23 Feb
2014
23 Feb
'14
11:59 a.m.
On 02/23/2014 08:59 AM, drlegendre . wrote:
And it met with commensurate success. In other words,
the C-64 (perhaps
even the VIC) trounced it to pieces..
Back in those days, there were essentially two camps of home compy users:
The C-64 / Apple or perhaps Atari folks (most of us) who had an interest in
computing for the sake and pure thrill of it - and the 'serious' users with
CP/M machines such as Osborne, Kaypro, Epson, TRS-80 or even the dread
IBM-PC / XT with its crazy MS-DOS deal.
Your forgot the S100 users CP/M, CDOS,
Cromix, NS*DOS.
Seriously. The enthusiast camp was quite different
from the "serious" camp.
The two rarely crossed paths, at least in those days.
These days maybe then [early then pre PC] it was a survival thing and
you would see
clubs with members having anything from a EVK6800, Kim-1 or S100
altair/imsai
through PDP-8 or a long list of others.
Later it would fragment into TRS80, Apple][, S100 CP/M or NS*dos, SWTP 6800
and then the Commie [Commodore] camps emerged.
The dividing line was distinct as the CPU and the operating software was
a partition.
the CP/M guys were more hardware diverse of the lot as any 8080/8085/z80
ran it
if there was disk and at least 16K ram starting at 0000h (trash80 had
Rom, video
and keyboard IO in the bottom). That meant the CP/M crowd were not married
to a physical system or vendor. Their evolution and longevity were
different
as a result. Oddly CP/M is one of the few in the bunch that can be
ported to a
currently available Z80 of some flavor, a CF or SD and a bios created to
mate
it all. Most of the rest are tied to specific hardware and interfaces.
The Osborne, Kaypro, Ampro Epson was later in the post PC era.
Some I came in contact with or had up to the intro of the IBM PC...
Systems:
PDP-8
*Altair
IMSAI
*North*star Horizon
*Netronics 8800, an 8085 based board expandable to s100 levels
Apple][
*TRS80 (the first!)
Heath H-11 (LSI-11 is heath clothing).
Boards (SBCs):
*National SC/MP
*RCA COSMAC
*IMSAI IMP 8035 based
*Technico SSS Ti9900 based
*Motorola EVK-6800-D1
*Kim-1
* means I actually have one that I bought in that time frame.
I'm sure I missed a few
Most of the LICA and related clubs would see all, we sure did.
Allison