OT - Is this computer for real? (CORRECTION)

[James Knott]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 09:45:28AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
>>Their CP/M cards were also decent.  Perhaps MS should have been a
>>hardware company.  ;-)
> 
> What is a CP/M card?

Way back in the dark ages, computers, based on the Intel 8080 or Zilog
Z80 CPU, often ran an operating system called CP/M.  The Apple II
computers used a 6502 CPU, which could not run the popular CP/M
software.  Since at that time, Microsoft was selling CP/M BASIC and
compilers, they couldn't sell to Apple users, unless they could figure
out a way to run CP/M in those Apples.  The alternative was to rewrite
all their code in 6502 (back in those days, most apps were written in
assembler, not C etc).  They then decided to create a card, built around
the Z80, for the Apples, which could run CP/M and apps.

Incidentally, the original MS-DOS was a poor clone of CP/M.  It was
developed by a hardware manufacturer Seattle Computer Products, as a
development system, while waiting for CP/M-86 (for the 8086 CPU) to be
released.  Many of the DOS calls can be traced back to CP/M.

> 
> Personally I only think the first Microsoft keyboard was decent.  The
> rest had the key layout all screwed up (and the current don't even have
> function keys by default).  Never did like their mice, I am a logitech
> mouse fan.  It is amazingly hard to find a decent keyboard.  They all
> have screwed up key layouts it seems.  Microsoft does something stupid,
> everyone else goes to copy it.  Aaarrrhh!!!

I've never cared for those keyboards.
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