In high school in 1980 we had Commodore PETs. They had no tangible OS, just a BASIC interpreter in ROM. There was an easter egg that made it say Microsoft or wasn't it spelled MicroSoft? Either way a company nobody had ever heard of.
CP/M had the aura of being something for real pros. Read some journal articles and it looked really complicated. But without suitable hardware I had never any chance to touch it.
In 1983 I went to university where beginner courses happened on VAX/VMS and my definition of "pro" got shifted.
The early microcomputer OSes were little more than program loaders and only came into play if you had a disk drive. Even MS DOS was not much more than a program loader for most of its existence. It was a little jarring when making the transition from a TRS-80 or Apple ][ or Commodore computer to something running MS-DOS or CP/M that you could no longer just type 10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD!" to start writing a program.
I inherited one of these from a friend in 2000. The ‘l’ key switch was broken. It (like most) were only booted into C64 mode and used for Batman and stuff. ‘L’ was broken because of ‘load’? I think that was the command. It’s been too long.
I passed it on, but wish I didn’t. At this point, I probably could have replaced the switch.
With its separate number pad, it looked really grown-up and professional compared to the 64, though. The 128D even more so, with its desktop box, built-in floppy drive and separate keyboard.
Yes I had that one. It was the worst decision of my life. Had I waited 6 months or so, the Amiga 500 would have launched. I got stuck on dead hardware and got hooked off from computers for several years.
If it is any consolation, I got started on the Radio Shack Color Computer ecosystem, with the original version the the CoCo3. Back then, there was quite a bit of debate by the mid 1980's about the longevity of 8/16-bit processors like the 6809 and the 6502 / 6510 series.
Addressing a maximum of 64KiB of memory back when 4KiB was expensive seemed fine. And due to cost, picking an 8-bit processor for a design in 1980 seemed sensible. But the ability to support up to 1MiB of RAM (eventually) on the 8086 series help insure the platform's longevity, in spite of the horrible segmented memory programming model.
Companies like Motorola weren't terribly interested in backwards compatibility, preferring instead to design completely new instruction sets (like the 68K family) for their 32-bit platforms.
Same here. Trying to type anything on that thing (especially copying the code out of magazines) was just horrible.
Edit: just remembered something that made it even worse than just the awful keys - all reserved words for BASIC were tokenized in some way where you had to use a control-key sequence to tell it PRINT, for instance, instead of being able to type P,R,I,N,T <enter>.
128 was a scam. It was a way for Commodore to get rid of unused sunk cost R&D (MOS 8563). Buyers were promised C64, but twice the number so must be 2x better, received C64 with another almost separate computer glued to its ass. Second graphic chip requiring expensive monitor, second CPU. As a bonus manufacturing C128D was more expensive than Amiga 500!
CP/M had the aura of being something for real pros. Read some journal articles and it looked really complicated. But without suitable hardware I had never any chance to touch it.
In 1983 I went to university where beginner courses happened on VAX/VMS and my definition of "pro" got shifted.