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◈ALB Atlas

CP/M Dead

CP/M
KindOperating system
Appeared1974
Ended1983
StatusDead
CreatorGary Kildall / Digital Research
FamilyCP/M
Platform8080/Z80

The first microcomputer OS that mattered — Kildall's BDOS made software portable across 8-bit machines; MS-DOS inherited its calls and its market.

Succeeded by MS-DOS
Ran on IMSAI 8080
Descendants MS-DOS Atari TOS

Gary Kildall wrote CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) in 1974 — the first hardware-independent microcomputer OS, with the BIOS abstraction that let one OS run on every 8080/Z80 box. By 1981 it ran on 200,000 machines across 200 vendors.\n\nIts API (BDOS calls, file control blocks, drive letters A:) is the ancestor of MS-DOS — QDOS was essentially a CP/M clone for the 8086. DR-DOS continued the line; FreeDOS still runs it.