CP/M Main Page

This page is a mirror of John Elliott's original CP/M archive


elliott@teaching.physics.ox.ac.uk
As John's page is closing in June 1996, I have (with his permission) mirrored it here. I have substituted my own mailing address for his (which appears above), as a contact-point for suggestions.
I have converted John's original HTML to be XHTML 1.0 (Transitional) compliant.
NB Many of the links in this mirror are now stale (2004)

What is CP/M?

It's an operating system for 8-bit computers. It looks rather like DOS to use (only not so user-friendly); this is hardly surprising because DOS was copied from CP/M in about 1980.

CP/M comes/came in three main versions; 1.4, 2.2 and 3.1. v2.2 was the basis of MSDOS, while v3.1 evolved into DRDOS and Novell DOS.

There were also 8086 and 68000 versions of CP/M. CP/M-86 evolved into DOS Plus, Concurrent DOS and REAL/32.

There is still a lot more interest in CP/M than might be expected for an operating system whose current version was released in 1982. This is probably because 8-bit Z80-based computers are still remarkably common (Amstrad plan to release another one in a few weeks) and it is easy enough to port CP/M onto a given computer (compared to other operating systems).

Why CP/M? Dave Baldwin's USENET posting explaining his reasons for still using CP/M.

Information archive

I hope to construct a HTML archive of all possible information about the various versions of CP/M. Some of the documents are my own; others are HTMLized versions of those at Oakland. So far, I have:

CP/M related links

What would the Web be without pages consisting entirely of links?
Caution: Many of these links are stale.