I used to dial into an old CP/M BBS, I think it ran on a Kaypro machine with two 5¼ floppies. The Sysop wanted to expand so he used a clone and ran Hue's (spit) Citadel86.
I do think that a CP/M dominated world would have turned out a lot better than an MS-DOS dominated world. MP/M would have formed the basis for a multitasking system years before Microsoft ever had anything usable. And it's likely that DR would have eventually worked on a transition to unix, just like MS was planning to do during the MS-DOS 2.0 days ... before they decided they had to build a Macintosh killer instead.
Eventually we would have ended up right around where we are today, but with different technologies and perhaps a lot less pain along the way. On the other side of the world, Apple made a big mistake by moving forward with the Macintosh instead of the Apple //gs. Again, they would have eventually wound up in roughly the same place we are today, but it would have been better in the interim.
One final note. Some people know that Bill Gates (spit) was among the first to challenge the idea that there would always be a lot of different types of computers; his opinion was that there was only going to be one kind of computer. Most people who know this assume that he was talking about the standard PC, or as it was known then, the IBM-compatible PC. This is not the case. He was talking about the MSX platform, developed in the early 1980's, and for which (of course) Microsoft built the operating environment (a sort of "Extended BASIC" as was common at the time). More than a dozen manufacturers built compatible machines, which ended up becoming very popular in Japan.
In the US they weren't all that popular.
Tue Oct 23 2018 10:16:35 AM EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold @ UncensoredI think you forget that the IIgs was a junker from the get go..... It was rehash of the plain old Apple II from the late 70's. They couldn't milk that cow any longer.
https://apple2forever.com/images/apple2forever/logo-v3.png
I recall that the guy who invented CP/M was dead-set against the idea of also vending software... either sell the operating system, or the software running on the operating system, but not both.
Gates, by contrast, sought to do both, and thus create a kind of monopoly that the other guy (can't recall his name) thought was immoral.
The Apple IIgs was very different from the rest of the II line. It had a 16-bit 65C18 running at 2.8 MHz. Backwards compatibility was achieved with an onboard "Mega II" chip, which was basically an Apple II SoC (uncoincidentally, the same SoC used on the Apple II card for early Macs).
It was, by all measures, superior to the original Mac. The only reason the Mac became the flagship was because Steve The Jobs had returned to Apple and he wanted to boot some heads. In fact, one of The Steve's first official acts of state when he returned was to cripple the IIgs clock speed to deliberately make it slower than the Mac.
The IIgs had better graphics, better sound, more memory, and backwards compatibility.
It was superior to the original Macintosh in every way.
More here: [ https://youtu.be/7h4tepFbMso ]
Tue Oct 23 2018 02:10:05 PM EDT from fleeb @ Uncensored
I recall that the guy who invented CP/M was dead-set against the idea of also vending software... either sell the operating system, or the software running on the operating system, but not both.
Gates, by contrast, sought to do both, and thus create a kind of monopoly that the other guy (can't recall his name) thought was immoral.
The late Gary Kildall
Maybe it was also the same person who was in charge of suppressing the objective truth that Bill Gates really did say "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Digital Research also sold a compiler and runtime called CBASIC. It's what I learned on, actually. I suppose an argument could be made that this counted as system software.
2018-10-23 14:17 from IGnatius T Foobar
The Apple IIgs was very different from the rest of the II line. It
had a 16-bit 65C18 running at 2.8 MHz. Backwards compatibility was
achieved with an onboard "Mega II" chip, which was basically an Apple
II SoC (uncoincidentally, the same SoC used on the Apple II card for
early Macs).
That's like saying the Commodore 128 was vastly superior to the C64. It was, but both were too little too late.
With Paul Allen’s passing it is worth noting the similarities between Microsoft and Apple.
In the both cases the principals that started the companies split. Why?
Paul Allen came down with lymphoma in the early 80’s. His survival was in doubt. He eventually recovers. On a visit to the office, he gets wind that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are plotting how to get his Microsoft stock. After all, he is not contributing to the company. At that point he started the process of leaving and taking his stock with him.
Steve Wozniak in the early 80’s was beginning to enjoy the fruits of his labor. He started taking pilot’s lessons and bought an airplane. At some point he has a crash landing. He is injured and goes through a long recovery. He gets wind that Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula are plotting to recover his stock in Apple. That started the process of him leaving and taking his stock with him.
Greed. Covet is one of those 10 Commandment things. Ex 20:17
What Paul Allen and Bill Gates did with that first BASIC is simply amazing. It would run in 4K of RAM!
The BASIC itself was approx. 3200 bytes of code leaving 800 bytes for the program.
It supported 32 bit floating point with transcendentals. Ie:sin, cos, etc.
At the time you could get a library of subroutines to do the said floating point operations. The library was about 1600 bytes.
So Allen and Gates did the rest of the BASIC interpreter in a total of 1600 bytes. Amazing!!
For the record, a 4 MHz Intel 8080 would do this benchmark:
For I = 1 to 1000
Next I
In just under 4 seconds. That was the normal max clock for the cpu.
Allen and Gates also did a version of the interpreter for the Motorola 6800.
Max clock for the 6800 was 1 MHz.
Intel and Motorola processed things internally in different ways.
The 6800 version at max clock did the benchmark at 3.2 seconds. marginally faster.
1600 bytes!
Right, Gary Kildall.
https://www.digitalresearch.biz/GARY&CPM.HTM
His own words regarding CP/M, etc. I thought it an interesting read.
Semi-related, though, is this article where someone determined that MS-DOS did not copy CP/M code at all:
http://www.embedded-computing.com/embedded-computing-design/software-forensics-lay-ms-dos-cp-m-controversy-to-rest
The TL;DR is, no, MS-DOS copies no code from CP/M, and Microsoft likely settled the case out of court just to get past the whole issue since there wasn't much money involved in the lawsuit at all.
(According to the article... you can read it yourself to decide if they're full of crap or merits any respect).
OTOH, the article also kinda reads like an advertisement for a software tool that helps perform forensics, which is rather a clever idea ... hooking people into reading the article by using the target software to prove or disprove something controversial.
Mon Oct 22 2018 01:53:07 PM EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold @ UncensoredFriendly? You're delusional.
Nothing was compatible between systems. Zilch. Even simple documents were next to impossible to share. ...
Plenty of people shared across systems with BBS systems. I can remember dialing in to a system hosted on an Atari ST system and downloading BASIC programs in the same day as I downloaded some BASIC programs for my TRS-80 Model 102 from another BBS over packet radio from a boat while fishing on a lake.
For the general public, they were also using different systems (non x86) to go online and do dial up using FIDO and other linked systems not too many years after that. I would say it was open to the masses to share things, and that would have continued.
But they made it available for every obscure platform in existence, sold it on every medium (tape etc) and really entrenched themselves well in the market. He named his boat "BLAST" and put the logo on the transom.
You can dial your own phone (1954)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuYPOC-gCGA
And the follow-up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok