How CP/M Launched the Next 50 Years of Operating Systems - Slashdot

How CP/M Launched the Next 50 Years of Operating Systems

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• My first PC was a two-user CP/M M/PM PC. It had 64MB of memory per user

  ITYM 64kB

  The downfall of CP/M and M/PM was that the once again, standards were loose.

  The downfall was that it was tied to a slow processor (not when it was new, but not so long thereafter) and it had no hierarchical file system which was already an expected feature of a real OS.

  • https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]

    I quote someone else saying: "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

    And my comment on that included (removing all the supporting links):
          "We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO....
            But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyrights and patents which set the stage for that. We still have choices, and we can still pick different ways forward. [With] the free and open source software movements, we are in a sense returning to older ways of sharing knowledge that were more popular before artificial scarcity was so broadly thought to be a good idea for promoting progress. One should always ask, "progress in what direction"?...
        Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday...
          Those who have the impulse to share and cooperate more than hoard and compete are still stuck trying to navigate the economic mess we have made of today's society through artificial scarcity, the growing rich/poor divide, the diversion of so much productivity into weapons and consumer fads, and so on. The late 1960s and early 1970s when Kildall, Moore and Kay/Ingalls were having their breakthroughs were a more hopeful time in that sense....
        Still, the web and HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 are a new hope for sharing via open standards, and they have been a big success in that sense. I'm moving more of my own work in that direction for that reason (even for all their own issues). Like has been said about JavaScript -- it is better than we deserve considering its history and the pressures that we all let shape it."

    So, while you and others who are posting here are no doubt right on technical limits and marketing issues, I would say the "downfall" story is more complex socially than one man and his decisions with one design.

    I'll again echo a key point about Gary by someone else quoted at the start: "But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man." We need to build a society and an economy where people who make that choice get more support and respect.

    • I think the story is proof that design doesn't matter. People will buy garbage if the marketing is good enough. You have to have a good product AND good marketing to beat a bad product. Just look at every major purchase you've done in the last 20 years - cars, appliances, TVs etc.

    • Re:

      in the Game Theory construct called, "The Prisoner's Dilemma."it is 'common knowledge' that the 'best outcome for yourself is to betray your partner... but this is not the outcome with the best solution for you! the best solution is for you and your partner to never betray each other! The dilemma is that it is presumed that your partner will betray you, so you should betray them, if I recall correctly.

      What is best for society is often in this same vein. You can profit yourself, or you can create for the

    • Re:

      I quote someone else saying: "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to th

  • Re:

    ITYM 64 KiB
    
    64 kB = 64,000 bytes
    64 KiB = 65,536 bytes

    • Re:

      Back then, KB was all binary
      "The term 'kilobyte' has traditionally been used to refer to 1024 bytes...
      The binary meaning of the kilobyte for 1024 bytes typically uses the symbol KB, with an uppercase letter K...
      In December 1998, the IEC addressed such multiple usages and definitions by creating prefixes such as kibi, mebi, gibi, etc., to unambiguously denote powers of 1024"
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Hence, anything built before 1998 should use the nomenclature in place at that time. Maybe.

      • Re:

        Those prefixes invoke images of Liberace and Elton John in their flaming gay attire.

    • Re: My first PC

      There was no such thing as KiB back in them thar frontier days.

      1 KB was 1024 bytes.

      It was when the marketing departments of disk manufacturers realised that their disks would seem bigger if they went metric that the confusion set in. And then the standards bodies got involved and pointed out (rightly) that kilo means 1000, whatever number base you're working in, and so the KiB was born and KB was redefined to specifically be the base-10 method of counting.

      It took a while for the industry to adapt, but

• My third had it

  I went from the VIC-20, to Commodore 64, then Commodore 128 which added a Z80 as a 2nd CPU, 80 column output, and could boot up CPM. I didn't have any CP/M software, so only tried it a few times. Once was to run software a friend wrote on his CP/M system, which I think was a TRS-80 Model 4. My C=1571 disk drive was able to read the disks he brought over. Software ran just fine, though it ran slower than on his system.