Is CP/M still being used anywhere?

[whm1974]

I've been wondering about really old computer hardware that is still in use, and I just thought of the CP/M(Control Program/ for Microcomputers) Operating System running on i8080 and Z80 machines including the Apple II w/ Z80 Softcard and the Commodore 128.

So is it still in use anywhere?

 

[bbhaag]

Ah good old CP/M. A reminder of what could have been if IBM and Microsoft would had never met. We have you to thank for my main drive starting with C not A or B.
Could it still be in use somewhere in the world? Sure it could be but who really knows. It's fun to think of old creaky hardware working away silently in the night. Forever thankless in some dim lit room in the bottom of a basement god knows where. Still doing its job day in and day out year after year decade after decade just humming away all by itself.

 

[whm1974]

I've read somewhere that the person who wrote CP/M Gary something, first offered it to Intel but they turned it down.

 

[bbhaag]

I don't know enough about the early days to say whether that is true or not. When the OS was written Intel was a small to medium sized chip manufacturer so software was not their focus. Anyway, it's to hard to say what could have been and the history on it has already been written.

 

[JackMDS]

Gary something is Gary Kildall at the time worked for Digital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86

 

[bruceb]

I have an old Northstar Horizon Z80 that runs NS-DOS ... But it also has a diskette with CP/M on it if someone wanted to use it. It also has a very old Word Processor called "Secretary"

 

[whm1974]

Gary something is Gary Kildall at the time worked for Digital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86

Thanks, For some reason I couldn't remember his last name.

 

[SPBHM]

Gary something is Gary Kildall at the time worked for Digital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86

I would recommend watching this to get a better idea of where the OS came from and who he was https://archive.org/details/GaryKild

 

[Mike64]

I've read somewhere that the person who wrote CP/M Gary something, first offered it to Intel but they turned it down.

I don't remember anything like that ever happening. The big C/PM "story" was that IBM approached Kildall to license C/PM for the PC. Instead of which, it ended up the total POS that DOS was in its first several generations when Kildall balked at giving IBM a license for their own "version" of the OS (i.e., the equivalent of IBM's PC-DOS counterpart to Microsoft's MS-DOS). Or at least that was (said to be) the real deal-breaker, there might've been other issues too…

 

[whm1974]

I don't remember anything like that ever happening. The big C/PM "story" was that IBM approached Kildall to license C/PM for the PC. Instead of which, it ended up the total POS that DOS was in its first several generations when Kildall balked at giving IBM a license for their own "version" of the OS (i.e., the equivalent of IBM's PC-DOS counterpart to Microsoft's MS-DOS). Or at least that was (said to be) the real deal-breaker, there might've been other issues too…

Actually MS-DOS wasn't even written until Bill Gates found out that Kildall turned down IBM and quickly brought out the company that owned QDOS, which was a clone of CP/M which was then modified and ported over to the i8086 CPU.

 

[Mike64]

Actually MS-DOS wasn't even written until Bill Gates found out that Kildall turned down IBM and quickly brought out the company that owned QDOS, which was a clone of CP/M which was then modified and ported over to the i8086 CPU.

Yeah, I could've been clearer about what I meant. I knew Gates had nothing to do with its initial development and that it wasn't literally "MS-DOS" when he first got his hands on it, but I didn't remember exactly how he'd acquired it. I knew he'd bought "something", but didn't remember even that what he bought was an already "finished" product" of sorts (I actually had a vague notion - obviously incorrect - that he'd bought something still in development and hired people to finish it.)

What I did remember distinctly was Gates pretty much scrambling to get something (or anything, as the case was) slapped together to jump into the PC's OS vacuum before someone else did, and since the first commercial releases of xx-DOS were such crap, I was basically guess-xtrapolating that the even earlier versions (what you've pointed was in fact "QDOS") could only have been even that much worse.

 

[Gojito]

The following article gives a nice summary of the events that led to the demise of CP/M and the rise of DOS:

http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/
http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-2/