3 Dec
2005
3 Dec
'05
11:33 a.m.
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