MP/M & CP/NET Networking Uncovered

[@vmisev]

Thanks for the video! I’m quite comfy in CP/M, but I never touched MP/M & CP/NET - this was super interesting and educational, thanks!

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

@@vmisev you‘re welcome!

[@vmisev]

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Now, I wonder will your patches work for other emulators/platforms like Vice (x128), Retro Virtual Machine (CPC6128) or AppleWin which supports SoftCard emulation? It will be fun to network together C128, CPC6128 and Apple II! ;)

[@8randomprettysecret8]

Thank you so much 😊

[@marksterling8286]

Wow this is a great video, I have not touched this stuff since early 1990s but it all came flooding back. Thank you for sharing

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

@@marksterling8286 you‘re welcome

[@TSteffi]

From what I understand, you can also write the MPMLDR to the boot tracks of a disk and boot into it directly. Similar to how it works with the CPMLDR for CP/M 3. I'm sure I will refer back to this video, once I get MP/M running on my own hardware. You did a great job on exploring the multiuser aspect of MP/M. What I would wish for is an exploration of the multitasking capabilities of MP/M, the other big selling point. I would have jumped on MP/M much earlier, were it not for the advanced features of CP/M 3 that never made it into MP/M. Like the support for up to 512 MB drives and up to 32 MB files.

[@NiceCakeMix]

Another really good video, well explained and easy to follow along with. Thank you as always for sharing.

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

@@NiceCakeMix Thanks! My pleasure!

[@revision386]

I always love your content.

[@idahofur]

Thank You for the video. Reminds me of the Serial network Lantastic sold. But, I can see how it comes in handy. Several Mini computers like a Dec. Yould could add several serial ports to. Terminals, Printers, and now lan ports among other things. As for the mail. I can't remember what Os I was using. Caldera Dos or what not. Got a similar mail error.

[@monad_tcp]

2:57 that was the "easy" way, the hard way would be doing a pull request patch to remove completely the dependency on X11 because no one uses that thing anymore, replace it with a modern library GLFW or SDL.

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

@@monad_tcp indeed, though that would have stolen away my time to investigate into CP/NET, so …

[@kFY514]

Reconfiguring the system by recompiling (parts of) the OS... those were the days. I somehow associated this "tradition" mostly with early Linux, but of course it makes sense that people were doing it with earlier OSes as well. The network drive mounting refers to a server ID, which suggests that there can be multiple servers on the network. If the "network" is really just a bunch of independent serial connections between the server and the clients, how would a multi-server network work? Is there any support for routing the network traffic? Or do you just use multiple serial ports on the client to connect to different servers?

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

There‘s no routing. And as far as I understood it, you would add multiple serial connections to different servers for a multiserver environment. As you don‘t provide the serial connection, but an optional server-id, the system would propably figure it out itself, which serial line matches the given server-id.

[@vk3fbab]

NetWare 2 required you to link object files as well. Common in the day.

[@MonochromeWench]

Serial port networking seems ideal for use with a modem but that default Authentication is really poor for a system connected to a phone line so maybe not the intended use case.

[@slincolne]

I wonder if anyone has made a CP/NET parser for Wireshark ? It would be interesting to see what traffic flows between the MP/M host and the client systems.

[@perceptron-1]

I haven't seen this since 1986, when I connected 256 self-designed Z-80 CP/M machines on a real RS-232 serial line, multiserver & multiuser & multitasc each, so I got a 256 x 256 x 256 virtual machine, corresponded to a 16,777,216 CPU supercomputer. Not as fast as today's.

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

@@perceptron-1 can you elaborate how this was physically connected?

[@perceptron-1]

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Each CP/M computer panel had an 8-line RS-232 interface. Each CPU could exchange data with 6 neighbors. There were 8 x 8 CPUs in a matrix, 4 such matrix sheets next to each other in space, this used 6 serial lines / CPU, 2 remained outside the panel, which were the output and input lines, so that any of them could be connected to a separate keyboard and screen, through a 256 to 1 multiplexer switch or to any other peripheral through which the data can be loaded and the result can be read. There was 64K RAM on the panel. 256 x 64k in total, not a lot these days, and they all ran multitask CP/M separately. This was just a model so that when the time comes we can integrate it into 1 chip. That time has now come. We can make this machine with a million times as much memory, and a thousand times faster, and a single chip, instead of 2 m3 racks. CP/M is still the best system today, it's interesting that Google suggested it to me, even though it didn't exist when I last dealt with it. In today's age of LLM, this would be a very useful thing..

[@asanjuas]

How clarifier for me is the ED editor to tell al of MSDOS was a copy and ripoff of the CP/M.

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

@@asanjuas it totally was …

[@kFY514]

@@asanjuas Apparently both were inspired by _ed_ from Unix. Which incidentally is in a way also a distant ancestor of vi.