Subj : Re: recent projects
To   : Mike Powell
From : Jeff Thiele
Date : Sun Aug 14 2022 11:13 am

On 14 Aug 2022, Mike Powell said the following...
 MP> > As if all of that wasn't enough, the FujiNet also has running on that sa
 MP> > microcontroller an emulated Z80 CPU running CP/M, which can be accessed 
 MP> > the Atari.
 MP> I was reading an article on osnews.com recently about CP/M and how the
 MP> owners have said it "and all its derivatives" are now free.  The author
 MP> was questioning whether that was restricted to just CP/M derivatives, or
 MP> also things like DR-DOS, which apparently started out as a CP/M
 MP> extension.

I did find this, which seems to clarify things a bit:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/15/cpm_open_source/

 MP> One thing I did not glean was whether or not their are also open source,
 MP> i.e. if they source is out in the wild or if it even still exists for
 MP> some of the projects.

CP/M is very tied to the 8080/Z80 architecture, but customizing it for a
particular application was up to the people who created various systems. For
that reason, I'm pretty sure that licensing CP/M also granted access to the
source code, and there are copies all over the place.

 MP> Some of the derivatives and extensions could do things that other
 MP> versions of DOS that were out at the time could not do natively, like
 MP> multitasking.

True. Also, the presence of the "PIP" command, among others, in CP/M traces
its inspiration back to at least OS/8 on the PDP-8, first released in 1971.

Jeff.

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