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> While Concurrent CP/M was a very capable OS, ideal for multiuser accounts systems, it had a big limitation: it could only run CP/M-86 apps. The problem being
by mhd 4y ago
> While Concurrent CP/M was a very capable OS, ideal for multiuser accounts systems, it had a big limitation: it could only run CP/M-86 apps. The problem being that there weren't that many of those, while the market in MS-DOS apps was exploding.
Or you could run Unix on some of the machines that would've been targeted by the multi-user derivatives. I remember one article about an early TeX version ported to one of them, IIRC a Z8000 system running a port of V7 Unix.
- dboreham 4y agoThere's "late TeX" ??
- mhd 4y agoFor forty years, basically. The first "tugboat" TeX newsletters were written during the rewrite to "TeX82", so most people porting during that time were basing their variants on the the version written in SAIL ("TeX78"). It's quite fascinating to read and look at. Some from scratch rewrites in different languages, while the core group writes about the new version in Pascal (IIRC the literate programming tools were invented during that time). Old time-sharing and mainframe setups most people haven't heard of. Rewrites in C an Fortran. And still even that early TeX used there isn't that much different from what's still used today, including the DVI format, Metafont etc. (Both syntactically and when you see the output)