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Gary Arlen Kildall was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur.
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. 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.
The Xerox 820 is an 8-bit desktop computer sold by Xerox in the early 1980s. The computer runs under the CP/M operating system and uses floppy disk drives for mass storage. The microprocessor board is a licensed variant of the Big Board computer.
Kaypro Corporation was an American home and personal computer manufacturer based out of San Diego in the 1980s. The company was founded by Non-Linear Systems (NLS) to compete with the popular Osborne 1 portable microcomputer. Kaypro produced a line of rugged, "luggable" CP/M-based computers sold with an extensive software bundle which supplanted its competitors and quickly became one of the top-selling personal computer lines of the early 1980s.
The Osborne Computer Corporation (OCC) was a pioneering maker of portable computers. It was located in the Silicon Valley of the southern San Francisco Bay Area in California.
The Osborne 1 is the first commercially successful portable computer, released on April 3, 1981 by Osborne Computer Corporation. It weighs 24.5 lb (11.1 kg), cost US$1,795, and runs the CP/M 2.2 operating system. It is powered from a wall socket, as it has no on-board battery, but it is still classed as a portable device since it can be hand-carried when the keyboard is closed.
Ladder is a barrel-jumping game like Donkey Kong written for the CP/M operating system and made to be operated on the early Kaypro line of luggable computers. Ladder was written by Yahoo Software of Los Angeles, California.
The Compaq Portable is an early portable computer which was one of the first IBM PC compatible systems. It was Compaq Computer Corporation's first product, to be followed by others in the Compaq Portable series and later Compaq Deskpro series. It was not simply an 8088-CPU computer that ran a Microsoft DOS as a PC "work-alike", but contained a reverse-engineered BIOS, and a version of MS-DOS that was so similar to IBM's PC DOS that it ran nearly all its application software. The computer was also an early variation on the idea of an "all-in-one".
BDS C is a compiler for a sizeable subset of the C programming language, that ran on and generated code for the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 processors. It was the first C compiler for CP/M. It was written by Leor Zolman and first released in 1979 when he was 20 years old. "BDS" stands for "Brain Damage Software."
ZEOS was a PC manufacturer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Originally based in New Brighton, Minnesota, and founded by Gregory E. Herrick, the company incorporated in Minnesota in 1981. Prior to manufacturing PCs, the company was called NPC Electronics. NPC was a contract assembly business best known for developing a transmitter device called Radio Realty. Marketed primarily to real estate brokers, this product enabled prospective home buyers to tune in and listen to prerecorded information about a property listing while parked in front of the dwelling. Radio Realty was divested in the early 1980s as NPC started developing, manufacturing, and selling PCs under the ZEOS name. The company went public in mid-1985 by self-underwriting, and officially changed its name from NPC Electronics to ZEOS International.
Micro Cornucopia, sometimes shortened to Micro C, was a 1980s magazine for microcomputer hobbyists and enthusiasts. It was published in Bend, Oregon by former Tektronix engineer David J. Thompson.
A source-to-source translator, source-to-source compiler, transcompiler, or transpiler is a type of translator that takes the source code of a program written in a programming language as its input and produces an equivalent source code in the same or a different programming language. A source-to-source translator converts between programming languages that operate at approximately the same level of abstraction, while a traditional compiler translates from a higher level programming language to a lower level programming language. For example, a source-to-source translator may perform a translation of a program from Python to JavaScript, while a traditional compiler translates from a language like C to assembler or Java to bytecode. An automatic parallelizing compiler will frequently take in a high level language program as an input and then transform the code and annotate it with parallel code annotations or language constructs.
George Morrow was part of the early microcomputer industry in the United States. Morrow promoted and improved the S-100 bus used in many early microcomputers. Called "one of the microcomputer industry's iconoclasts" by Richard Dalton in the Whole Earth Software Catalog, Morrow was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.
Following the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer, or IBM PC, many other personal computer architectures became extinct within just a few years.
S-BASIC was a "structured" BASIC variant, distributed with Kaypro CP/M systems. It was made by Topaz Programming is distributed by Micro-Ap.
CatChum is a text-only clone of Pac-Man written for the CP/M operating system and made to be operated on the early Kaypro line of luggable computers.
Aliens is a text-only clone of Space Invaders written for the CP/M operating system and made to be operated on the early Kaypro line of luggable computers. It was written by Yahoo Software of Los Angeles, California. Along with Star Trek, CatChum, and Ladder, Aliens was one of the games that came with the early Kaypro computers.
MINCE is a text editor for microcomputers that run the CP/M operating system. Developed in BDS C by Mark of the Unicorn, it was bundled with computers from Kaypro and Morrow Designs, and the Epson QX-10. It was a subset of Emacs designed to run within the 64kB memory limit of 8-bit computers.
Perfect Writer is a word processor computer program published by Perfect Software for CP/M, subsequently rewritten and released as Perfect II by Thorn EMI Computer Software for IBM PC compatible computers. It was written in C and famous for its stability. It was an enhanced version of MINCE, which itself was a version of Emacs for microcomputer platforms. Emacs itself was too heavyweight to fit within the 64kb RAM limit of most microcomputers. Like MINCE, it included a floppy disk based virtual memory system.
References
- ↑ "Richard D. Dalton".
- ↑ Brand, Stewart (1984). WESC. ISBN 9780385191661.
Richard Dalton's CP/M strategy is an interesting one. Use the bargain Kaypro or Morrow machines for highly specific business applications and they'll quickly pay their way and you won't care about the software world passing you by.