On 08/25/2012 05:22 AM, Rick Murphy wrote:
At 11:14 AM 8/24/2012, Allison wrote:
David Gesswein wrote:
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 12:21:57PM -0400, Allison
wrote:
Unlike many when CP/M came about in the mid 70s
I'd experience
with OS/8 and TOPS-10 and wished that CP/M was more.
I haven't used CP/M. What was the significant items that were better
about OS/8 than CP/M? I had thought they were similar in capability
(and even shared some command names).
The biggest difference was OS/8 was multi-task/multi-user.
OS/8 on the DEC PDP-8 was most definitely single-task, single-user.
There were other PDP-8 operating systems such as TSS-8 (EDUsystem-50)
which were multi-task/multi-user, as well as time-sharing systems that
were multitasking.
You may be thinking about the fact that OS/8 could be run as a
background job as part of RTS-8.
Indeed it can and also under TSS-8.
It also
existed and was more powerful than CP/M years earlier on
a CPU (PDP-8) that was more primitive.
I don't know how anyone could call OS/8 more powerful than CP/M. OS/8
was a very, very simple system.
So Is CP/M.
OS/8 does just a few things: it allows you to
read/write files, has a
command decoder, and a keyboard monitor (command line). It has no
services for critical things like console terminal input/output, has a
rudimentary file system, and basically doesn't do much.
And the difference is?
Now, if you replace the "OS/8" above with
"RT-11" I'd be in agreement.
RT11 I could consider that almost true. Save for the file system is
actually more primitive
as it cannot do scatter gather and CP/M does. A partially used RT11
disk with deleted files
needs to be compacted to get back the large contiguous spaces same as
NS* dos.
But it does many other things very nicely.
Allison
-Rick