Re: Apple// CP/M question

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3A117427.FDBEBEEA@inetnebr.com>,
Roy and/or Janet Miller  <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:
 
> Paul Schlyter wrote:
> 
>> 2. Even if Apple // disks had been compatible with the rest of the
>> world on the sector level, MSDOS still uses a different logical disk
>> format than CP/M.
> 
> Not necessarily. The Coleco ADAM's version of CP/M 2.2 used exactly the
> same format as the first PC/MS-DOS format, 160K, SSDD.
 
.... I was referring to CP/M-80 though, not CP/M-86.  OK, I didn't say
it explicitly....
 
> In fact, I used to put my ADAM's CP/M boot disk in my IBM PC and try to
> boot. It didn't really enter CP/M of course, but it would "start" to, at
> least to the extent that I would get a screen message saying CP/M 2.2,
> copyright Digital Research etc, and then garbage, and then the machine
> would freeze. The fact is that there was no standard disk format for
> CP/M on 5.25" disks, or for that matter the occasional machine that
> used 3" or 3.5" inch disks.
 
Very true -- the 5.25" diskette situation was chaotic in CP/M.  I
remember Lifeboat offered CP/M software on 8" SSSD disks and also
on some 60 different 5.25" CP/M diskette formats -- *including*
Apple CP/M !!!
 
The situation regarding object file formats was equally chaotic in
CP/M: each compiler vendor used their own object file format!  THis
created a market for PLINK: it did cost some $600 (and it was $$$'s
of the 1980'ies!) for just a linker!  But it was an extraordinary
linker, which was capable of linking object files in any one of some
6 different object file formats into one executable program!
 
Early versions of MSDOS included LINK.EXE with MS-DOS even though
no compiler was supplied: this made that object file format
pretty much standard in the MS-DOS world (at least during the early
years; later compiler vendors added their own extensions.  And
Turbo pascal ver 4 included "TPU" files instead of "OBJ" files,
with a very Borland-specific format...)
 
-- 
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