The best CP/M machine ever? was Re: Kaypro II

On 08/25/2012 11:37 AM, Al Kossow wrote: Yes, I know, I even have a PDP-8 with 24KW of core. However TSS-8 and OS/8 had many hacks that allowed things that were, uhm, unsupported. ;] I keep a few DM-IIIs handy to run the bastard stepchild OS/278 as well. The point remains that CP/M was not a significant OS advance save for it made a similar phenomena occur, that was the standard software and generalized hardware platform every one could develop code on and for. For the PDP-8 and PDP-11 it was DECUS, for CP/M is was way bigger and ranged The only advances that CP/M brought was the concept of OS independent BIOS for hardware abstraction, a scatter/gather file system that didn't need to be compacted to allow for files larger than the largest contiguous unoccupied block and a set of APIs while not large were adequate. Oh, and it was cheap and cheap enough that if your media was supported or allowed for SSSD 8" then the OS was port-able, and applications could be portable. While it wasn't perfect it could be run on anything 8080, 8085, NSC800, z80, z180, z280 and there was an official 68K version. However in the 8080 world if you had enough ram from 0000h to at least 20K (48K was considered practical) and mass storage it could run a whole lot of applications (though there were some programs that were limited to Z80). I never saw an OS for the 6502 or 6800 world that unified all the 6502s for example. They were fragmented by vendor unless the other vendor was a clone and not litigated out of existence. It not to say there weren't a lot of 6502 OSes that weren't good but any of them that ran on Apple ][ would not run on Commie or ZYX! Allison