I remember, when I was a kid, having a CP/M diskette for the Amstrad CPC. It was provided with the machine. Every now and then I would try it out, not really understanding what it was about.
Years later I learned, reading about it, that it was some sort of "professional" OS on which productivity software would be used.
Does anyone actually used that OS on CPC or any other 8bits machine of the 80s to do anything remotely useful? Genuinely interested.
There was huge amounts of CP/M software, much of it distributed for the CPC by "public domain libraries", who'd send you a disk of stuff by post for a small fee. (I ran one such!) But, to be frank, it was a minority taste because there were often faster, more graphical native programs available - i.e. running under the CPC's ROM-based firmware. For example, why would you use a CP/M wordprocessor when you could use Protext? Why would you use a CP/M assembler when you could use Maxam? And so on.
So CP/M programs on the CPC tended to flourish in areas where there wasn't much decent native software. Comms programs, for example - dialling up to a BBS, or even running one. (There were a couple of BBSs run on CPCs using the ROS software under CP/M.) Languages other than BASIC or assembler. Compression/archiving.
CP/M was a bigger thing on the Amstrad PCW because it didn't really have native firmware, and because the hardware was closer to a decent CP/M machine.
CP/M was a lot like MS-DOS. People used the Wordstar word processor on it, you could run a BASIC interpreter and compiler on it. There was an upgraded version called ZCPR3 that was used on a BBS server in my town where you could log in and use the command line.
Wrote thousands and thousands of lines of code on CP/M, back in the day - not on an Amstrad CPC back then, rather some other strange machine - but it opened the door for a lot of great work in the decades that followed.
In my retro collection I currently have a CPC6128 that boots CP/M and for which I have Turbo C and Turbo Pascal installed.
I prefer to run SymbianOS on it though - it has multitasking, a network stack and a working GUI. ;)
I worked on an industrial process monitoring system using CP/M in the 80s. It wasn't on CPC. It ran on a professional Z80-based S100 bus system with lots of I/O cards.
My first job straight out of engineering school in 1983 was developing Z80 embedded code. My 'development system' was some kind of semi home made floppy disk based CP/M computer with 48K of RAM and the native Dev tools including ED a command line editor and ASM an 8080 assembler (which was basically sufficient if not ideal for writing Z80 code). For the first few days I recall being confused about the difference between the ED command line and the CP/M command prompt. In other words, I was all at sea. But it was basically being thrown into the deep end and I learned fast. Within a year or so I was writing my own BIOS for an Intel bubble memory based customer CP/M computer that we were embedding into a field application. I didn't have the proper OEM documentation, but if you understood the CP/M architecture you didn't really need it.
I haven't used a real 80s computer (except in a museum). I've used CP/M a fair amount on an RC2014[0], but never for anything you might describe as "useful".
Same here, I've been running a single-board Z80-based system with 64k and CP/M 2.x
I worked my way through the various infocom adventures, and even wrote my own trivial text-based adventure game in Z80 assembly language - later porting it to the ZX Spectrum (which was the actual computer of my youth).
It's fun to play with these systems, and I've rebuilt the CP/M from sources a few times to add simple changes and new built-in commands.
Turns out I've actually played your text adventure on my RC2014, and sent you a couple of trivial pull requests :).
I had a go at Zork too but found it far too complicated to be playable. I might have persevered if the directions were consistent, but it's just too hard to map everything out when you leave a room by going east but then to go back to where you came you need to go south.
Small world, thanks for your contributions! It wasn't very complicated, but I enjoyed putting it together and playing it with our child.
For me the Hitchhikers Guide was something I'd been wanting to complete - having played it for the first time a little after the release -and I did get there in the end.
I did, on a Czechoslovak 8080-based machine called TNS: I have written & cross-compiled a fulltext screen editor for another 8080 machine. It was written in the assembly language, and the resulting product had less than 2 KB.
Yes, I remember using Dr.Logo on CP/M on my friend’s CPC6128 and being very impressed with the capabilities of the language compared to BASIC. I also loved how detailed were the help text for the CLI tools. I remember reading HELP pages. I used to like command-line option syntax in brackets too. It felt very thorough and professional compared to AMSDOS :)
There was a category of med/high range microprocessor machines ($10k+) that used it a lot, like Z-80 S100 machines with a bunch of "custom" expansion cards. I don't recall any of their names now, but if you look at the ads in late 70's Byte magazine you'll see them.
Same here. Had it on the CPC464. Had no idea what to do with it other than IIRC loading an image editor whose highlight (for me) was a brush in the form of a propeller fighter plane :)
Years later I learned, reading about it, that it was some sort of "professional" OS on which productivity software would be used.
Does anyone actually used that OS on CPC or any other 8bits machine of the 80s to do anything remotely useful? Genuinely interested.