C64-C128 CP-M Cartridge Interest

[Chuck Guzis]

On 25 Dec 2010 at 13:02, Eric Smith wrote:

> Tony Duell wrote:
>  > I beleive the historay can be traced back to the MCS8i system.
>  This, > AFAIK, never had disks, and never ran CP/M. But it's
>  8080-based and > amazingly it has a CPM-like IOBYTE at location 3.
> 
> It's not that the Intel development systems had a CP/M-link IOBYTE. 
> It's that CP/M has an Intel MDS-like IOBYTE.  Remember that Gary
> Kildall wrote software for Intel before writing CP/M, and that CP/M
> was written to run on an MDS

...and IOBYTE wasn't universally implemented among OEMs.  It was an 
optional feature of the BIOS in the early days of CP/M.  I can 
probably find some words in the System Alteration Guide to that 
effect, if anyone's interested.    Other than STAT and PIP, I'm not 
aware of any standard CP/M utility that cares about it--or supports 
the additional "extended" device names.

--Chuck