Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rwmj 7 days ago
I wonder if anyone used CP/M-86 back in the day? I used CP/M 2.2 and 3.x on Z80 pretty extensively. But on 8088/8086 it was MS-DOS everywhere. Were there niche CP/M-86 apps or use cases?
3 comments

DR-DOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS) was reasonably popular, and was a derivative of CP/M-86. I never saw the original OS in the wild, though.
I knew some shops that went CP/M-86 because they were big CP/M-80 shops and thought the price difference was worth a presumably lower conversion and training cost. Didn't last long since MS-DOS ate the software world, which is all that mattered.
They used it at my high school in Denmark. It was easy to share hard disks across many machines and the ability to multitask was also very nice. The office people could switch between word processing and calendar software easily, for example.
Was it branded CP/M or MP/M?
Or concurrent cp/m?
DR-DOS was CP/M-86
DR-DOS was an MS-DOS compatible OS and did not run CP/M apps.