On 21-Mar-10 20:53:53, mick wrote:
On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:23:55 -0000 (GMT) (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk allegedly wrote:
Well, yeah, "bugs" connects. But I hadn't been aware that my very first OS, CP/M, might stand for "Chicken Post/Mortem".
Ah yes, CP/M, the wonders of PIP destination = source. Mick
It was amazingly good, for what it was designed for. In my 64K-of-RAM Sharp MZ-80B (with 2 floppy drives, cassette drive, and a graphics-capable screen -- 16K Graphics RAM), the whole CP/M "kernel" lived in the top 16K of RAM (plus a little bit at the bottom end), leaving a bit less than 48K, and I could run a FORTRAN compiler (and later a C compiler) on it. Lots of swappy-to-floppy involved at times, and perpetual reading on of "overlays" from floppy, but it worked, and did some quite heavy stuff.
Where Microsoft made their most far-reaching design error, in my view, was in emulating CP/M as their base structure for DOS, with a few bits (and not the really important ones) pinched from Unix (e.g. a hierarchical directory structure). One side-effect of this was the pestilential "" separator for directory paths, since CP/M used "/" as the options flag for commands (where Unix uses "-"), and MS kept this.
Ted.
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