Aaron Kulkis wrote:
[And yes, CP/M WAS a toy. It was written by one guy in his basement in the mid-1970's to use on his Altair (*?) Intel 8080 machine, which he distributed freely to hobbyists. Then it was given commercial legitimacy first by Radio Shack (TRS-80), and then MS (Gates bought a slightly extended commercial version and re-branded it PC-DOS].
I suggest you get your history right. CP/M was developed by Gary Killdal, a computer science professor, who also did some work for Intel and CP/M was originally written for an Intel system. It was the most successful operating system for the 8080 & Z80 CPU's and also ported to others. Also, it was not a toy distributed freely to hobbyists. It was sold as a commercial product and many businesses used it. There was a lot of commercial software written for CP/M. PC & MS-DOS came about as a result of a company called Seattle Computer Products, which developed Q-DOS as a test system for their hardware, while waiting for CP/M-86 to be available. When IBM was developing the PC, they looked for an operating system. They initially had three, CP/M-86, something called P-code and DOS. Bill Gates sold IBM DOS, before he even owned it. He then went to SCP to buy it, repackaged it with some minor changes and called it DOS 1. IBM called their version "PC-DOS" and the version Microsoft sold to others was called "MS-DOS". Gary Killdal was able to demonstrate in court that DOS contained some CP/M code. The TRS-80 never ran CP/M. It had it's own OS . It also ran a BASIC, sold by Microsoft, as many of the personal computers of the time did. -- Use OpenOffice.org <http://www.openoffice.org> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org