A lot of very old computing technology has remained in use long after it became obsolete. For example, many businesses still run old software written in COBOL (sometimes on legacy hardware or in emulators). And according to Wikipedia IBM’s venerable OS/2 operating system was still running many banks’ ATMs and many cities’ public transit systems as recently as a few years ago.
CP/M was one of the most popular mass-market operating systems in the 1970s and early 1980s, until it was eclipsed by IBM PC-compatibles running PC-DOS and MS-DOS. Is it still used by anyone today in a production environment? Or is its use entirely confined to retrocomputing hobbyists?
It would be very unusual for any business to use CP/M today.
Maybe a old small business with a legacy system. Perhaps a bookkeeping program or spreadsheets the owner uses.
The owner might feel the cost to change just isn’t worth it. Especially if they plan to retire and close the business.
I supported some home brew bookkeeping systems early in my career. Monstrosities written in GWBasic. Updated over and over by many people. Totally undocumented. I’d ask the owner about writing a new system for them. They’d always insist what they had worked fine.
Does it count if you play Ladder in a CP/M emulator running inside a DOS emulator? (I don’t know why I bother, when the Java version is now available, but sometimes I like the original. Even though the 5.25" floppy I had the original copy on went bad long ago…)
Wasn’t CP/M among the first embedded controller options? It seems entirely possible that some legacy devices still use it for runtime, if not necessarily for continuing development. I’ve worked for more than one company that had active products on a very old platform, simply because newer OSes brought nothing but bulk and a need for complete rewrites from the kernel out to the last UI and servo driver.
If it was, this is the first I’ve heard of it. I did a bit of Googling just now but all I came up with was a discussion on the Wikipedia talk page for “List of computers running CP/M” in which an anonymous commenter repeats the same claim. He or she offered no evidence, despite another editor’s request for it.
You’re right that if CP/M was in use in embedded systems, then some of those systems might still be running today. But first we’d have to find out what those systems actually were.
I’m not at all involved with embedded systems. I’ve been “technically aware” of them for three decades, but only to the very superficial extent that they’re covered in the mainstream computing press and general-interest hobbyist websites. Please tell me about CP/M in embedded systems.
Oh, it’s nothing I’m expert on. Just “I vas dere… at de beginning” and remember quite a few projects and breathless articles about Computer! Controlled! Stuff! I’m pretty sure CP/M was big in that field, although I went down the machine language route - 6800 and then the glories of M/ASM.
And as I said, over the years worked with a lot of mature systems that used “ancient” tech like CP/M instead of… XWindows. One company had a piece of gear run on a TRS-80 slab computer and when those were discontinued they bought up like 1,000 and eventually shipped every one, across years and years.
Most CMP-8 contemporary embedded systems used microprocessors or single chip devices that did not use operating systems. However some companies built products that had a computer (case and all) inside. I remember Coulter had a PDP-8 inside one of their systems. It’s likely that CMP-8 computers were embedded in large systems, and a diligent search might uncover one in a hospital, lumber yard, barn etc. - if one were inclined to make the search.
I have a KAYPRO 2, but it’s not embedded in anything.
(Except in my case, it was when I accidentally knocked the keyboard off the front of the Kaypro II and several of the keys snapped off and my dad wouldn’t let me use it anymore.)
(Then I found a Kaypro 10 at a rummage sale a few months later. I couldn’t wait to play Ladder on that super-fast 10MB hard drive! But then it turned out the floppy drive was broken and I could only use the stuff that was already on the hard drive. )
Perhaps my grammar was off. CPM is an operating system that is loaded into a computer ahead of any applications programs. The advantage of the operating system is that it looks the same to the application program no matter what computer it is running on.
Small embedded systems used processors with very limited memory. At the time of CPM, memory sizes were 500 to 2000 bytes for single chip processors. That was too little memory to contain an operating system. Every program was custom designed to only run on a single device type. That’s OK since small embedded systems were very high volume ~50,000 units minimum.
How much does a professional Ladder player make these days?
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