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s 3 basic input output system bios basic disk operating system bdos console command processor ccp the bios and bdos were memory resident while the ccp was memory resident unless overwritten by an application in which case it was automatically reloaded after the application finished running a number of transient commands for standard utilities were also provided the transient commands resided in files with the extension com on disk the bios directly controlled hardware components other than the cpu and main memory it contained functions such as character input and output and the reading and writing of disk sectors the bdos implemented the cp m file system and some input output abstractions such as redirection on top of the bios the ccp took user commands and either executed them directly internal commands such as dir to show a directory or era to delete a file or loaded and started an executable file of the given name transient commands such as pip com to copy files or stat com to show various file and system information third party applications for cp m were also essentially transient commands the bdos ccp and standard transient commands were the same in all installations of a particular revision of cp m but the bios portion was always adapted to the particular hardware adding memory to a computer for example meant that the cp m system had to be reinstalled to allow transient programs to use the additional memory space a utility program movcpm was provided with system distribution that allowed relocating the object code to different memory areas the utility program adjusted the addresses in absolute jump and subroutine call instructions to new addresses required by the new location of the operating system in processor memory this newly patched version could then be saved on a new disk allowing application programs to access the additional memory made available by moving the system components once installed the operating system bios bdos and ccp was stored in reserved areas at the beginning of any disk which would be used to boot the system on start up the bootloader usually contained in a rom firmware chip would load the operating system from the disk in drive a by modern standards cp m was primitive owing to the extreme constraints on program size with version 1 0 there was no provision for detecting a changed disk if a user changed disks without manually rereading the disk directory the system would write on the new disk using the old disk s directory information ruining the data stored on the disk from version 1 1 or 1 2 onwards changing a disk then trying to write to it before its directory was read would cause a fatal error to be signalled this avoided overwriting the disk but required a reboot and loss of the data that was to be stored on disk the majority of the complexity in cp m was isolated in the bdos and to a lesser extent the ccp and transient commands this meant that by porting the limited number of simple routines in the bios to a particular hardware platform the entire os would work this significantly reduced the development time needed to support new machines and was one of the main reasons for cp m s widespread use today this sort of abstraction is common to most oss a hardware abstraction layer but at the time of cp m s birth oss were typically intended to run on only one machine platform and multilayer designs were considered unnecessary console command processor edit screenshot showing a cp m 3 0 directory listing using the dir command on a commodore 128 home computer the console command processor or ccp accepted input from the keyboard and conveyed results to the terminal cp m itself would work with either a printing terminal or a video terminal all cp m commands had to be typed in on the command line the console would most often display the a prompt to indicate the current default disk drive when used with a video terminal this would usually be followed by a blinking cursor supplied by the terminal the ccp would await input from the user a ccp internal command of the form drive letter followed by a colon could be used to select the default drive for example typing b and pressing enter at the command prompt would change the default drive to b and the command prompt would then become b to indicate this change cp m s command line interface was patterned after the operating systems from digital equipment such as rt 11 for the pdp 11 and os 8 for the pdp 8 citation needed commands took the form of a keyword followed by a list of parameters separated by spaces or special characters similar to a unix shell builtin if an internal command was recognized it was carried out by the ccp itself otherwise it would attempt to find an executable file on the currently logged disk drive and in later versions user area load it and pass it any additional parameters from the command line these were referred to as transient programs on completion cp m would reload the part of the ccp that had been overwritten by application programs this allowed transient programs a larger memory space the commands themselves could sometimes be obscure for instance the command to duplicate files was named pip peripheral interchange program the name of the old dec utility used for that purpose the format of parameters given to a program was not standardized so that there was no single option character that differentiated options from file names different programs could and did use different characters the cp m console command processor includes dir era ren save type and user as built in commands 51 transient commands in cp m include asm ddt dump ed load movcpm pl pip stat submit and sysgen 51 cp m plus cp m version 3 includes dir display list of files from a directory except those marked with the sys attribute dirsys dirs list files marked with the sys attribute in the directory erase era delete a file rename ren rename a file type typ display contents of an ascii character file and user use change user number as built in commands 52 cp m 3 allows the user to abbreviate the built in commands 53 transient commands in cp m 3 include copysys date device dump ed get help hexcom initdir link mac pip put rmac set setdef show sid submit and xref 53 basic disk operating system edit the basic disk operating system 13 12 or bdos 13 12 provided access to such operations as opening a file output to the console or printing application programs would load processor registers with a function code for the operation and addresses for parameters or memory buffers and call a fixed address in memory since the address was the same independent of the amount of memory in the system application programs would run the same way for any type or configuration of hardware basic input output system edit cp m advertisement in the 11 december 1978 issue of infoworld magazine the basic input output system or bios 13 12 provided the lowest level functions required by the operating system these included reading or writing single characters to the system console and reading or writing a sector of data from the disk the bdos handled some of the buffering of data from the diskette but before cp m 3 0 it assumed a disk sector size fixed at 128 bytes as used on single density 8 inch floppy disks since most 5 25 inch disk formats used larger sectors the blocking and deblocking and the management of a disk buffer area was handled by model specific code in the bios customization was required because hardware choices were not constrained by compatibility with any one popular standard for example some manufacturers used a separate computer terminal while others designed a built in integrated video display system serial ports for printers and modems could use different types of uart chips and port addresses were not fixed some machines used memory mapped i o instead of the 8080 i o address space all of these variations in the hardware were concealed from other modules of the system by use of the bios which used standard entry points for the services required to run cp m such as character i o or accessing a disk block since support for serial communication to a modem was very rudimentary in the bios or may have been absent altogether it was common practice for cp m programs that used modems to have a user installed overlay containing all the code required to access a particular machine s serial port applications edit distribution 5 1 4 inch diskettes and packaging for the last version version 4 of wordstar word processing program released for 8 bit cp m wordstar one of the first widely used word processors and dbase an early and popular database program for microcomputers were originally written for cp m two early outliners kamas knowledge and mind amplification system and its cut down successor out think without programming facilities and retooled for 8080 v20 compatibility were also written for cp m though later rewritten for ms dos turbo pascal the ancestor of borland delphi and multiplan the ancestor of microsoft excel also debuted on cp m before ms dos versions became available visicalc the first ever spreadsheet program was made available for cp m another company sorcim created its supercalc spreadsheet for cp m which would go on to become the market leader and de facto standard on cp m supercalc would go on to be a competitor in the spreadsheet market in the ms dos world autocad a cad application from autodesk debuted on cp m a host of compilers and interpreters for popular programming languages of the time such as basic borland s turbo pascal fortran and even pl i 54 were available among them several of the earliest microsoft products cp m software often came with installers that adapted it to a wide variety of computers 55 the source code for basic programs was easily accessible and most forms of copy protection were ineffective on the operating system 56 a kaypro ii owner for example would obtain software on xerox 820 format then copy it to and run it from kaypro format disks 57 the lack of standardized graphics support limited video games but various character and text based games were ported such as telengard 58 gorillas 59 hamurabi lunar lander along with early interactive fiction including the zork series and colossal cave adventure text adventure specialist infocom was one of the few publishers to consistently release their games in cp m format lifeboat associates started collecting and distributing user written free software one of the first was xmodem which allowed reliable file transfers via modem and phone line another program native to cp m was the outline processor kamas citation needed transient program area edit the read write memory between address 0100 hexadecimal and the lowest address of the bdos was the transient program area tpa available for cp m application programs although all z80 and 8080 processors could address 64 kilobytes of memory the amount available for application programs could vary depending on the design of the particular computer some computers used large parts of the address space for such things as bios roms or video display memory as a result some systems had more tpa memory available than others bank switching was a common technique that allowed systems to have a large tpa while switching out rom or video memory space as needed cp m 3 0 allowed parts of the bdos to be in bank switched memory as well debugging application edit cp m came with a dynamic debugging tool nicknamed ddt after the insecticide i e a bug killer which allowed memory and program modules to be examined and manipulated and allowed a program to be executed one step at a time 60 61 62 resident programs edit cp m originally did not support the equivalent of terminate and stay resident tsr programs as under dos programmers could write software that could intercept certain operating system calls and extend or alter their functionality using this capability programmers developed and sold auxiliary desk accessory programs such as smartkey a keyboard utility to assign any string of bytes to any key 63 cp m 3 however added support for dynamically loadable resident system extensions rsx 52 18 a so called null command file could be used to allow ccp to load an rsx without a transient program 52 18 similar solutions like rsms for resident system modules were also retrofitted to cp m 2 2 systems by third parties 64 65 66 software installation edit although cp m provided some hardware abstraction to standardize the interface to disk i o or console i o application programs still typically required installation to make use of all the features of such equipment as printers and terminals often these were controlled by escape sequences which had to be altered for different devices for example the escape sequence to select bold face on a printer would have differed among manufacturers and sometimes among models within a manufacturer s range this procedure was not defined by the operating system a user would typically run an installation program that would either allow selection from a range of devices or else allow feature by feature editing of the escape sequences required to access a function this had to be repeated for each application program since there was no central operating system service provided for these devices the initialization codes for each model of printer had to be written into the application to use a program such as wordstar with more than one printer say a fast dot matrix printer or a slower but presentation quality daisy wheel printer a separate version of wordstar had to be prepared and one had to load the wordstar version that corresponded to the printer selected and exiting and reloading to change printers disk formats edit ibm system 34 and ibm 3740 s single density single sided format is cp m s standard 8 inch floppy disk format no standard 5 25 inch cp m disk format exists with kaypro morrow designs osborne and others each using their own 67 22 68 infoworld estimated in september 1981 that about two dozen formats were popular enough that software creators had to consider them to reach the broadest possible market 20 jrt pascal for example provided versions on 5 25 inch disk for north star osborne apple heath hard sector and soft sector and superbrain and one 8 inch version 69 ellis computing also offered its software for both heath formats and 16 other 5 25 inch formats including two different trs 80 cp m modifications 70 certain disk formats were more popular than others most software was available in the xerox 820 format and other computers such as the kaypro ii were compatible with it 57 71 no single manufacturer however prevailed in the 5 25 inch era of cp m use and disk formats were often not portable between hardware manufacturers a software manufacturer had to prepare a separate version of the program for each brand of hardware on which it was to run with some manufacturers kaypro is an example there was not even standardization across the c...