On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 2:43 PM, Ali <[email protected]> wrote: > I've seen references to a CP/M port for the IBM Displaywriter in magazines of > the era. Has anyone ever seen this beast in real life? Better yet anyone have > a copy of it?
Thanks for the reminder, I'd been meaning to send an email here and elsewhere calling out the re-discovery of "CP/M-86" for the IBM 6580 Displaywriter. I understand that CP/M-86 was intended to be an actual product for the IBM Displaywriter, but I've not found an IBM product code for it, and I don't recall during my searches that I found anyone who actually used it as a released product. It could be that IBM asked Digitial Research to do the demonstration port so they could assess whether there was any interest in it. I contacted one of the Phoenix BIOS team who had also done a port of MS-DOS to Displaywriter and was assured this never became a released product. As it happens, the demonstration port of "CP/M-86" for the IBM Displaywriter has been hiding in plain sight for over 10-years. I have been looking for it for at least 5+ years ever since I became interested in Displaywriter and managed to acquire one in Australia. >From time to time I trawl back through the usenet archives attempting to track down details of the Displaywriter and came across an interesting comment by the people who recovered some of the original DRI disks. This recovery resulted in these diskettes being imaged back in 2005. The comment made a reference to a couple of diskettes labeled (DRI) "concurrent CP/M 86 DW Demo, Data Drive B (right" - it was speculated as to what they were but it seems no one examined them further at the time. I was intrigued by the initials DW and downloaded them and took a look, it was clear they were for the Displaywriter and they booted fine once I copied them onto 2D media (I initially tried the image as Type 1 diskettes but that didn't work). I'm double-quoting CP/M-86 deliberately since the diskette image on the Internet is actually of a demonstration port of something more than merely CP/M-86, it is some hybrid (or transitional) MP/M-86 and Concurrent CP/M-86, I have some screenshots here of it running: https://goo.gl/photos/UCH2TnfBunPub6xNA DRI was I think developing CCP/M-86 in late 1982, and had derived it from the MP/M-86 codebase and this demonstration port seems to be of this alpha or beta code for CCP/M-86. Other than the keyboard, diskettes and the screen, I've not been able to discover the extent of driver support for Displaywriter hardware (comms, printer). The IBM Displaywriter is a complex machine with several (factory) configuration options, and it was not originally designed to host multiple operating systems or to be (as easily) re-configurable like the IBM 5150 PC. You purchased the Displaywriter with a specific set of options. I doubt the demonstration CP/M-86 port can do much more than be a dumb terminal to CCP/M-86. Anyhow, you want to look here: http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html under this section: NEW 04/10/2005 Miscellaneous DRI disks You'll need to use Dave Dunfield's utilities or similar to image the diskettes onto the 8-inch format.
