We had a pretty active CP/M community in the 80's when the C128 was released. Most of the time I spent in CP/M mode was either running Turbo Pascal or MEX ( the Modem EXecutive ... a telecommunications program. ) We had some CP/M bulletin board systems in the area with downloadable software and source code. This was where I first used archivers such as Gary Novosielski's LU / Library Utilty ... which was kind of like tar. It stored archives in files ending in the extension ".LBR". Versions of ARC were also used at the time. There were stand-alone versions of LZW and Huffman compressors ( Crunch and Squeeze, respectively ) which were often used in conjunction with LU in the same manner that gzip is often used with tar archives.
The posted article mentions how slow C128 CP/M when compared to comparable machines, but I really didn't notice. It ran quickly enough for my needs.
"I had a brief encounter with CP/M when I was 14 or 15 years old; I can’t remember exactly. At the time, I was in high school in Aveiro, and the local computer shop, which I visited daily on my way to the train station, just to stare at the window, the same way a pilgrim would visit and contemplate at a shrine, had two beautiful machines on display: the brand-new Amiga 1000 and a C128D."
This hit me with so much nostalgia. Different parts of the world - same experience.
I would spend my vacations with my grandparents in Uruguay in the 1980s and 1990s. The shops had all sorts of micros, from Amigas to Coleco Adams.
There was a small Amiga shop on 18 de Julio Avenue and I once took a friend from Brazil there and he was mesmerised; I couldn't get us out of there. I remember the owner was called Juan; he was a nice chap and we talked all afternoon.
In Brazil we had to make do with mostly clones of PCs and Apple IIs (and, later, MSX). Sadly, computer imports were very restricted in order to protect a local industry which was considered strategic. The policy was somewhat successful in the end, but not to the extent the government - a military dictatorship - intended, which was to bring about a completely local industry. There were few locally developed architectures, most based on imported components, and the bulk of the industry centered on clones with minor improvements (such as better peripherals, higher integration) in order to remain compatible with the existing software base.
I believe two key components were missing from Brazil's protection of its IT industry. Firstly, there was no attempt at educating the public (such as with Britain's initiative in the 1980s). Secondly, there was no attempt at making the machines cheaper.
And when push came to shove with Unitron's Mac, Brazil gave precedence to its orange exports. So I would classify it as a half-hearted attempt at industrial policy.
I had a C128 as a kid, but I almost exclusively booted into C64 mode to play games. I did have a CP/M floppy, but I only booted it once or twice, had no clue what to do with it, and forgot about it quickly.
Same here. I had this vague notion that CP/M was something that grownups would use to do SeriousBusiness, but I had no idea what kind of applications it could be used for. Booted it once or twice and didn't see anything interesting. My C128 usage was about 80% games 20% learning how to program, so if they had built in some kind of programming language to their CP/M ecosystem I would have probably gotten more into it.
Same. My dad bought our C128 second-hand from a guy at work and it came with a box of disks. Most were cracked games the previous owner had likely downloaded from BBSes or otherwise copied from other users (incidentally, how I discovered the demoscene, though I had no idea why so many of these programs and games had such awesome intro screens with great music and weird names in scrolling credits).
It's how I got to play a bunch of Infocom games and some other interesting stuff. But CP/M was boring and I only ever saw dad use it for word processing a few times. Most of my time was spent messing with games, getting S.A.M. to swear, and digging through the C128 BASIC manual to figure out how write programs to make pictures and play music.
edit: also use The Print Shop to create banners and use up all our printer paper, much to the chagrin of the aforementioned father.
>I had a C128 as a kid, but I almost exclusively booted into C64 mode to play games.
95% of C128s spent 95% of their time in C64 mode.
>I did have a CP/M floppy, but I only booted it once or twice, had no clue what to do with it, and forgot about it quickly.
If 1% of C128 users ever used the bundled CP/M disk for more than what you did—boot it to see what it's like—I'd be surprised. 1985 was just too late to expect people to buy a new computer to run CP/M.
I had a card to run CP/M on my Franklin (apple ][+ clone] it was to use WordStar I never used it. A computer store clerk in December 1982 basically said, "you should wait for the C64", but we just plowed ahead and got the Apple clone. It was easier in college as I could write my paper, take my 5.25 over to the big 24-7 study room at Rutgers, called the roost and they had a small computer print lab. I got a 3.5 disc and could use an Apple 11c the had with both disk types to move the doc over. Then I'd take my 3.5 disk over to a Mac and typeset my paper. For 86-89 that really felt modern. I just used AppleWrite or whatever knockoff name Franklin called it, and a couple of times when I had a longish paper I just spit it into two docs, I think the limit was under 15 pages. I wish I had gotten info on how to get going with CP/M there as I've heard Dos and Windows are based on it.
MS-DOS was inspired by CP/M to an extent, but not directly based on it. The device handling, BIOS functions, and command line were similar.
When IBM first developed the PC they needed an OS. At first they tried to license CP/M from Digital Research since it already existed with many applications available. But when DR fumbled the business negotiations, Microsoft stepped in and offered IBM favorable terms for MS-DOS. It wasn't exactly compatible with CP/M, but close enough that the transition was easy for users and developers.
Some things were identical, for example .com files were loaded at 0x0100 which meant that before the start of the loaded program there was space for the FCB:
This block would contain the command-line arguments, and have space for working with files (via FindFirst and FindNext), using the same globbing patterns as CP/M supported.
Of course things changed when MS-DOS got support for subdirectories, and later int21 functions expanded filesystem support. Later still .exe files became more dominant as they could be larger than 64k (minus PSP).
You left out the part where Microsoft offered to IBM to create an operating system and then bought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS which was written because Digital Research didn't release CP/M for the 8086 soon enough.
I left out a lot of parts to keep the comment short. Whole books have been written about those events. Accidental Empires has one perspective on the story, although I wouldn't take it as completely accurate.
While I had a friend who had a 128, we never thought to boot up that CP/M disk on his shelf. I had a Apple ][+ with a Z80 daughter card, and a Pascal compiler... so I would have been interested if I had only known (I was 12 and not reading the right computer magazines). Years later I have tried all of this through Commodore emulation. It was fun for a bit and definitely felt nostalgic.
And it didn't work very well. It didn't sell much, CP/M was dying at that time and the CP/M support in the C128 was not great. "Half my class" at school had C64's, but I only ever knew one person whose family got a C128. I really wanted one when they were introduced, but ended up with an Amiga a couple of years later instead.
Too late to edit but will correct myself slightly because the above might mislead: The C128 did sell well for a 1980's 8-bit home computer - about 2.5 million sold made it one of the best selling 8-bit computers ever.
It just didn't sell well for Commodore compared to the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. As a replacement for the Commodore 64, it was a sales disappointment. Most other manufacturers would have been thrilled with a failure like that, however.
That said, perhaps more accurate would be to say that using CP/M to position the C128 that was didn't help much - even of the people who bought a C128, most never used CP/M. Though to some it might have been what allowed them to convince parents it was a "serious computer".
Yes, 1985 was really too late for CP/M. Even Kaypro (the last surviving major CP/M machine vendor) had seen the writing on the wall and began to sell MS-DOS machines by then. Still, I was still using CP/M occasionally on my Apple II clone with a Z80 card, mostly for running early versions of Turbo Pascal (which was released for CP/M but never the Apple II natively).
I believe much of the team that was working on the S900 left Commodore with Jack Tramiel, and were involved with the design of the Atari ST.
In particular Shiraz Shivji, who was the main designer of the ST, was part of the S900 project.
Pretty sure the S900 was effectively dead before the C128 project was even started.
And in any case the S900 was a monochrome business computer, aimed at the productivity market -- a segment Commodore later targeted with PC compatibles instead.
The C128 was targeted at consumers who wanted to run C64 games.
They had an interesting hack to connect to a high-res monitor. Timing wise they had to stick to the standard TV timing otherwise regular Amiga software would not work. So they created a hack where the Amiga would send 4 screens of pixels that would then assembled and sent to a high-res monitor. Screen refresh rate was very slow though.
I still have a (printed on dead trees!) manual for Coherent 3.2 (286 version, circa 1990-91) kicking around. Ran multiuser (login via tty or virtual terminals on the console) in 640Mb of RAM, off a 10Mb fully installed setup. If I remember correctly you were limited to 64Kb code & 64Kb data per process, though ... (Coherent 4.0 removed the addressing limit).
Wow. That could have been something! Might have been a commercial flop, but it would have exposed a lot of young folks to some useful ideas a decade or two before they otherwise would have been exposed.
Interestingly all 3 of C900, C128 and the Amiga are/were to be ~1985 machines (maybe 86 for the C900). I'd think from the specs (memory, CPU power, multitasking OS, hard drive as standard for the C900 etc) point of view the C900 was competing more with the Amiga than the C64-compatible 128k machine that didn't have architectural prospects of addressign more memory later.
CP/M was the first serious OS I used. By serious I mean one with the full set of office tools (Supercalc, WordStar, dBase) and languages like BCPL, Pascal, C (BDS). I think this had a significant effect on my views on what can be achieved in a small system with scarce resources.
You can, but not at the same time. The data and address bus is shared. IO is done by the 8502 (the 6502 variant) when in Z80 mode, but only one CPU is executing code at the same time - the other one is halted. It was a shame they didn't sort that out. I don't know enough about the Z80 to know how practical sharing the bus would be, the way the VIC and 6510 in the C64 does, but almost "anything" would've be better than the arrangement where either one is totally stopped.
(If you have a floppy, though, the 6502 in the disk drive would still be available, and run in parallel, but the disk drive was both severely memory constrained and of course limited to the serial bus.
The Z80 and the 6502 (well, 8502 actually) CPUs share the same bus, and so there can only be one CPU running at one point in time. However afaik in CP/M and Z80 mode there are some I/O functions for the keyboard etc that halt the Z80, switch to the 8502, do what they do, and then switch back.
I'm not sure if you can somehow programmatically switch from the Z80 to the 8502 and back, though. I suspect not.
The posted article mentions how slow C128 CP/M when compared to comparable machines, but I really didn't notice. It ran quickly enough for my needs.