CP/M Alive and Well!!

Brings me back to the days of my Osborne-One (Z-80 CPU) and Wordstar for CP/M.
 
And SuperStar which I think was the spreadsheet equivalent is said to have brought the PC to the business world out of the typing pools.
 
It has been so long that I don't recall, but there WAS a spreadsheet and there was also a version of BASIC that wasn't terribly bad. I liked Wordstar enough that when I moved to a "real" PC I got Wordstar for DOS and later, for Windows. Wife and I used it to make our own wedding invitations. As I recall, it was a $10 Wordstar disk, a $10 Fonts disk, and a $10 graphics and images disk plus my HP Laserjet and a long-arm stapler. I already had the printer and stapler so it cost us $30 plus about half a pack of paper for everything else. We DID hire a printer for the formal invitations, but we did our own program and order of the service. Plus the maps we included in the invitations. Wife and I had a discussion about Wordstar vs. Word Perfect, but I didn't have WP at all on my PC and she didn't have WP/Windows on her system. Considering how well it turned out, she didn't complain that much. The software packages back then were quite capable if occasionally clunky.
 
CP/M was way better than MS-DOS. A sound operating system that wasn't issued when it was still full of bugs.
MP/M was a true multi-user operating system and there was a graphics version. All way before Microsoft.
Wasn't it Bill Gates that said "why would someone want to do two things at once" when staff were pushing for something to match Apple?
By fair means or foul the money won in the end. By the time Microsoft started charging for updates they had killed it off.

The MS-DOS manual.
One of the highest selling books in the World at the time, that was never actually read by more than a handful of people.
 
CP/M and WordStar helped me start my amateur writing hobby. My first novel was started on my Osborne-I (CP/M) and WordStar. And that was upgraded once I got a PC and a compatible WordStar. Eventually the novels went from WordStar to WordPerfect and then to MS-Word - where they are today.
 
I wrote my Masters thesis on Wordstar on DRDOS (CP/M 3 by any other name fo 8088
8086 systems). CP/M had a full screen editor when MSDOS only had Edlin!
 
Nostalgia.
Ain't what it used to be.

Real Nostalgia!!

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