Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 22 Oct 2018 at 16:28, Jim Manley via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> 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.


-- 
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