CP/M

From: Roger Ivie <IVIE_at_cc.usu.edu>
Date: Sat Dec 13 10:30:51 1997

> Is there any way that CP/M is better than MS-DOS? i.e. does it provide
> anything that DOS doesn't?

One thing I've always really really missed in MS-DOS is the IOBYTE. I've done
enought whacky wild things with the IOBYTE (debugging a program running on one
screen by interacting with the debugger on another, interacting with a user on
one terminal while drawing pictures on a Tek 4010, even a serial mouse-based
dorky little sketch program) that I really miss it.

But by far the absolutely most important thing CP/M does better than MS-DOS is
be hardware independent. The CP/M community isn't tied to one hardware
platform like the MS-DOS community is. Sure, there _used_ to be wild and
interesting MS-DOS machines, but you can no longer run even the most basic
software on anything that doesn't have memory mapped video in a certain
location, a pair of 8259 interrupt controllers, 8250 UARTs, a particular
keyboard controller, etc.

I'm split about whether CP/M's filesystem or MS-DOS's file system is worse.
FAT sucks big time (especially FAT12), but at least it doesn't have to go
searching through the entire directory every 16KB. Of course, given exactly
how much FAT sucks, it's usually only one day a week or so that I think CP/M's
filesystem is worse than MS-DOS's...

Roger Ivie
ivie_at_cc.usu.edu
Received on Sat Dec 13 1997 - 10:30:51 GMT