Geekhack

[Daniel Beardsmore]

At our school we had Apple computers running CP/M.

Considering no Apple computers ever natively ran CP/M …

IBM should have had a man-up session and just built their own OS — they couldn't possibly have come up with anything worse than DOS. I'd also forgotten that the Commodore 64 didn't even have a procedural BASIC — I suspect the IT industry is still reaping the benefits of all the people who grew up with the likes of Microsoft's abominable BASIC and MS-DOS.

(I imagine that if I hadn't had the privilege to use MOS, classic Mac OS, EPOC etc I might be a little less bitter in accordance with the resulting greatly reduced expectations … Unfortunately I have a lower tolerance than most to the eternal dead-horse flogging and short-sighted stupidity characteristic of the cheap trash that polluted the industry.)

[Halvar]

You're right, and the same is probably true for the processor and off-the-shelf system design. IBM is the sole founder of the Wintel empire after all.

[mr_a500]

Considering no Apple computers ever natively ran CP/M …

MIcrosoft actually sold a Z80 board for Apple II computers to run CP/M. Think about how strange that is: a software company selling hardware to allow a computer (made by a future competitor) to run an operating system that was in direct competition to the DOS it was selling. (which itself was a clone of that competing OS)

(Good thing we're in Off Topic, because this thread is way off topic )

[Muirium]

The original IBM PC was such a rushed little skunkworks project – much delayed and then done on a shoestring once top brass finally cottoned on that personal computing was a big deal – that they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.

Before the web, what everyone needed was binary compatibility, so you could use your disks, let alone your files and apps, on any computer. IBM opened the floodgates without realising, Microsoft saw what was happening and made sure to leave cloning an open question in their contract, and Compaq led the tidal wave once they cleanroom cloned the BIOS. That was the entire computing industry gushing through until just recently. Everything that followed came from there.

Fortunately, a few rivals never did quite die out. Including Acorn's little legacy: the ARM processor, and good old UNIX. It's showing up everywhere these days!

[Daniel Beardsmore]

MIcrosoft actually sold a Z80 board for Apple II computers to run CP/M.

One of my favourite inventions is the Tube, essentially a special southbridge that allows all the I/O hardware to be in separate computer semi-computer connected via a cable or, later, an internal card.

That's how the ARM CPU was created. The ARM was placed into a cheese wedge with RAM but no I/O capability except for a Tube cable back to a BBC Micro, which supplied the video, audio, disc drives, keyboard etc using a set of buffers for data and host OS calls.

When Acorn invented the Tube I don't think it had even occurred to them that they might be creating their own CPU one day, but when they wanted to do that, they already had a computer system ready to supply all the I/O for the new chip.

(This is also the system with a 1981 procedural BASIC with 32-bit integers and 40-bit floats, heap allocation, inline/macroassembly etc ;-)

[mr_a500]

I know the Quick and Dirty Operating System story well. One version of the story says IBM only approached Microsoft after CP/M's top dog wouldn't meet with them. A group of IBMers turned up at his office unannounced, and his wife, who was his receptionist, failed to convince them it was worth hanging around until he landed his plane, which he was out flying all day. Bill Gates was all too pleased to meet with them, and bullshitted his way into the deal that made his company. Then bought QDOS real quick!

I just watched a nice documentary about the maker of CP/M and it didn't quite go like that:

[7bit]

What does the black rectangle have say?

[mr_a500]

He he Can't watch flash, eh? I was once like you, cursing people who posted videos. (but now that I can watch videos, I'm better than you )

Basically, the black rectangle says that the head of Digital Research didn't miss the IBM meeting, but that IBM ended up screwing them over on pricing and contract limitations.

[Vierax]

If you have a Youtube/Google+/Gmail account you can log in and enable the html5 player feature (it's a beta but it works nice on Debian Wheezy so it should works on almost every OS)

[Halvar]

Here's the MS DOS story as told by Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, IBM guy Jack Sams and QDOS programmer Tim Patterson:

Video (watch from around 15:40 ):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHFJdLP0Hdg

Transcript:
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html

[Broadmonkey]

Thanks for the link to those Triumph of the Nerds videos, they are certainly worth a watch!

[bhtooefr]

One of my favourite inventions is the Tube, essentially a special southbridge that allows all the I/O hardware to be in separate computer semi-computer connected via a cable or, later, an internal card.

Although, the Z80 Softcard (and its many, many clones) worked a bit differently. It actually grabbed the Apple II's DMA line, giving it full bus master capability. Then, it simply used the Apple's RAM and I/O hardware directly, with the 6502 sitting idle.

The tube approach did mean that a native tube processor could use all of the weird filesystems that the host computer supported, as well as whatever video modes and such that it supported, with no effort, though.

In fact, early RISC OS machines had a program called !6502Tube, which emulated a Tube-attached 6502, giving 6502 code the capabilities of the ARM systems with no or little changes to code.