CP/M

command

Tim Olmstead Memorial Digital Research CP/M Library (cpm.z80.de) Here, in one place, are all the manuals we have for Digital Research software products. These manuals have been produced by scanning, and ocr’ing, the originals. Where possible, the look and feel of the original has been preserved as much as possible. The manuals presented here have been through an extensive clean-up process. OCR is not an exact art, at least not in the affordable software available for the PC, so a separate cleanup process is necessary to produce a pretty manual.

The CP/M 86 and CP/M 80 Museum (cpm8680.com) This website is a Work In Progress dedicated to CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) which was (and is) an operating system similar to MS-DOS but which predated MS-DOS, and which is in fact the operating system that MS-DOS descended from. But CP/M is much more than simply an early version of MS-DOS and CP/M is very much alive in online communities of Enthusiasts and Others who still use CP/M in Old (and sometimes newer) Computers and Emulators.

Nicole gets a real computer! The Microsoft Z80 SoftCard! (nicole.express) So there I was, very happy with my Apple ][plus. But then I saw someone on the internet post, and it seems that my Apple is an overpriced box with a toy microcontroller for a CPU, while real computers use an Intel 8080, 8085 or Zilog Z80 to run something called “CP/M”… but I’ve already spent so much money on the Apple, so can I turn it into a real computer?

retrotechnology.com retrotechnology: repair, restoration and/or reuse of old technology, particularly but not limited to 1970’s and 80’s digital computers. Why bother? History of old technology reveals and reappears in, represent trends, or may be essential for, new technologies. Preservation and description of past methods, for future use in similar situations. And, preservation for its own sake, of items for use as produced.

CP/M and Digital Research Inc. (DRI) Web pages (retrotechnology.com) Many software and hardware companies of the 1980’s and beyond, began as one or two-person companies offering a CP/M-compatible program, or a 8080 or Z80-based hardware product or system. CP/M was the dominant operating system for the 8080 and Z80 based systems of the microcomputer market in the mid-1970’s through well into the 1980’s. Created by Dr. Gary Kildall before 1975 and sold quietly in that year as CP/M version 1.3 for $70 per disk, it became known as IMSAI’s first diskette operating system IMDOS in 1976. Gary Kildall and his wife formed Digital Research Inc. to sell and support the product. A popular release was CP/M 1.4 in 1978, and later as CP/M 2.0 and 2.2 in 1979. It was popular because it was cheap and non-proprietary, and because it included all the software tools and information necessary to move it to any hardware platform with a terminal and a floppy diskette controller. Proprietary or competing Z80/8080 operating systems of the time were often program-compatible with CP/M. Non-Z80 systems sometimes had a “Z80 card” in order to run CP/M.

Digital Research Source Code (cpm.z80.de) Here you will find all the source code that we have for Digital Research software products. If there is something that you don’t see the source for, and you have it, please drop me a line, and I will provide you an address where to send it. It will then be posted here so everybody can enjoy it.

Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables, and which one is right? (devblogs.microsoft.com) If you snoop around your environment variables, you may notice that there are two variables that propose to specify the location of temporary files. There is one called TMP and another called TEMP. Why two? And if they disagree, then who’s right?
The Microsoft SoftCard for the Apple II: Getting two processors to share the same memory (devblogs.microsoft.com) The Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard was a plug-in expansion card for the Apple II that added the ability to run CP/M software. According to Wikipedia, it was Microsoft’s first hardware product and in 1980 was the single largest revenue source for the company.

CP/M (Wikipedia) CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. CP/M is a disk operating system and its purpose is to organize files on a magnetic storage medium, and to load and run programs stored on a disk. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors.