Re: early dates for CP/M

Steve wrote that Kildall's floppy drive and possibly controller
were...

Purportedly, a year on the shelf. Here, it sure sounds like the CP/M
filesystem had been done, tested on the simulator, awaiting proof on
the hardware, in 1973, by fall, likely.


Allison says:

Well the landmark moment is the fall of 73 was first
silicon (die) for 8080 so anything real was after that.

Running a sim before that was likely and a file system
is just a database and could be simulated back then.

As noted building the first FDC was not trivial as there
are complex timing and encoding issues to face and
the 1771 was not there to help.

1) Kildall had the advantage of working with and at Intel,
and had the specs for the 8080 before anyone else. Other
sources (Faggin's remarks at http://www.intel4004.com/)
suggest 8080 development started before 1973.

But Kildall dates his look at 8080 development silicon at "1973"
in his 1980 DDJ article. If someone wants to cite specific
sources for WHEN Intel had preliminary silicon for the
8080, I'd be glad to add them to my site. Be specific.

I can try to date some of Intel's products written by Kildall,
or related products like ISIS. Dates and references will be
on my Web pages. I welcome specific references to
specific dates.

2) My account for various early floppy controllers is at:

http://www.retrotechnology.com/dri/first_floppy.html

and an account of Torode's floppy controller PRODUCTS,
largely based on technical work by several comp.os.cpm
contributors, is on this Web page:

http://www.retrotechnology.com/dri/torode_designs.html

3) I'm working on my CP/M Web pages to reflect discussion
and sources provided. Thanks to Steve for providing some
documents to me recently. All of this is a lot of work which
I cannot do in a short time. I'll post briefs as results are on my
Web site.

Herb Johnson
retrotechnology.com
.