For an operating system that was once incredibly popular and expected to become a standard for a long time to come, it’s remarkable how little experience most people have with CP/M. In fact, many conventions and historical limitations you might be aware of – like the 8.3 filename convention of DOS – come straight from CP/M, as it influenced DOS considerably. It’s quite easy to emulate CP/M today, but it’s just old and different enough that getting into it might be a but confusing, but that’s where Eerie Linux’s introduction to CP/M comes into play.
This article is just what the headline promises: an introduction to the CP/M operating system. No previous knowledge of 1970s and early ’80s operating systems is required. However, some familiarity with Linux or a BSD-style operating system is assumed, as the setup process suggested here involves using a package manager and command-line tools. But why explore CP/M in the 2020s? There are (at least) two good reasons: 1) historical education 2) gaining a better understanding of how computers actually work.
↫ Eerie Linux
This article is a great way to get up and running with CP/M fairly quickly, and I intend to do just that when I find some time to mess around with it. What are some of the core, crucial applications that one should try on CP/M? Things people would be using back when CP/M was properly in use?
Turbo Pascal ? Wordstar ? Maybe Multiplan ?
but those might be hard to find… there was a lot of of CP/M programs for the Amstrad PCW. Would be nice to see how many can still be found and run..
CP/M owes a great deal to the DEC operating systems such as OS/8 and RT-11. A lot of the command naming and architecture was inspired quite heavily by such systems.
However, DOS was largely a clone of CP/M. Early DOS versions were largely compatible with CP/M, and MS-DOS (and compatibles) can almost be called “CP/M clones”. There was less inspiration and more direct copying. QDOS/86DOS was originally written as an 8086 version of CP/M because Digital Research were slow to get an x86 version of CP/M out the door. Microsoft bought QDOS as a quick way of getting an OS for the IBM PC, as Microsoft has pretty much signed the contract to provide one (and claimed to have an x86 OS) without actually having one.
So in an weird way, through Dave Cutler and Windows NT, the only commercial non-UNIX OS available on comsumer hardware today is basically just a derivative of (several) DEC OS(es)
I like to shout about how the modern computing world owes it’s entire existence to the PDP-11, and the RT-11, CP-M, and VMS heritage of Windows 11 is a great example. That’s not including the lesser known fact that the 68k processors were heavily inspired by the PDP-11 architecture, and the much more well known fact that UNIX gained mass market adoption via the PDP-11. ARPANET was also dominated by PDP-11’s in it’s early days, and a PDP-11 is about the oldest computer you can run a TCP/IP stack on (via 2.11BSD). Ethernet, naturally, was an option DEC sold.
CP/M is great, but like most operating systems, it’s inspiration and heritage reach back far beyond what most people realise. And practically everything can claim some degree of heritage to the humble PDP-11.
The123king,
It’s true. Some ideas probably could have ended up being independently invented in a vacuum, however there were direct connections and shared heritage of ideas and personnel such that even competitors weren’t completely independent.