The world as I see it

 C is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems code (especially in kernels), device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems. C is an imperative procedural language, supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope, and recursion, with a static type system. It was designed to be compiled to provide low-level access to memory and language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, all with minimal runtime support. Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage cross-platform programming. A standards-compliant C program written with port...

 Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named after French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal. Pascal became very successful in the 1970s, notably on the burgeoning minicomputer market. Compilers were also available for many microcomputers as the field emerged in the late 1970s. It was widely used as a teaching language in university-level programming courses in the 1980s, and also used in production settings for writing commercial software during the same period. It was displaced by the C programming language during the late 1980s and early 1990s as UNIX-based systems became popular, and especially with the release of C++. UCSD Pascal formed the basis of many systems, including Apple Pascal. Borland Pascal was not based on the UCSD codebase, but arrived during the popular period ...

  B eginners A ll-purpose S ymbolic I nstruction C ode BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. The first microcomputer version of BASIC was co-written by Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff for their newly formed company, Micro-Soft. This was released by MITS in punch tape format for the Altair 8800 shortly after the machine itself, immediately cementing BASIC as the primary language of early microcomputers. Members of the Homebrew Computer Club began circulating copies of the program, causing Gates to write his Open Letter to Hobbyists, complaining about this early example of software piracy. Microsoft sold a CP/M BASIC com...

In computer programming, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of, e.g., memory locations, registers, and macros are generally also supported. Because assembly depends on the machine code instructions, each assembly language is specific to a particular computer architecture. Sometimes there is more than one assembler for the same architecture, and sometimes an assembler is specific to an operating system or to particular operating systems. Most assembly languages do not provide specific syntax for operating system calls, and most assembly languages can be used universall...

 There are many programming languages for CP/M.   The first, PL/M, an acronym for Programming Language for Microcomputers, is a high-level language conceived and developed by Gary Kildall in 1973 for Hank Smith at Intel for the Intel 8008. It was later expanded for the newer Intel 8080. The 8080 had enough power to run the PL/M compiler, but lacked a suitable form of mass storage. In an effort to port the language from the PDP-10 to the 8080, Kildall used PL/M to write a disk operating system that allowed a floppy disk to be used. This was the basis of CP/M. Assembler has always been the first available programming language for a new processor.  With the 8080, people were hand assembling their code and just toggling in the op–codes to get their programs to run.  An assembler and linker / loader were supplied with CP/M. BASIC gained popularity, particularly for general-purpose programming and educational purposes.  CP/M came with the Microsoft Basic interpre...

The reason most people are still drawn to CP/M is because it is so easy to fully understand the system, up from the tiniest detail. Yet, CP/M is the direct predecessor of MS-DOS (which was modeled very closely after CP/M) and has full functionality for normal use. If you know CP/M, you understand the low-level basics of any PC, and it gives you a level of understanding of the hardware that you'd never gain with, for instance, Linux. In short, understanding CP/M is relatively easy, and it gives you an insight in today's computers that is hard to obtain in any other way. CP/M essentially provides programs with a set of function calls that allow them to communicate with the computer's I/O devices in a standardized manner. These system calls (the BDOS functions) ensure that user programs never have to bother with how the computer hardware stores a file or puts text on a screen - instead, the system calls can be relied upon to do the job. That concept is the basis for any operat...