Boy this brings me back. I had an S100 buss machine with two, count 'em, two 8 inch floppies. It had an assembler, a basic interpreter and a basic compiler - BASCOM. But it came alive for me when I learned PASCAL and got my first Borland compiler for $30.00. PASCAL was the first, and, to this day, the cleanest programming language that has ever been. l learned it from a professor who was a hardware engineer for Nick Wirth. If I ever got stuck on something I went back to the railroad diagrams and plowed right through the speed bump. Those railroad diagrams made me realize how easy it could be to implement a compiler as long as the language could be described by such a clean format/representation. It was a one-pass compiler and I loved the pre-declaration requirement - whatever "it" was had to be declared before it was referenced - variables, constants, types, functions, procedures, whatever. And the executables were tighter than anything ever produced by a C compiler - even the Borland turbo C compiler. I programmed on that box for 2 or 3 years before the PC came out but I can't tell you what I programmed, with 2 exceptions - I programmed my senior project on it (I was an electrical engineering (digital hardware) student), and I wrote a CP/M version of a unix program called GREED. That was all 40 years ago in the early '80s. So many fond but fading memories. Thanks for the reminder.

WordStar was trivial to learn. I got up to speed playing with it after school in just a couple of days and started writing papers in it immediately. Those were heady days!

I still love Pascal, one of the best programming languages ever. I started with hisoft pascal on a zx spectrum, later on an amstrad. Then i switched to turbo pascal on the early pc’s and continued with Delphi. I learned myself object oriented programming with delphi and i loved it. It is so much better than any c variant, although c sharp comes close

This was actually the first proper show of how RC2014 works, and I still don't get it, but I haven't found videos that show how it works better than this video! Thanks!

One of the advents of the CP/M era was the common standardized BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). It had well known software interrupt handlers baked into the ROM which basically defined a software API. It made it so that any program could work on any computer with a compatible BIOS. The programs didn't need to know how to move the cursor or how to write text to the screen, they just called the appropriate interrupts with the correct values loaded into certain registers and it would trigger the function they wanted to accomplish. On a side note: in Windows 10, there's a registry setting you can turn on that will enable the old ANSI terminal commands if your software depends on those. As for future projects, it would be neat to build a video card for this (even if it used a microcontroller, or perhaps an old scavenged ISA card), and to program a BIOS to use the video card instead of writing to the serial port.

That's so cool that Turbo Pascal runs on this. That was my programming language along with C in the 1980's. I used to use a C cross compiler called Avocet to compile Z80 programs on my PC.

Used Pascal on a TRS-80 at college where they had a CP/M computer (used an Intel CPU) and Turbo-Pascal and Borland C at home.

I can recommend TeraTerm on windows. Does a great job as VT100 /ANSI terminal. I have recently written a BIOS for CPM 3 for John Winans' z80 retro board and it's a lot of fun.

That CPM format on compact flash has become the standard thing for several computers like N8VEM and FPGA boards. It's a pig to access from a PC. The best I was able to do was to lift the first 8M and access the A drive user 0 with cpmtools. There are a lot of files in the image under users 1-15. It's an utter pain in CPM to move files between users. You're right about Basic. Reading someone else's code in Basic is a nightmare. It's interesting looking at so many old languages in CPM.

I used to program in LISP on my CP/M 68K machine. LISP is meant to represent formal mathematical structures, so there's a lot of weird things one can do in LISP, like taking derivatives and doing integrals, calculating with polynomials, or even write LISP programs that rewrite themselves. One of the oldest programming languages, I haven't heard of it being used much lately, although AutoCAD and Mathematica were based in LISP.

Amiga basic helped me get thru my Fortran 77 class. Basic came out of Fortran, and Amiga basic didn't need line numbers, so I could code my assignments into Amiga basic and used a minimum tweaking to compile into Fortran. This kept me from an hour commute to the computer lab. Ah the good old days.

You have been successful in leaving 100s of men (maybe women too) with the most childish of grins remembering the challenges of 8 bit programming. Retro programming is a curious phenomenon. Why would intelligent humans yearn for antiquated technology when they are watching videos such as this on technology that has almost limitless resources? I think I may have an answer (no, I am not going to insult me fellow viewers). When humans come up against limited resources, they are at their most creative. They experience incredible achievements to come up with results that if performed on current technology would be seen as a slog. So, thank you for this trip down memory lane. Is there a decent IDE and C compiler on CP/M? Compilers were considered exotic creatures back in the day. I still had loads of fun with Z80 and 6502 assembly but would have been far more productive with Visual Studio. Happy days.

Maze Maker was a good one. It makes mazes with ASCII characters

8:10 THIS. Programming is not knowing about a specific language and syntax, but the idea about how everything works behind it. If you know the specific paradigm - procedural, OOP, functional - you can just use the language if you have a reference. And the thing is people these days think that Google and Stack Overflow isn't the same thing as those 2000 page reference manuals we used in the 90's for checking the syntax. If you know one programming paradigm, you know all the languages that use that if you just check the syntax and code reference. (I personally still have problems with understand functional programming as a paradigm - I sometimes get it, but I still couldn't code my way out of my life in LISP) ((ALSO sorry for spamming the comments, I commented as I was watching, much many comments came :D )

You need to find XMODEM or any other upload protocol to transfer data! I guess there would be com stuff in the bbs era, also compression too! CP/M is kind of limiting by it's size, but you have Basic, Pascal, Fortran and even C! The real limiting stuff will be that CP/M is geared towards text only. I dont know if there is video cards for the rc2014 although there should be yamaha sound cards, to at least give you music!

I likes. Please continues

7MHz is 3.5 times as fast as what I had, back in the day (Apple II CP/M-card, which ran at 2MHz)...

seeen your work on the olc i liked it

ProTip: .... Putty on windows can do serial communication last I looked and is very good on it's ansi support.

I really enjoy your video, but it's way above my head. I would like to have a retro-CP/M prebuild, like a Phoenix256 or a Commander X16 or such. Also, I like to play around with BASIC hobby coding. If anyone here wants a fast line number style BASIC for a modern computer, PC-BASIC is a free download. It would run this code shown above very,very quickly.

"CP/M and Pascal" now there's a couple of things that "give me the warm and fuzzies". GOTO is programming for "real men"! ;)

There are structured BASICs. The only real issue with programming in the language was laziness on the part of the programmer by not using top-down design and stepwise refinement and by writing the code away from the computer - essential to good programming.

FYI, you can redraw the screen in the Turbo Pascal editor by hitting Ctrl-L.

To be honest, modern operating systems don't derive from DOS. Current day Windows come from Windows NT. That did get some bits and bolts to run some ancient code, but it was different from the ground up. Edit: I'm glad to have grown up with BBC Micro's ... at least the BASIC on there had things like functions and procedures, didn't need to GOTO anything.

You have the same syndrome as me. I've been taught to not fix what's working. However, I do not consider stuff working "adequately" as working, so I keep trying to fix it to perform better. I think that's kind of the drive for innovation and trying to make things - never settle for less than perfect (though it's important to learn to accept "just good", perfectionism is such a disease - better to have done than not at all because you don't know how to make it perfect)

CP/M on a Z80? Cmon, TRSDOS for the win! 🤣

6:01 Yes, that's what I call fun. :P

Man PASCAL was the first real language I learned programming on (I do not count BASIC as a real programming language)

I remember Kermit file transfer. That's got error correction and compression.

I think RC2014 also has a FPU board (Am9511) I wonder if Pascal could use it for massive speed improvement 🙂

What didn’t you like about Putty on windows? I use minicom on Linux, minicom or ZTerm on OS X and Putty on Windows. Putty has good terminal emulation and is fairly configurable.

I agree the "DOWNLOAD" program is a pain. I use winrar to zip my files without compression (store) then send them to my cp/m machine with Xmodem and unzip them there. It's a bit more typing but a lot less hassle.

Nice video, thx for it. It's possible download pascal mandelbrot source ? I want run it on my RC2014.

Wow.. i remember using Aztec C, HiTec, dbase, wordstar, televideo, osborne, kaypro, LOL Can CPM handle graphical output like with a VGA adapter something like that.

Is there a VGA board for the RC2014? Probably need a keyboard input too.

I'd suggest trying Forth or COBOL for a different programming experience.

My rc2014 doesn't want to write anything to CF under cp/m, don't know how to diagnose this problem.

Doesn’t it use XMODEM to upload files?

Didn't CP/M have a kermit capable communication program? Then there *is* a bit of error checking.

Hi James, Does the BASIC (ROM version) support DATA, POKE and USR? I guess you can poke machine code into some safe place in RAM and run Z80 code. Back in the old days - I used MASM80 (Z80 Assembler) under CPM, sending code to Z80 game machines using a PIO chip. Best wishes - I'm sure the 'break' statement is a special 'goto' statement, BTW! Damn!

dma?

I'd say try programming BBC Basic. You can do it on a modern Raspberry Pi as long as you can stick RiscOS on it. You'll see that you can program without a single GOTO.

Sorry. I meant search for Kilobaud archives

We are talking jape of the decade. We are talking April, May, June, July and August fool. That's right. I am Queeg.

You know something i'd like to see done? I'd like to see someone write tetris for CP/M :) IIRC the original was written in PASCAL....

Can it run SymbOS? Thanks for the video.

Isn't 7mhz a bit fast?! The C64 ran at 1mhz, and some squeezed a lot out of a C64... 256kb of RAM??? That seems excessive for CPM. Not that I ever really used it. But I played around with it. A Commodore c128 also had a Z80 and a CPM Disc. But even back in 1989ish there was hardly any Software - it was really already completely obsolete by then.... Maybe some companies might have still had an old Z80 machine. Yeah! GOTO statements! That is how you learn to code the real way!!! Not even using labels but mind less line numbers. That way your brains memory got trained to the Max. Of course nobody else could read your code. But then eventually not using them anymore was the really fun Part. It made things so much better 😊😊😊😊😊 I agree CPM was very unintuitive. In my case the arrow keys might have worked to control the Cursor, but it was rather a surprise if something else worked as expected. Usually it didn't 😢 Since I had zero documentation it was pretty useless even in the late 80s. I mean I had a Commodore c128. It had 3 modes: c64, c128 and cpm The c64 Mode was the one to use to play games but it was only 40 characters wide (320x200px). The c128 Mode was useful to use a terminal emulator and go online with it since it was 80 characters wide. That also made it a valid word process ing option. The CPM Mode was just useless compared to the other two.... I really tried to use it but it was to hard to get Software or Information about it. I also never met anyone in real life who had even heard about it ( except from me), let alone used it....

You can try mumath

why?

Actually a good program to try on CP/M would be dBASE II. This was a full multi-file relational database system that had it's own interpreted language targetted at database manipulation. It's about as sophisticated a business application you're likely to find, as you can use it to develop any business application that is built around databases. (Well, you could probably write a text adventure with it too... 😂) It later got ported to MS-DOS, and was the leading database application during the 80s. (p.s. You WILL need to find a pdf manual or reference for it, as it just loads to a "." prompt. If you have a manual, the actual dBASE code is pretty easy to get the hang of though, especially if you already know programming.)

Pascal is a great language and it is fast

Queeg-500 lol

You do know that the structure of a program is down to the programmer and not the language. A BASIC program can be as structured as any other. The big problem was that may programs written in BASIC have been written by people that have never learned structured programming. I program in C, PASCAL and BASIC and they all seem very much the same but maybe that is because of the way I code. I find looking unknown PASCAL code just as confusing as looking unknown BASIC code. Lets take a very simple counting program. PASCAL First program forLoop; var a: integer; begin for a := 10 to 20 do begin writeln('value of a: ', a); end; end. From a BASIC programers view point: Why do we need the key words "do", "begin" they seem superfluous. Now the same in BASIC For a=10 to 20 Print "value of a: ",a Next a The only thing we don't know about is if "a" is a integer or not. How ever we can just say the default type in integer. Now if we add the superfluous key words to the BASIC program we get: For a=10 to 20 do begin print "value of a: ",a Next a end Or adding even more superfluous lines begin for a = 10 to 20 do begin print "value of a: ", a next a end end Or we could remove the superfluous key words from PASCAL var a: integer; for a := 10 to 20 writeln('value of a: ', a); end; end.

I can't hear what you're saying because of the bloody awful 'music' blasting away.