🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bss49z.E75@helios.physics.utoronto.ca>, sysmark@helios.physics.utoronto.ca (Mark Bartelt) writes:
> I'm certain somebody will correct me if I'm wrong (and my memory is admittedly
> hazy on this point), but I believe that when the Rainbow first came out, it ran
> only CP/M, and that MS-DOS wasn't available until people raised a fuss (and DEC
> realized that they'd made a rather serious marketing blunder, by which time it
> was too late).  Completely analogous, in fact, to what happened on the Pro/350,
> with only P/OS available at first, and no RT-11 or UNIX.
> 
I really don't know what the timing was; when the Rainbow first came out, I
was much more interested in the Pro (still am!), so I didn't pay any attention
to the Rainbow demonstration they made here at the University; I was having
much too much fun annoying the salesdroid about the Pro.

> By the way, I also believe that the original Rainbow had both an 8088 and a Z80,
> so that you "could run either 16-bit or 8-bit CP/M", as they so proudly boasted
> during that silly live-by-satellite, direct-from-Maynard product announcement at
> whatever DECUS symposium it was (Spring 83?).  My choice of *two* CP/M options?
> Whoopie.

Well, it ran CP/M-86, but knew how to send 8-bit programs over to the Z80
for execution. I almost exclusively ran 8-bit programs on it, but gave up
because the IOBYTE didn't seem to work right from Z80. I also had to give
up on running MS-DOS on the machine as the IBM PC became more and more
ingrained in the minds of DOS programmers.

Roger Ivie
ivie@cc.usu.edu