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Some of the products mention on that piece were true operating systems.

MP/M and its derivatives (MP/M-86, CCPM, CDOS) were all multitasking, multi-threading, multi-user, multi-terminal/console real time preemptive OSs. The bank switching versions also had a form of memory protection.

CDOS-68k, CDOS-286 and the subsequent renamed to FlexOS products also had those capabilities, but with inherent memory protection.

So it is only really the basic CP/M-86 product (lacking the MP/M bits) which was the simple program loader.

In many ways the FlexOS product are sort of inspired from the DEC minicomputer RSX-11m OS; and the MP/M derivatives look like they were inspired by DEC RSX-11d (and hence RSX-15).




I was an MP/M 2 user (Altos) for a while. It was a great system for a small workgroup, supporting a handful of (Volker Craig) Terminals. VT-52 clones IIRC.


Fair enough. I suppose that hardware resource constraints were sufficiently tight at the time that the "mass market" wouldn't have thanked you for something that might have cost twice as much (at a time when micros were already quite expensive relative to today).




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