Altair 8800 - Video #16 - CP/M Introduction

[@nesossin]

This is the original,all the dos's come from this. Brilliant Gary Kildall.

[@markesys]

Well, sort of. Certainly MS-DOS was a clone. However, its "look and feel", such as the command line syntax, and file system appearance (although not its internal structure) were strongly influenced by pre-existing DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) operating systems, such as TOPS-10, RT-11, and RSX-11. Killdall was still a great innovator though, and his work with CP/M was truly seminal.

[@steveb8472]

Kildall was the inventor. He basically invented, or designed the fist compiler as well as the operating system for the Intel microprocessors. IBM absolutely copied his API and gave it to Tim Paterson to make a true clone of cp/m what he even named quick DIRTY dos and they also sold cp/m a 4,5 times more than ms dos. Gary could have invented more, like the first memory management system that allowed loading device drivers and operating system to upper memory blocks and os to higher memory area. No doubt his regret not be able to make enough money as Microsoft and IBMs did in a cheap way with absolute no contribution to computer science but his greed is his punishment to die being an alcoholic loser.

[@kennypinkerton5818]

They had this Computer in the office at my high school when I graduated in 1991.

[@chap666ish]

PIP = Peripheral Interchange Program. Jeez, how old am I to know that.

[@psycho0815]

Way older than me.And I'm in my mid 30's now. Cause I would read PIP as 'Picture in Picture'.....

[@rty1955]

Well I built an Altair machine but hated the front panel becuase it was in octal, so i changed my panel to use nybles, much easier to use. At the time I built my toy, I was already a sysyems programmer on an IBM 370 mainframe. I ate, lived and breathed assembly and hex. I customized many many man CP/M and MP/M machines

[@alexsinclair2012]

Beautiful, strait to the point tutorial.. Thank you

[@pcuser80]

I used lifeboat a lot. On a big 8inch nec computer. In the basement somewhere is a 8 inch case with the original disks.....

[@rty1955]

I still have a ton of 8" floppies around

[@atesin_dj]

omg.. i thought it was a picture, until suddenly his hands appear to operate the switches, then i realised he actually OWNS A REAL ALTAIR!!

[@allanegleston4931]

from the experimenters friend to the mundane businness machine in a number of years .

[@OldAussieAds]

Something that has intrigued me was I thought for the longest time that the interface to the Altair was just blinking lights and physical switches because you rarely if ever saw pictures of it with a monitor and keyboard connected. I had to have known it was more because I knew about Microsoft creating BASIC for it, but I couldn't figure out how you actually interfaced with the BASIC. It's only been a few years that I found out it had it's own OS and then later had a port of CP/M. How was this possible? Did you need to put cards in it? - One for connecting to a monitor / TV and another for connecting to a keyboard and another for a disk drive (or tape drive or whatever)? In other words, with cards, did the Altair grow up from a box with funny blinking lights and switches to a very early traditional PC like computer? And was the Altair made for user installable cards, or was it more of a hack job (e.g. soldering)?

[@michalzustak8846]

You are right about the cards and it used a bus made for them, the S100.

[@deramp5113]

I'm not sure when STAT first showed up. It is present on my CP/M 1.4 disks, so pretty early! No video on PIP yet. It could easily be an entire video by itself.

[@fynnkarn-wadden234]

You Should Make A Video About PIP

[@Jeremy_Fisher]

The man himself, Gary Kildall. He's pretty rad, and you should look him up. He's one of the hosts of the Computer Chronicles, and they did a special on him once he died.

[@rty1955]

He was FAR superior than Gates! Gates was a thief!!!

[@Donaldo]

Great vid! Do you have a vid on PIP? Also, do you know which version of CP/M the STAT program became available on?

[@wuloki]

Interestingly the first CP/M was developed in an 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 computer, which ran the TOPS-10 system. There are a lot of hints pointing to this heritage: Command names like DIR, PIP or DDT, or the filename syntax (a file-name on TOPS looks like DSKB:[1,2]DIR.SAV, where DSKB: is "disk B" and [1,2] is the user id). Relinking the TOPS-10 "kernel" for a new system configuration is called a "SYSGEN", like on CP/M. The RT-11 system running on the PDP-11 also looks a lot like CP/M ( -> kzbin.info/www/bejne/qXycaoqrlrqSoZo ).

[@hcddbz]

So did OS/8

[@gp75motorsports]

Nice video! Quite uncanny the amount of resemblance CP/M has to modern command shells. I guess that's just evidence of how big a revolution it was. :D

[@rty1955]

CP/M was modeled after UNIX. Gates purchased a similar product changed a tiny bit and now claims he invented MSDOS. BILL, just because you modified someone elses work does not make it yours!

[@Eddthompson]

CP/M was an adaptation to 8008 processor of Multic and UNIX. DOS was an imitation of CPM because a lawyer and wife of inventor turned away IBM. Just think of the difference if they had had that meeting with IBM.

[@leberkassemmel]

PIP is like the earliest version of dd. Copy from file to disk, from disk to stdout, from stdin to file...

[@rty1955]

Not exactly, PIP copies files, DD copies everything including non file space

[@PauloConstantino167]

Hi son. Please make videos on Unix PC's too

[@dzvxo]

In general, can CP/M run Windows? (Like Windows 1.01?) Of course, nit on an altair. Was there a special version of windows designed for/ported to CP/M?

[@mspeter97]

I don't think you can, CP/M wasn't used on any IBM PC when windows was released

[@northwindkey]

Not on CPM-80, on CPM-86 if you mess around with the kernel, and QDOS became MS-DOS.

[@maboroshi1986]

WindowsLover6767 not stock anyway. CP/M was mainly an 8-bit micro OS. i think there's a 16-bit version for the 8086 but i don't think windows ever supported CP/M. especially since windows was a DOS shell. i think you may be able to run windows on top of DR-DOS though, it was made by the same people.

[@seancdaug]

While the original CP/M was designed for 8-bit architectures and had no hope of running even the earliest versions of Windows (which were designed for the 16-bit Intel 8086/8088), Digital Research did port CP/M to the 8086 in 1981, as CP/M-86. But although CP/M-86 was available for the IBM PC and compatible systems, the OS itself was not initially binary cross-compatible with MS-DOS. MS-DOS was basically a rebranded version of 86-DOS (originally QDOS), which looked like and was modeled after the original CP/M, but predated Digital Research's own CP/M-86 by a year or so. Eventually, in 1984, Digital Research released an addon module to CP/M-86 that added binary compatibility with MS-DOS. The very next version of CP/M-86 actually dropped the CP/M name in favor of Concurrent DOS. Then, when Digital Research spun off the more complex multitasking/multiuser features of Concurrent DOS into a separate product (called Muliuser DOS), the "home user" version of Concurrent DOS was renamed DOS Plus. Long story short, the last few versions of DOS Plus _did_ support Windows 1.0. DOS Plus 2.1 was (mostly) compatible with MS-DOS 2.x, and MS-DOS 2.x was the earliest version that would run Windows. What happened to DOS Plus? After version 2.1, Digital Research went back to the drawing board and rewrote the entire system from the ground up to finally address lingering MS-DOS compatibility issues. It was renamed once again, this time to DR-DOS, and the first version (3.31) was released in 1987. And DR-DOS, finally, stuck around. DR-DOS was compatible with every version of Windows up through Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Although you could argue that it had been completely rewritten and shared little to no legacy code with CP/M, it was still backwards compatible with CP/M-86 programs, and was clearly intended by Digital Research as the successor to DOS Plus/CP/M-86. After Digital Research folded in 1991, DR-DOS was handed off to several successive organizations, who continued to develop up right up to 2011, when the final version to date, 7.01.08, was released. So you could make a reasonable argument that CP/M actually outlasted MS-DOS by more than a decade (if you take the final version of MS-DOS to be the one bundled with Windows Me), or more than fifteen years (if you want to go with the release of Windows 95, at which point MS-DOS stopped being a standalone product).

[@stephenwalters4798]

No way no how. Impossible

[@8bits59]

What terminal emulator is that?

[@guycrew728]

PokeTerm V.905 its says at the bottom of the screen.

[@wuloki]

www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/?cat=25

[@Lordthyone]

who created cp/m? :)

[@fynnkarn-wadden234]

Gary Kildall

[@rty1955]

Gary Kidall. Loosly from UNIX

[@простокысяпростокыся]

I need this

[@rty1955]

CP/M is in public domain now

[@inerlogic]

heh heh.... "borrowed"

[@rty1955]

A polite way of saying "stolen"