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...

8-bit microprocessors were the first widely used microprocessors in the computing industry, marking a major shift from mainframes and minicomputers to smaller, more affordable systems. The introduction of 8-bit processors in the 1970s enabled the production of personal computers, leading to the popularization of computing and setting the foundation for the modern computing landscape. 8008 The first commercial 8-bit processor was the Intel 8008 in 1972 which was originally intended for the Datapoint 2200 intelligent terminal. Intel's first 8-bit microprocessor, designed by a team including Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, and Federico Faggin, who had also worked on the 4004.  The chip, limited by its 18-pin DIP, has a single 8-bit bus working triple duty to transfer 8 data bits, 14 address bits, and two status bits. The small package requires about 30 TTL support chips to interface to memory. For example, the 14-bit address, which can access "16 K × 8 bits of memory", needs to be lat...

 Well, Earthlink has stopped supporting the old Mindspring free web hosting so my old site is gone.  Soon you will be able to find me at my new domain marshallgates.com . In the meantime, I have finished removing all the old, dead, defunct quiz results from my blog history.  There were quizes hosted on geocities , that's how old some of them were. Now I just have to get in the habit of posting something every once in a while.

 Back in the early days, I did a lot of on-line polls and personality tests.  I recorded the results here as blog entries.   Turns out that a lot of them were not 'well supported' and the resources they referenced have gone away.  So, I am cleaning out those posts from my history.  I hope this will tighten up my blog as I start to post to it regularly again. Wish me luck.