3 ms·

I've had pretty limited experience using CP/M - I think the last time I actually played with it was in the early 90s when some old guy I knew was still using it

by 13of40 5y ago

I've had pretty limited experience using CP/M - I think the last time I actually played with it was in the early 90s when some old guy I knew was still using it to run a BBS. As far as I recall it was just as atrocious as DOS and other things of that era, at least from a UX point of view. DOS's int 21h API is a close cousin of the system library in CP/M, so I'd expect the developer experience to be kind of similar. Is there something specific you think CP/M was doing better?

lproven 5y ago
It most definitely wasn't that "CP/M was an atrocious clone of DOS"! It's the other way round: DOS is a much-enhanced clone of CP/M. And TBH, in the early days of DOS – let's say up to MS-DOS 3.3 – it wasn't a lot better than CP/M. No command-line editing, no file manager, disk partitions of max 32MB, no built-in disk cache. This was the version that was a big hit and it was kinda basic. IBM built PC DOS 4.00 and MS licensed it from them. It was bigger, slower, & a bit more complicated – but it started offering improvements. It provided part of the impetus for DR to offer DR-DOS 3.41, the first widely-distributed version. It had the key improvements of PC/MS-DOS 4.00 (disk partitions >32MB being principal) but it was as small as MS-DOS 3.3 and as compatible. The DOS market only became competitive when DR introduced DR DOS 5, which integrated all the most important 3rd-party enhancements: 386 memory management, a disk cache, a full-screen text editor, and a graphical file manager... and it was sold at retail for the first time, as an upgrade to (and improvement over) MS-DOS 3.3, PC/MS-DOS 4.00 and vendor-proprietary tweaks like Compaq DOS 3.31 (which was the first DOS with >32MB partition support in the way that became standard.) MS was more or less forced to respond, which it did with MS-DOS 5 which pretty much matched DR DOS 5 feature-for-feature, including being sold at retail. The next few years they competed hard, each trumping the other on features in each release.

by 13of40 5y ago

lproven 5y ago

It most definitely wasn't that "CP/M was an atrocious clone of DOS"! It's the other way round: DOS is a much-enhanced clone of CP/M. And TBH, in the early days of DOS – let's say up to MS-DOS 3.3 – it wasn't a lot better than CP/M. No command-line editing, no file manager, disk partitions of max 32MB, no built-in disk cache. This was the version that was a big hit and it was kinda basic. IBM built PC DOS 4.00 and MS licensed it from them. It was bigger, slower, & a bit more complicated – but it started offering improvements. It provided part of the impetus for DR to offer DR-DOS 3.41, the first widely-distributed version. It had the key improvements of PC/MS-DOS 4.00 (disk partitions >32MB being principal) but it was as small as MS-DOS 3.3 and as compatible. The DOS market only became competitive when DR introduced DR DOS 5, which integrated all the most important 3rd-party enhancements: 386 memory management, a disk cache, a full-screen text editor, and a graphical file manager... and it was sold at retail for the first time, as an upgrade to (and improvement over) MS-DOS 3.3, PC/MS-DOS 4.00 and vendor-proprietary tweaks like Compaq DOS 3.31 (which was the first DOS with >32MB partition support in the way that became standard.) MS was more or less forced to respond, which it did with MS-DOS 5 which pretty much matched DR DOS 5 feature-for-feature, including being sold at retail. The next few years they competed hard, each trumping the other on features in each release.