Is there any reason to use CP/M ?

[Douglas]

Hey everyone!

I have fun learning new (to me at least) computing systems, so I enjoy playing with CP/M, but is there any reason that you would need to use CP/M on the 128 where is does something that can't be done in native 128 mode?  Are there any programming languages that are available under CP/M that were never translated to 128 mode for example?  How about Database or Spreadsheet use.  Are the CP/M alternatives to the 128 versions of there programs more "Robust" or offer anything that a native 128 program didn't?

Just wondering aloud...

Douglas

[BillBuckels]

Hey everyone!

I have fun learning new (to me at least) computing systems, so I enjoy playing with CP/M, but is there any reason that you would need to use CP/M on the 128 where is does something that can't be done in native 128 mode?  Are there any programming languages that are available under CP/M that were never translated to 128 mode for example?  How about Database or Spreadsheet use.  Are the CP/M alternatives to the 128 versions of there programs more "Robust" or offer anything that a native 128 program didn't?

Just wondering aloud...

Douglas

Your use of the word "Need" is much different than "Want". Like you I Want to have fun with vintage computers and emulators and learn about all of them. As far as "Would one need to?"... Others didn't, but some of us never even considered either choice a reasonable alternative.

Back to The Future in 1980

If you put yourself in "Back to the Future" mode and take a Quantum Leap back to the time of dark basements with dirty little boxes of diskettes copied from every conceivable direction... probably 1980 maybe a little earlier or later... there were all these camps of users... the SIG's (special interest groups) were happening... the "scene" came later... and there were main-frame operators who thought that programming was related to punch cards and young kids learning assembly language... and lots of business software running on Z80's with some guy named Gary Kildall selling his CP/M operating system for a huge sum of money which speaks back to his roots at IBM.

A Little Later On

Anyway, that's what I saw back then, and I also saw the C64 when it first came-out as being a fun toy for my cousin's 12 year old son as we sat and wrote music programs in BASIC 2 for an hour or so.

MESSY-DOS Had Already Taken-Over

If you examine the strategy behind all this and understand what Bil Herd was saying about the C128 being some kind of stalling technique while we waited for the Amiga (I didn't wait by the way, apologies to Carl Sassenrath and so forth), the CP/M thing was marketing and nothing more on the part of cbm. I don't mean the fellows (Engineers) like Bil Herd and consultants like Von Ertwine who were *NOT* what we have long called in this business "Managers" (and then washed our mouths out afterwards with soap when they left the room and we still do).

Herd and those fellows as far as I am concerned were in the trenches designing and building cool stuff that people enjoyed at home and could afford to buy and except for one point that I never liked about cbm... their disk drives were always too slow... this was good value.

This disk drive business in itself turned me off and I walked away much preferring to use cross-compilers for slow machines. But then I was already spoiled with real computers (not just PC's) and too impatient to play with toys because programming and CAD and so forth was all that I cared about and in the end the money was in the IBM-PC for me.

We had equal or better spreadsheets and word processors already on MS-DOS machines by the time cbm introduced this CP/M thing. And no business programmers that I knew were bothering much with anything but the IBM-PC running MS-DOS. The MAC was a favorite in the schools around here following the Apple II which by virtue of being around the schools a little longer had pushed the school market in the Apple-Sit direction (they were always going the wrong way just like the Appletalk Protocol).

In the late 80's our Amiga User's groups were a little like the Linux User's groups in the mid '90's (they were quite a religion) but for some reason I blinked and missed the C128. The Amiga by the way although having a faithful following and ham-e and 12 bit graphics and all that was still smoked by my IBM software using 16 bit TARGA board knockoffs by Everex. I once wrote some little songs using bars and pipes for a buddy who was doing a pacman for Blackbelt Systems so it's not like the Amiga wasn't there... our "Junior" version was offered on it... and when we developed our own digital speech board for talking Kiosk Systems before the Soundblaster we used the amiga to clean-up our recordings rather than write our own set of tools.

But I just skipped the C128. To me at that time it was just a C64 with more.

Why Bother Indeed?

Now I thought I'd best paint a different picture than many here would have to explain that all you would need CP/M for on a C128 would be to learn an MS-DOS like command line environment that was a little more unix-like than the BASIC 7 environment that a "real" C128 user would know back then...

Then using that knowledge, if you liked CP/M you might decide to give MS-DOS a try. Except that the poor way that CP/M was implemented on the C128 might discourage you from using CP/M.

What I really would like to ask Bil Herd and Von Ertwine is "Was a decision by the Managers at CBM made to make CP/M on the C128 so unusable that it would turn-off CBM home computer users from switching to MS-DOS and remain loyal to CBM until the Amiga could be produced?"

Because that's the way I see that CP/M on the C128 worked out. It was a hack as far as I can see and the reference to "native mode" about says it all... It reminds me of putting a 68030 motorola chip into a XT with a 4.77 mghz 8086 processor and 128K of ram on the motherboard and a 4 color CGA video card, then slowing down the 68030 to 9 MGHZ and disabling it to the point that it could properly use the bus and the RAM on the boards back then.

Just Wondering Aloud Myself,

Bill

Note: Any Resemblance To Anything Living or Dead in the preceding is purely coincidental since this version of history occurred in my mind and is just one of several versions that exists there that I dusted off to fit the occasion



   

[LarryJor]

     Originally, CPM offered better productivity tools than the C128 had.  For example, dBase 2.43 was available for the CPM mode.  Wordstar was available also, and configurable, wouldn't be too surprised but what it could be used with a modern printer.  I used it with a parallel adapter cable on a dot matrix printer that offered different fonts - aside from the possibility of having the bold, italic, underlining, etc. that was available in C128 mode.  There was also a spread sheet I never did use (but have anyway somewhere).  All these are available now on the altairz80 CPM site.
     It was always slow, and not much of a gaming computer.

[airship]

What really got me about the drives is that it was so easy to make them much faster by connecting them to the user port with a ribbon cable and a software driver. Why didn't Commodore do that upgrade at the factory for the C128, or even the C64C?

Even factory-included JiffyDOS (or another accelerated DOS) would have been a big improvement.

[RobertB]

Why didn't Commodore do that upgrade at the factory for the C128, or even the C64C?

I would surmise that cost was the factor.  Also by the time of the C128/C64C, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of C64s, VIC-20s, Plus4s et al with their serial ports had been distributed and throwing in a "non-standard" interface would not have generated more sales/traffic and would have confused the public with another peripheral to buy.

Even factory-included JiffyDOS (or another accelerated DOS) would have been a big improvement.

JiffyDOS came out later in the run of the Commodore.  It too would have been another cost to include.

                 Back from VCF East,
                 Robert Bernardo
                 Fresno Commodore User Group
                 http://videocam.net.au/fcug
                 The Other Group of Amigoids
                 http://www.calweb.com/~rabel1
                 Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network
                 http://www.sccaners.org

[RobertB]

Also by the time of the C128/C64C, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of C64s, VIC-20s, Plus4s et al with their serial ports had been distributed and throwing in a "non-standard" interface would not have generated more sales/traffic...

Heh, I caught myself.  The Plus4 had its specific disk drive, the 1551, with its parallel connection.

                 A non-standard,
                 Robert Bernardo
                 Fresno Commodore User Group
                 http://videocam.net.au/fcug
                 The Other Group of Amigoids
                 http://www.calweb.com/~rabel1
                 Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network
                 http://www.sccaners.org

[LarryJor]

   Have found now that I can get more bang for the buck ($0.00) out of the altairz80 package in linux; all old software works and runs with speed.  At least, I've tried the dbase 2.43 package and the Wordstar; both run fine and quickly.  Have both for my old C128, down in the basement somewhere, along with books & docs.  Looking at them, I don't see much use for them anymore.  May play with dbase a little at some point just for old times sake.

[LarryJor]

    Incidentally, I used a special ribbon cable to connect a parallel printer.  Was more interested in the extra font and print speed capability at the time.

[Hydrophilic]

Thanks Bill, for your comments.  I agree that CP/M on the C128 was severly crippled.  It was *almost* adequate if you had 1571 (or 1581) disk drive, but complete crap if you had 1541 disk drive.

@airship

As far as I see, CBM tried to improve the disk performance with hardware on 1571 and 1581 drives.  Even by today's standards, these devices operate at adequate speed.  It is with 1541 and other "slow" devices that a speed loader is needed to make computing not intolerable... the folks a Berkley Softworks realized this and put fast-loaders into GEOS... But I do wonder why there was never a parallel disk drive... if I had a time machine, I could be a multi-millionare!

[quarkx]

If you read the book "on the edge" you will find that the original 64 was designed with a "Hi-speed" bus for the floppy drive, that was going to be developed after the release. Someone on the final production line saw the extra lines and took them out, not knowing what they were. Needless to say, temper's flared, but it was too late to stop production, and the rest is history.

[6502Dude]

We had equal or better spreadsheets and word processors already on MS-DOS machines by the time cbm introduced this CP/M thing.

Perhaps, but cost was a very significant for both MS-DOS compatible machines.
I used CP/M very actively from 1985 until 1987, when I bought XT compatible PC (which by the way was $3K for PC, EGA monitor, and 9 pin dot matrix printer).
dBase 3 sold for about $600 back then. Lotus 123 was several hundred dollars as was WordPerfect.

I used to load main CP/M applications into 512k ram disk. I had a pair of 1571 drives also.

I ocassionally pull out my Kaypro 10. It is a much better CP/M experience than using C128 for CP/M.

[RobertB]

If you read the book "on the edge" you will find that the original 64 was designed with a "Hi-speed" bus for the floppy drive, that was going to be developed after the release. Someone on the final production line saw the extra lines and took them out, not knowing what they were. Needless to say, temper's flared, but it was too late to stop production, and the rest is history.

Yup, p. 265-268 of the book.

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug
The Other Group of Amigoids
http://www.calweb.com/~rabel1/
Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network
http://www.sccaners.org

[Hydrophilic]

I guess supporting machines must have been a heavy burden for CBM because I would think after the first run of C64s, CBM would release C65 or something with the lines restored, and with the new high-speed disk?  And maybe CBM or third parties could have release an "upgrade kit" for the mangled C64s... I guess I should read the book!

[carlsson]

Remember Jack Tramiel compared computers to razors. As long as everyone used a Commodore razor, they could get razor blades from any manufacturer. If Commodore would change the razor design too often, the 3rd party manufacturers may get confused and focus on other razors. The C64 obviously took off very well so there would've had to been more reasons than purely technical improvements to release a new model shortly thereafter. Many competitors released upgraded models one after another, which I believe was more of a drawback than a benefit.

In any case, I doubt a faster floppy drive would've made much difference. Aren't the IEEE series drives faster than IEC in standard mode? I'm thinking in terms of the BX256 and similar B-series machines that were advertised with 8088 or Z80 co-pros. If Commodore wanted a slew of the CP/M market, to me it seems more logical if they pointed the customers to these business computers which already do 80 columns, have 128-256K RAM and only required a Z80 upgrade.

Of course in my world, the most clever business computer Commodore could've released in late 1982, early 1983 would've been an IBM PC clone like Sirius 1/Victor 9000 with additional 6502 PET emulation mode. However it likely would've ran some sort of MS-DOS rather than CP/M.

[commodorejohn]

Of course in my world, the most clever business computer Commodore could've released in late 1982, early 1983 would've been an IBM PC clone like Sirius 1/Victor 9000 with additional 6502 PET emulation mode. However it likely would've ran some sort of MS-DOS rather than CP/M.

Well, it could've run either DOS or CP/M-86, really. Heck, they could've even tossed in the DOS version of GEOS.

[BillBuckels]

Thanks Bill, for your comments.  I agree that CP/M on the C128 was severly crippled.

Even CP/M by itself was severely crippled 

[commodorejohn]

Even CP/M by itself was severely crippled

Oh, now, that's not very fair. Remember that it was a system designed for the emerging hobbyist computer market of the mid-'70s, back when things like graphical displays and multitasking were reserved for minicomputers and a lucky hobbyist might have a smart terminal instead of a pre-owned teletype; heck, the earliest versions predate the Altair. And as instrumental as it was in helping the microcomputer industry become viable, I think we can overlook its flaws...

[quarkx]

Well, you have to remember that even Bil Herd knew CP/M was on its way out when they were designing the C128, but as he states "We saw it as a transitional thing", not expecting the popularity or life span of the C128. You also have to take into account that CBM probably picked up the licences for CP/M at the time for little or nothing for costs, and that Microsoft was probably still a bit peeved at CBM, and would have charged them more for MS DOS. Plus, CP/M probably ran way better on the C128 then MS DOS.

[Blacklord]

Thanks Bill, for your comments.  I agree that CP/M on the C128 was severly crippled.

Even CP/M by itself was severely crippled 

CP/M crippled - how so ? CP/M was a robust operating system - hung around for some time to with GEM.

[Hydrophilic]

CP/M crippled - how so ?

Well the first problem is, on the C128, it runs at Z80 2MHz, which is equivalant, I think, of 6502 at only 1 MHz.  If you compare 2MHz C128 CP/M with other systems, like the Atari or "trash 80", you should see that Commodore is slower...

My original "fast patch" I submitted to VICE team included 2MHz for Z80 (and thus CP/M), but the latest release goes back to the old days of 1MHz for Z80.  So VICE is SLOWER than a real C128 in CP/M mode...