On Mon, 22 Oct 2018 at 16:28, Jim Manley via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I'm going to stand by my assertion that the Softcard was a single-board > computer on the technicality that it did have its own RAM - you apparently > forget that registers are a form of RAM - HA! They're memory, they're > addressed over a bus (that just happens to be within the microprocessor), > and you can directly access any register at any time (random access). As > for I/O, that's what the Apple ][ bus was for, right? As Opus from Bloom > County, among other comic characters, was known to utter, > "PBBBBBBTTTTTT!!! Heh. Nice attempt at hair-splitting but I think you missed. ;-) > > For those that cited the Amstrad systems, I was referring to the S-100 and > Softcard timeframe. But you didn't _say_ that. > > CP/M was only provided with the Amstrad CPC664 and > 6128 floppy-disk based models, and the DDI-1 disk expansion unit for the > 464 (only CP/M 2.2 with the 664, and 2.2 and 3.1 with the 6128). Nope. It was an option for the CPC series of colour-capable home computers, yes. But it was supplied *as standard* with the PCW 8000 & 9000 series of monochrome-only "personal computer wordprocessors". You got 2 boot disks in the box: one with LocoScript, the dedicated Amstrad PCW word processor (albeit later ported to, or rather rewritten, for IBM-compatibles), and one with CP/M 3. CP/M was the _only_ general-purpose OS for the PCWs. (Excluding the later, unsuccessful, PcW 16.) They had no ROM and no ROM BASIC or anything else. I think they were the last CP/M machines of any significance, first released in 1985, well into the MS-DOS era. Nonetheless they were hugely successful in their time and there were quite a few CP/M apps released that only ran on the PCWs, directly driving their 720*256 res screen in graphics mode or a few in 90*32 text mode. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: [email protected] - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
