORY
Contents |
[edit] Accuracy
Lots of edits just now - I used CP/M from 1981 till around 1993, mostly on an Osborne 1 and Ibex 7150 - so I missed the 8 inch drives period, mostly. C: hard drive is an MS DOS thing - my Ibex calls the hard drive A: and the floppy B:, and any CP/M machine had to call the drive from which CCP was reloaded the A: drive. User area 0 was not generally accessible to other user areas in stock CP/M, but ZCPR patched this to make it work the way the article used to describe it. Executable files were called .COM in 8-bit CP/M - the .EXE extension was only for MS DOS. (16-bit CP/M called binaries .CMD). It's a little unfair to call a 30-year old operating system "primitive" by today's standards, especially as you could have found CP/M contemparies which were even harder to use (such as no random access files). I've also done some reorganizing - the drawback with editing online is that after a few people have touched the article the flow gets murky. --Wtshymanski 05:50, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Backronym?
I'm 99.9% sure that "Control Program for Microcomputers" is a backronym, and "Control Program/Monitor" is the original name. It's that missing 0.1% that's preventing me from doing the edit myself... -- DocSigma 08:42, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
- I have changed the order of the two names; you are correct, the name was changed. I used to have documentation that would prove this. --Moby 10:28, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Acronym
Isn't the correct acronym for CP/M actually "Control Processor for Microcomputers"? Maybe I just made this up (it's been a long time!) or maybe it was printed wrong in the manuals that I had for my 1984 Kaypro II. Any thoughts on this? --KevinWatts 06:11, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
- I am quite sure that Processor was never commonly used. Maybe your manual had a typo. --Moby 11:06, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
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- Ah, did a little more research, and I'm in agreement now! Thanks! KevinWatts 05:18, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Correct
Should'nt 64000 bytes of memory say 65536 bytes of memory? johan_h 23:15, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] RAM?
Why are we using "random access memory" in here rather than referring to it as RAM? Seems particularly odd seing as we aren't using the long version of BIOS and others...
[edit] Graphics
I am not sure if this (from the "History" section) is correct: "There were no operating system support for graphics (images) with 8-bit versions of CP/M. While graphics-capable S100 systems existed from the commercialization of the S100 bus, CP/M did not provide any standardized graphics support until the release of CP/M 3.0 with GEM graphics extensions. Owing to the small memory available, graphics was never a common feature associated with 8-bit CP/M operating systems.". On the (8-bit) Amstrad PCW8256, there was something called GSX (Graphics Systems eXtension?), a library providing graphical drawing functions. I thought this was part of CP/M, but I am not sure, and did not find anything on the net about it. Ahy1 12:45, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
- You are quite right. Graphical Environment Manager has a chapter on GSX. Though, I'm not sure about the actualy timeframe. See also http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Cpm/gsx.html. --Frodet 15:16, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Is this right?
Many of the basic concepts and internal mechanisms of early versions of MS-DOS were patterned after those of CP/M. Internals like file-handling data structures were identical, and both referred to disk drives with a letter (A:, B:, etc.). The main innovation was MS-DOS's FAT file system. This intentional similarity made it easier to port popular CP/M software like WordStar and dBase.
My understanding is that MS-DOS was a CP/M x86 port purchased by Microsoft. That is, it was not 'like' CP/M, it was CP/M.
This was, of course, long ago and I may not be remembering this correctly.
- I doubt you'd call Linux a Unix port, or Wine a Windows port. AFAICS, it would only be considered a port if it used actual CP/M code. --StuartBrady (Talk) 17:33, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
- CP/M-86 was Digital Research's own version of CP/M for the 16-bit register width Intel 8088 / 8086 CPUs. It was made available (at a hefty premium) for the IBM PC with diskettes. MS-DOS was a somewhat reworked (at Microsoft) version of QDOS which was CP/M-80 ported to the new 16-bit processors as a way to test a new CPU board for the S-100 bus developed at Seattle Computer Products. It was written by Tim Patterson, then an employee there. Patterson was later hired to work at Microsoft and supposedly did some work on that version of QDOS.
- So this editor's impression of what CP/M-86 was is quite off the mark both as to the name as well as to the internals. 67.86.175.54 05:03, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
The connection between Z80 and 8080 support is not clear, in my opinion.
