The world as I see it

CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. CP/M is a disk operating system and its purpose is to organize files on a magnetic storage medium, and to load and run programs stored on a disk. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors. Gary Kildall originally developed CP/M as an operating system to run on an Intel Intellec-8 development system, equipped with a Shugart Associates 8-inch floppy-disk drive interfaced via a custom floppy-disk controller. It was written in Kildall's own PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers). Various aspects of CP/M were influenced by the TOPS-10 operating system of the DECsystem-10 mainframe computer, which Kildall had ...

CP/M is a monitor control program for microcomputer system development that uses floppy disks or Winchester hard disks for backup storage. Using a computer system based on an 8080 or Z-80 compatible microcomputer, CP/M provides an environment for program construction, storage, and editing, along with assembly and program checkout facilities. CP/M can be easily altered to execute with any computer configuration that uses a compatible Central Processing Unit (CPU) and has at least 20K bytes of main memory with up to 16 disk drives. Although the standard Digital Research version operates on a single-density Intel MDS 800, several different hardware manufacturers support their own input-output (I/O) drivers for CP/M. The CP/M monitor provides rapid access to programs through a comprehensive file management package. The file subsystem supports a named file structure, allowing dynamic allocation of file space as well as sequential and random file access. Using this file system, a large numbe...