OT - Is this computer for real? (CORRECTION)

[James Knott]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 10:07:40AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
>>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.
> 
> I didn't know MS had made such a thing.
> 
> I know there was such a device for the C64, and the C128 had one built
> in of course.
> 
>>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.
> 
> Yeah that I know. :)

You might be interested in reading a book "fire in the valley" by Paul
Freiberger and Michael Swaine.  It's a history of personal computers and
contains lots of interesting info.  I recall a lot of that history, from
reading the various magazines of the time and I still have *EVERY* issue
of Byte magazine, which contains a lot of history, including the history
of Seattle Computer Products' Q-DOS, which became MS-DOS.

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