PC versus CP/M (Re: IBM bashing / OSF / SVID / added pennies)

[Peter da Silva]

In article <3660 at bsu-cs.UUCP>, dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
> In article <1260 at ficc.UUCP> peter at 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????"