peter@ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva) (08/17/88)
In article <3660@bsu-cs.UUCP>, dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes: > In article <1260@ficc.UUCP> peter@ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes: > >And we're talking about a different CP/M, too. I don't recall any serious > >deficiencies in CP/M that weren't shared by the early PC-DOS... > CP/M had no expandability. With MS-DOS you *began* with 64 K, > remember? With CP/M, you finished there. Must have imagined MP/M and CP/M 3.0 then. Sure, it was bank selected... but then so is the 8088... the only difference is that the 8088 puts the bank select logic on-chip. > With competing CP/M machines, > there was no standard programming environment, since everybody's video > display and language interpreter was slightly different. Whereas the IBM-PC let people make assumptions about the hardware that we're still paying for, and doomed many genuinely superior machines. > The IBM PC > was the only machine for which you could write a good graphics program > (for the color/graphics display) and expect it to work on all > machines. Well, except for the majority (at that time) that had monochrome adaptors. And anything you could do on a monochrome adaptor you could do with termcap (and later curses) on UNIX. *Or* CP/M. I wrote and released into the public domain a CP/M Termcap clone back in '80 or '81. It's a trivial program... a few pages of code. Other people with better marketing savvy have done the same at the same time or since then. > But CP/M did last a little longer, thrashing and desperately struggling > to survive, while MS-DOS added [a bunch of stuff]. That was later, and not at ll obvious when the PC came out. -- Peter da Silva, Ferranti International Controls Corporation, sugar!ficc!peter. "You made a TIME MACHINE out of a VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE?" "Well, I couldn't afford another deLorean." "But how do you ever get it up to 88 miles per hour????"