🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Mar16.174555.21577@thyme.jpl.nasa.gov> kaleb@thyme.jpl.nasa.gov (Kaleb Keithley) writes:
>In article <27478@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> jdb@reef.cis.ufl.edu (Brian K. W. Hook) writes:
>>A friend and I got in a massive argument over who wrote the CP/M operating
>>system.  He claimed that it was "DEC" but I stated that it was DRI.  I
>>assumed all along that:

>>1.  CP/M was written by Gary Kildall.
>>2.  CP/M was written by DRI
>>3.  DRI is NOT related to DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation)

>>If I am in err, pleae let me know.


>A little tidbit that may be more folklore than fact, is that Digital
>Research Inc (DRI) was once known as Intergalactic Digital Research.

A fact that may be even less interesting is that an early version of
CP/M was written by Dr. Kildall when he worked for Intel.  The system
was called ISIS (and later ISIS-II) and ran on the Microprocessor
Development Systems line of 8080 and 8085 based development stations.
There was a user-contributed-library set of patches that would allow
CP/M programs to run on top of ISIS-II by changing several of the system
vectors to remap filenames, and operation numbers.

The critical architectural concepts of separate BIOS and operating
system, system vectoring, and filename spaces (drive letters, filename
formats, etc.) were all present in the ISIS system.  The external
interface looked similar to the Digital Equipment Corporation operating
system family structures: filename formats, drive specifications,
command line arguments and flags.

Even more amusing is the guy at Motorola who wrote their first 68000
development system software.  He was so bemused by the DEC approach to
doing things that a typical command line looked like:

,,,,PASCAL.EXE ,,DEMO,SRC,/LK=NO,,LST

(note that there are no typos in the above line).  The first three
commas indicated that the standard search path, account number, group
number could be used.  The fourth comma was required to indicate
something that I now forget.  The rest of the commas are also required,
and the comma separating the DEMO and SRC was there to indicate that it
was a Pascal source program, and that the standard suffix of .PAS was
not used.

Note also that I told Motorola in no uncertain terms that putting that
kind of abortion onto a lovely processor like the 68000 was
unconscionable, and that we would not use the development system as a
consequence.  Motorola was not into customer service in those days ;-)

Sorry about the harangue -- I just needed to remind people that I do a
really good Inspector Luger impersonation %-)
-- 
-- * * * Remember: I before E except after DALGL * * *--
Bob Dalgleish		bobd@zaphod.UUCP