CP/M-86 info and ancient PC hardware stuff for RBIL62?
Matthias Paul
With all you knowledgable CP/M fans in this group and with the lack
of really detailed info about [C]CP/M-86 and Concurrent DOS internals
in Ralf Brown's Interrupt List (http://www.pobox.com/~ralf/files.html),
I thought you should know that Ralf is going to put together the next
issue (RBIL62) soon.
If you check INT E0h and other CP/M related places in RBIL61, you
will still find many white spots in there in terms of documented
and undocumented functionality, data structures, background pro-
gramming knowledge, known bugs and workarounds, version numbers,
release dates, early hardware and clone BIOS issues, and all the
like. And it would be great if RBIL could become as much a default
reference for CP/M-86 stuff in the future as it is for PC/DOS/Windows
stuff (as much as the x86 platform is affected).
Apparently some people are still programming with and under CP/M,
but I think, it will also become increasingly important to preserve
all the CP/M knowledge simply for historical purposes, and RBIL
would be the ideal place for it, so it can be cross-linked with
related DOS and hardware stuff.
Due to my longlasting DOS research work and - later - also my
direct involvement in the development of DR-DOS, I certainly
know the single user DR-DOS family (as well as other DOSes)
from the inside out, but my knowledge in regard to [C]CP/M-86,
MP/M, Concurrent DOS, Multiuser DOS, REAL/32 and also FlexOS
is still comparably limited, and almost everything I could
provide in regard to these systems is covered in RBIL61 already
or at least will be covered with the release of RBIL62.
So, I would like to encourage those of you, who know these systems
much better than I could ever do, to flesh out the existing stuff
with all the intrinsic details you are aware of, the more detailed
the better, as long as the facts are accurate.
What's also interesting (and not limited to Digital Research stuff)
is any info about bugs and fixes in early ROM-BIOS versions, hardware
differences on early PC clones, oldest floppy formats (as long as
they were somehow readable on x86 machines), ROM signatures, ROM
entry points, and all this stuff you could find in the original
manuals or in magazine articles (remember the times, when computer
magazines still dealt with programming and hardware details, not
just with product testing and speed comparisons? ;-)
I think you got the message already... ;-) Let's try to put as
much of this info together. I suggest to send your submissions
directly to Ralf and preferable in semi-RBIL style already.
(Or, if you would for some odd reason prefer to use me as
a "pre-processor" for some kind of material you can provide,
you're welcome, although I might have to delay any such activities
until RBIL63 then, as I'm extremely busy with other stuff right
now and still have to report tons for the more modern systems...)
Anyway, thanks for your consideration and time.
Greetings,
Matthias
--
<mailto:Matthi...@post.rwth-aachen.de>; <mailto:mp...@drdos.org>
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org
Richard Plinston
>
> MP/M, Concurrent DOS, Multiuser DOS, REAL/32
There is (or will be real soon now) yet another development along those
lines: Real/NG.
This is a core of Real/32 running on top of Linux and giving a
Multiuser-DOS services to terminals and to terminal sessions over
TCP/IP. And yes it does still run CP/M-86 (or at least some programs).
See www.imsltd.com or www.realng.com