CP/M

One thing I've always really really missed in MS-DOS is the IOBYTE. I've done enought whacky wild things with the IOBYTE (debugging a program running on one screen by interacting with the debugger on another, interacting with a user on one terminal while drawing pictures on a Tek 4010, even a serial mouse-based dorky little sketch program) that I really miss it. But by far the absolutely most important thing CP/M does better than MS-DOS is be hardware independent. The CP/M community isn't tied to one hardware platform like the MS-DOS community is. Sure, there _used_ to be wild and interesting MS-DOS machines, but you can no longer run even the most basic software on anything that doesn't have memory mapped video in a certain location, a pair of 8259 interrupt controllers, 8250 UARTs, a particular keyboard controller, etc. I'm split about whether CP/M's filesystem or MS-DOS's file system is worse. FAT sucks big time (especially FAT12), but at least it doesn't have to go searching through the entire directory every 16KB. Of course, given exactly how much FAT sucks, it's usually only one day a week or so that I think CP/M's filesystem is worse than MS-DOS's... Roger Ivie ivie(a)cc.usu.edu