7 ms·

CP/M for OS X

128 points by bilegeek 5y ago

peterbmarks 5y ago
Anyone know how to run this on Big Sur? I've built the project and it runs but there's no terminal window and the New menu item is dim. I looked at all the forks but most are very old. I guess I need a CP/M disk image?
mfollert 5y ago
It's called macOS now.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  The project started 7 years ago.
  - ngcc_hk 5y ago
    Wow. Sorry for op. But it is a wow.
tyingq 5y ago
Looks like it emulates a Z80 with 64k and selectable Osbourne, ADM/3A, Hazeltine, or VT52 screen output.
- logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  My first ever computer was a hand-me-down Osborne. I vividly remember needing a special hardware keyboard combination to be able to display all the contents of the “window” in the frame buffer. I’ll definitely need to check this out for the nostalgia.
deaddodo 5y ago
If the goal was seamlessness; I would think you’d want to pipe the output into terminal directly via STDIN/STDOUT. Impressive work, regardless
- rbanffy 5y ago
  A lot of the CP/M computers I used had serial terminals connected to them and no way to directly attach a monitor and keyboard. It feels like it's easier to emulate that way. Also, Apple's Terminal.app does an outstanding job of pretending to be a VT-200 terminal. OTOH, this one is self contained. Still pretends the terminal is attached through a serial port, but it's emulated in the app. It's a shame Apple doesn't make the Terminal.app engine available to developers.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    >It's a shame Apple doesn't make the Terminal.app engine available to developers. Sigh. Add it to the pile of "things Apple really ought to open source just to give back to the community that they used to build the worlds most successful business from"
    - swiley 5y ago
      Remember that next time someone argues the GPL restricts their freedom.
      - simondotau 5y ago
        The GPL can restrict your freedom. All licenses which contain restrictions "restrict freedom" by definition. The actual question is whether the GPL license restrictions come into conflict with any freedoms YOU wish to exercise, such as the freedom to distribute modified binaries without releasing source code. Alternatively you could argue that the mere existence of any software—regardless of its license—can only be additive to freedom and can never be subtractive of it. Under this view it is impossible to have "less freedom" because Terminal.app exists; you've merely identified a scenario where you could have more freedom than you do right now.
    - simondotau 5y ago
      You are right that making Terminal.app open source would be a net win for everyone, but it's not going to happen. Not because Apple doesn't want to, but because there's no spare bandwidth for anyone to push for it internally. I think one of the biggest misunderstandings about Apple is the assumption that they have massive resources available to them, therefore they must have a wide bandwidth for competent development—be that in terms of vision, design, or code. The way I see it, Apple seems rarely able to focus on more than a few things at once. They have never been able to maintain high standards across the full breadth of their product stack. MacOS tends to get jankier and cruftier with every release. At this point it's akin to a very pretty rug that has had so much mess swept under it that it's impossible for it to lie flat. If you've ever dealt with the back end of Apple Music (née iTunes Music Store) you'd know that it's held together with a lot of crummy, barely-maintained software that falls apart under the most trivial of circumstances. For example, their iTunes Music Producer software can't even rip two-CD sets without causing file name conflicts in the XML. This bug has not been fixed for over a decade.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
williesleg 5y ago
Finally some real software. Lots of productivity because no internet. No facebags.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Did a little searching but did not see a specific version of the old ASCII Star Trek game for CP/M. I see BASIC for CP/M so I presume you could enter Star Trek that way....
tzs 5y ago
Around 1984, I worked for a Unix workstation manufacturer named Callan Data Systems [1]. Our workstations were 68k based and ran System V. Except for one that was sitting in a corner of the main office, which I noticed was running CP/M-68K. I asked around and found out that this was for the accounting people. It wasn't because they needed some accounting software that wasn't available for Unix. Everything they were interested in could easily be done on Unix. So why did accounting choose CP/M-68K? Because they assumed (correctly, it turned out) that in a company where all the engineers were Unix kernel hackers, running CP/M would keep all the engineers from messing with accounting's computer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callan_Data_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callan_Data_Systems (BTW, Wikipedia says Callan was founded by Dave Callan. That's only partially correct. There were actually three equal founders. They could not agree on a name for the company, and it got to the point where the only thing stopping them from starting was having a name to put on the paperwork. One weekend the other two founders went away on a hunting trip, and when they came back Callan told them he'd picked a temporary name and filed the paperwork, and they could change it to the real name later when they came up with one. They never did agree on a "real" name, and so the company retained Callan's "temporary" name, Callan Data Systems).
- zabzonk 5y ago
  > CP/M-68K Wow - I did a lot of work with CP/M in the early 80s, but I'd never even heard of that variant. Yours may have been the only copy ever purchased :) > It wasn't because they needed some accounting software that wasn't available for Unix. Well, actually, it may well have been - there was a lot of accounting software (and other end user stuff such as word processors, databases and spreadsheets) written for CP/M, and back then not so much for Unix (which I was also working on at the time).
  - bitwize 5y ago
    CP/M-68K was originally to be thr basis for the Atari ST OS. Atari went with a modified version of GEMDOS instead,
  - tzs 5y ago
    Thinking more about it, I'm not actually sure it was CP/M-68K. I remember hearing something about before building the 68k workstations they built a couple test units with x86 motherboards to test out the proposed workstation form factor. Accounting may have ended up with one of those, in which case it would have been plain old CP/M-86.
spullara 5y ago
I think my Commdore-128 would still run CP/M if I found the disks. What an odd thing.
flowerlad 5y ago
OK, but can it run Turbo Pascal [1]? [1] https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/3x https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/3x
- mhd 5y ago
  It's even in one of the screenshots of the Readme. https://github.com/TomHarte/CP-M-for-OS-X/blob/master/Images/TurboPascal.gif https://github.com/TomHarte/CP-M-for-OS-X/blob/master/Images...
musicale 5y ago
Interesting! Is processor.m a new/original Z-80 emulator written in Objective-C?
cable2600 5y ago
I remember the Apple ][ CP/M-80 cards. Those were cool. Now there is CP/M for MacOS.
talideon 5y ago
I stumbled across his YouTube channel a few days back where he demonstrates this and lots of other retrocomputing gubbins. Worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/user/80Thom80 https://www.youtube.com/user/80Thom80
ralphc 5y ago
Is anyone using this, a quick howto would be most appreciated. I went to CP/M sites and mainly found ARK files for the main software. Do I need to uncompress this into a directory and pretend it's a floppy drive? The github just talks about dragging and dropping of individual files.
- lproven 5y ago
  ARK files are from an early forerunner to PKZip, which evolved from a program called PKArc. They're just compressed file archives. https://techtinkering.com/articles/compression-and-archiving-on-cpm/ https://techtinkering.com/articles/compression-and-archiving... Here is a collection of CP/M compression/decompression tools: http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cpm/archivers/index.html http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cpm/archivers/index.html

128 points by bilegeek 5y ago

Anyone know how to run this on Big Sur? I've built the project and it runs but there's no terminal window and the New menu item is dim. I looked at all the forks but most are very old. I guess I need a CP/M disk image?

mfollert 5y ago

It's called macOS now.

rbanffy 5y ago
The project started 7 years ago.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  Wow. Sorry for op. But it is a wow.

tyingq 5y ago

Looks like it emulates a Z80 with 64k and selectable Osbourne, ADM/3A, Hazeltine, or VT52 screen output.

logbiscuitswave 5y ago
My first ever computer was a hand-me-down Osborne. I vividly remember needing a special hardware keyboard combination to be able to display all the contents of the “window” in the frame buffer. I’ll definitely need to check this out for the nostalgia.

deaddodo 5y ago

If the goal was seamlessness; I would think you’d want to pipe the output into terminal directly via STDIN/STDOUT. Impressive work, regardless

rbanffy 5y ago
A lot of the CP/M computers I used had serial terminals connected to them and no way to directly attach a monitor and keyboard. It feels like it's easier to emulate that way. Also, Apple's Terminal.app does an outstanding job of pretending to be a VT-200 terminal. OTOH, this one is self contained. Still pretends the terminal is attached through a serial port, but it's emulated in the app. It's a shame Apple doesn't make the Terminal.app engine available to developers.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  >It's a shame Apple doesn't make the Terminal.app engine available to developers. Sigh. Add it to the pile of "things Apple really ought to open source just to give back to the community that they used to build the worlds most successful business from"
  - swiley 5y ago
    Remember that next time someone argues the GPL restricts their freedom.
    - simondotau 5y ago
      The GPL can restrict your freedom. All licenses which contain restrictions "restrict freedom" by definition. The actual question is whether the GPL license restrictions come into conflict with any freedoms YOU wish to exercise, such as the freedom to distribute modified binaries without releasing source code. Alternatively you could argue that the mere existence of any software—regardless of its license—can only be additive to freedom and can never be subtractive of it. Under this view it is impossible to have "less freedom" because Terminal.app exists; you've merely identified a scenario where you could have more freedom than you do right now.
  - simondotau 5y ago
    You are right that making Terminal.app open source would be a net win for everyone, but it's not going to happen. Not because Apple doesn't want to, but because there's no spare bandwidth for anyone to push for it internally. I think one of the biggest misunderstandings about Apple is the assumption that they have massive resources available to them, therefore they must have a wide bandwidth for competent development—be that in terms of vision, design, or code. The way I see it, Apple seems rarely able to focus on more than a few things at once. They have never been able to maintain high standards across the full breadth of their product stack. MacOS tends to get jankier and cruftier with every release. At this point it's akin to a very pretty rug that has had so much mess swept under it that it's impossible for it to lie flat. If you've ever dealt with the back end of Apple Music (née iTunes Music Store) you'd know that it's held together with a lot of crummy, barely-maintained software that falls apart under the most trivial of circumstances. For example, their iTunes Music Producer software can't even rip two-CD sets without causing file name conflicts in the XML. This bug has not been fixed for over a decade.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

williesleg 5y ago

Finally some real software. Lots of productivity because no internet. No facebags.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Did a little searching but did not see a specific version of the old ASCII Star Trek game for CP/M. I see BASIC for CP/M so I presume you could enter Star Trek that way....

tzs 5y ago

Around 1984, I worked for a Unix workstation manufacturer named Callan Data Systems [1]. Our workstations were 68k based and ran System V. Except for one that was sitting in a corner of the main office, which I noticed was running CP/M-68K. I asked around and found out that this was for the accounting people. It wasn't because they needed some accounting software that wasn't available for Unix. Everything they were interested in could easily be done on Unix. So why did accounting choose CP/M-68K? Because they assumed (correctly, it turned out) that in a company where all the engineers were Unix kernel hackers, running CP/M would keep all the engineers from messing with accounting's computer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callan_Data_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callan_Data_Systems (BTW, Wikipedia says Callan was founded by Dave Callan. That's only partially correct. There were actually three equal founders. They could not agree on a name for the company, and it got to the point where the only thing stopping them from starting was having a name to put on the paperwork. One weekend the other two founders went away on a hunting trip, and when they came back Callan told them he'd picked a temporary name and filed the paperwork, and they could change it to the real name later when they came up with one. They never did agree on a "real" name, and so the company retained Callan's "temporary" name, Callan Data Systems).

zabzonk 5y ago
> CP/M-68K Wow - I did a lot of work with CP/M in the early 80s, but I'd never even heard of that variant. Yours may have been the only copy ever purchased :) > It wasn't because they needed some accounting software that wasn't available for Unix. Well, actually, it may well have been - there was a lot of accounting software (and other end user stuff such as word processors, databases and spreadsheets) written for CP/M, and back then not so much for Unix (which I was also working on at the time).
- bitwize 5y ago
  CP/M-68K was originally to be thr basis for the Atari ST OS. Atari went with a modified version of GEMDOS instead,
- tzs 5y ago
  Thinking more about it, I'm not actually sure it was CP/M-68K. I remember hearing something about before building the 68k workstations they built a couple test units with x86 motherboards to test out the proposed workstation form factor. Accounting may have ended up with one of those, in which case it would have been plain old CP/M-86.

spullara 5y ago

I think my Commdore-128 would still run CP/M if I found the disks. What an odd thing.

flowerlad 5y ago

OK, but can it run Turbo Pascal [1]? [1] https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/3x https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/3x

mhd 5y ago
It's even in one of the screenshots of the Readme. https://github.com/TomHarte/CP-M-for-OS-X/blob/master/Images/TurboPascal.gif https://github.com/TomHarte/CP-M-for-OS-X/blob/master/Images...

musicale 5y ago

Interesting! Is processor.m a new/original Z-80 emulator written in Objective-C?

cable2600 5y ago

I remember the Apple ][ CP/M-80 cards. Those were cool. Now there is CP/M for MacOS.

talideon 5y ago

I stumbled across his YouTube channel a few days back where he demonstrates this and lots of other retrocomputing gubbins. Worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/user/80Thom80 https://www.youtube.com/user/80Thom80

ralphc 5y ago

Is anyone using this, a quick howto would be most appreciated. I went to CP/M sites and mainly found ARK files for the main software. Do I need to uncompress this into a directory and pretend it's a floppy drive? The github just talks about dragging and dropping of individual files.

lproven 5y ago
ARK files are from an early forerunner to PKZip, which evolved from a program called PKArc. They're just compressed file archives. https://techtinkering.com/articles/compression-and-archiving-on-cpm/ https://techtinkering.com/articles/compression-and-archiving... Here is a collection of CP/M compression/decompression tools: http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cpm/archivers/index.html http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cpm/archivers/index.html