Old MS-DOS & WIN Software

[Holger Veit]

woodelf wrote:

> Mind you if somebody came  up with a better OS when the 386's came 
> out, would we have windows
> today? 

Ahem, there were better OSs at or shortly after the time 386's came 
out... but "better" does not mean that they were in wide use.  Note the 
VHS vs. Betamax  effect.

> ** Well I  did say  8088, so that is more on topic, as I wanted to 
> play around with small - C for the
> 8080 and cross compile for a FPGA home brew computer.

There is plenty of stuff around there which does not primarily require 
80x86s with DOS or Windows (or rather, just with emulators as a 
bootstrap for a native system).

> To get on topic for all the people that have a Z80 and CP/M check this 
> page out.
> http://www.schorn.ch/cpm/intro.html    SPL is new language for the z80 
> and some replacement
> CP/M software too.

There were numerous scripting languages for CP/M and/or 8080/z80 based 
systems. Unfortunately, none really persuaded me to use them beyond the 
"hello world" level. They were typically at some sort of DOS batch level 
- if you want to really program something, it pretty fast results in 
obscure hacking as some constructs were not very well thought through. 
Compare this to the prior Bliss or DCL languages known from DEC, which I 
liked pretty much those days. Same goes for the PDP MAC assembler with 
its accompanying macro libraries. CP/M 3 had RMAC which would be 
comparable, but I have never really seen it in use with really 
sophisticated macros.

Holger