A CP/M like operating system with no proprietary code #VintageComputing #CPM @hjalfi
David Given posts on GitHub an open source sort-of CP/M 2.2 distribution. What is CP/M you ask?
CP/M (Wikipedia) is Digital Research’s seminal desktop operating system from 1977 that for a decade dominated the personal computer market. It’s of enormous historical value and there’s a vast wealth of programs written for it. It’s even useful today: both to study (as a superb example of sheer minimalism) but also to use; the Z80 is a common target for homebrew computers, and CP/M is the obvious operating system to run on one.
So what is CP/Mish?
CP/Mish is an open source sort-of-CP/M distribution for the 8080 and Z80 architectures (although for technical reasons currently it only works on the Z80).
It contains no actual Digital Research code. Instead, it’s a collection of third party modules which replicate it, all with proper open source licenses, integrated with a build system that should make it easy to work with.
What you get is a working CP/M 2.2 clone consisting of:
ZSDOS as the BDOS replacement
ZCPR1 as the CCP replacement
open source BIOSes for the supported platforms
various tools copying the functionality of the standard CP/M tools (some of them written by me)
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