Gregy wrote:
. > [CP/M] was a very good operating system, for its time, but I don't think
. > any of us want to go back to that time....<g.
I don't think that anyone would want to go back to MS/PC-DOS 1.0 either. It
should be remembered that DOS has evolved, and it should be assumed that CP/M
would have evolved. Also, CP/M was the operating system that the first
practical spreadsheet, Visicalc, was developed for. CP/M was also the
operating system for AutoCAD. All operating systems of that time required
that a monitor type be selected; Lear Sigler, VT52, VT100, etc., as there was
no standardization and everyone was vying to be the de-facto standard.
I "toyed" with CP/M on a Sage computer in about 1984 in getting my feet wet
with PC's. Several things that I think I remember about CP/M are:
It came with a defrag utility, PACK.
It *did* have a DIR command.
It *did not* have a 640KB memory barrier as it placed all of the drivers and
relocatable ROM at the bottom of memory.
Also, IIRC, Kindall was out flying when IBM came a-calling.
Kindall was not the only one that failed to defend his creation. The
"point-and-click" concept was developed by SPARQ Park when Jobs (or his
partner) saw his toddler daughter moving the cursor around a monitor using an
early incarnation of a mouse.
Roger Turk
Tucson, Arizona USA
