3 ms·
Locoscript (the WP that came bundled with Amstrad's PCW series of Z80 small office machines -- probably the best-selling CP/M boxes ever, first sold in 1985) di
by cstross 4y ago
Locoscript (the WP that came bundled with Amstrad's PCW series of Z80 small office machines -- probably the best-selling CP/M boxes ever, first sold in 1985) didn't actually run under CP/M. Locoscript could read and write the same filesystem as CP/M 3.0, which you could also boot by flipping the 3" disk over, but it had its own i/o subsystem and ran on the bare metal. (At least the version that Amstrad licensed -- earlier, Locoscript was apparently sold as a horrifically expensive dedicated legal word processing package. The Amstrad version was a cut down cheap'n'cheerful port.)
Also, Locoscript 1.00 really was anything but fast: saving a document over about 20kb to floppy could easily take a minute or two, and if it exceeded the free disk space the WP would crash hard with a corrupted screen buffer ...!
(Source: a PCW8256 was my first real computer, back in the day.)
- sideshowb 4y agoFair! I don't remember a crash, but I always assumed the save speed was just a limitation of the floppy drive
- cstross 4y agoThey fixed that particular crash by version 1.04, which shipped with machines sold after the first couple of months on the market. And version 2.0, a for-money upgrade, was much faster at saving overall. (I never bought it, by that point I'd switched to Protext on CP/M and was trying to wrap my head around HiSoft C.)
- tengwar2 4y agoWe used to run an entire lab on these things, including one floating at 4000V inside a perspex cage, controlling part of a C14 accelerator. My understanding was that although you would flip the disk to boot in to Locoscript, at root it was running on CP/M, albeit with the CCP replaced by Locoscript. It would seem odd for them to re-engineer CP/M functionality - though given that CP/M was rather incomplete as an OS, it would naturally have to touch some bare metal. I never really investigate to check that belief. Is there a reason that you think that it didn't use CP/M?
- cstross 4y agoActually, replacing the CCP but retaining the BIOS and BDOS makes perfect sense. However, this was completely obscured from the user ...