Why did DOS/86 overtake CP/M-z80 ?

[cj7hawk]

Your points are well taken. The Sinclair which was released here in the US was known as a Timex. It was boon to hobbyist at under 100 USD but needed a TV monitor and adapter. Perfect for the youngsters, but a stretch for serious users. The Tandy Model 1, Model II, Models III & 4 all used a form of the Z80. Although the 5 million or so European Sinclair units used the Z80, it seems to have eventually to have seen a dead end.

Absolutely. Though I think bringing it to the US was a mistake - Sinclair's name was barely known in the US, and there was no shortage of local supply of computers and by the time it appeared in the US, the price was the only thing going for it. That the Russian and Japanese example persisted for another *decade* though is remarkable and still indicates what a world without IBM might have looked like.

Though while the computers at the low end were not really suited to anything of note, they did have the unique position of being affordable to children, which is the only reason I think consoles have survived to this day. Children not only become attached to their computers, but learn to program and operate them and take on an affinity to their brand. I think this explains why some z80 machines persisted towards the end of the 1990's. A good corporate policy should be to engage childred while they are young, then keep supplying them a better product when they become adults... Like the Tobacco industry does exhibits so well. This would have played a key part of Apple's success.

It's also one reason why I think Sinclair ( and *not* Amstrad ) could have progressed the z80 through more iterations and exhibited the same outcome as the Japanese and Eastern Europeans achieved, though mainly in the UK and parts of Western Europe. And perhaps also the colonies.

There was no advancement and boils down to a "shoulda, woulda, coulda" scenario for Zilog. Motorola, a huge conglomerate in its own right, couldn't sustain the pressure from Intel and AMD in the PC world, and their somewhat slow chips wound up mostly in washing machines and the like. So, I'm not dishing on Zilog - it's just a matter of the level of technology and sales performance that one brings to the table. The US made Tucker automobile from the late 1940s is a good example; he, Tucker, had the product that could potentially rock the entire US auto industry but not the wherewithal to become a viable factor against big business.

Don't hold back, Dish on Zilog. It's deserved -

 

[cj7hawk]

The cause of Zilog's success was Intel's penchant for not improving the current chip design because of the promise of the chip of the future even before the future chip existed. Intel kept repeating that mistake every few years though mostly for AMD's benefit.

And then they went and made some other big mistakes like the 860 and 960.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Spectrums sold in the Millions and there was a world where the PC never took root.

Pet rocks also sold in the millions, but that doesn’t mean they matter a whole lot today.

Eastern Europe was big into overgrown Spectrum pseudo-clones mostly because it’s what they could have, not because 1MB Z80 systems are a very good idea. Until the fall of the Soviet Union (and a while afterwards) “good” western technology was hard to import behind the iron curtain and too expensive for anyone to afford even if they could lay hands on it. Obsolete platforms that *could* be legally imported (or reproduced domestically by the relatively crude manufacturing facilities available in places like East Germany) were mostly superior to homegrown soviet garbage (which themselves were usually knockoffs of even more obsolete western hardware) and generally *much* cheaper, so that’s what people bought and made the best of. Pretending this junk was in any way in “competition“ with systems based on the more advanced 16 and 32 bit CPUs being churned out in the West is just silly.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

… I mean, are we arguing here that there’s some amazing untapped potential that was foolishly ignored by the West in Commodore’s failed “TED” computers (C16 and Plus/4) because they happened to find a ton of happy owners in Hungary, where Commodore dumped a huge number of them for pennies on the dollar after they couldn’t sell them anywhere else? I mean, sure, maybe it’s possible that late 1980’s Hungarians knew something the rest of us didn’t… or it could just be that any computer is better than no computer.

 

[Agent Orange]

cj7hawk said:

"Children not only become attached to their computers, but learn to program and operate them and take on an affinity to their brand".

A story from the 80's: I gave my youngest son, who was about 14 or so at the time, a bedside clock radio with a 5" black and white TV screen for Christmas. Unbeknownst to me, and at the time, he received a Commodore 64 from his mother. He figured out how to connect the two and had some book with early BASIC games. A 5 inch screen isn't very big and you really have to squint to distinguish those characters. But there he'd be, hour after hour, plugging away at the thing and getting great satisfaction when he finally cleared all of the syntax errors and the program actually ran. He moved on in later years to an Amiga and wound up doing some graphics for a local TV station. And so it started. Today he's a sucessfull IT type and can't even find time to play Solitaire. Score 1 for Commadore.

 

[cj7hawk]

Pet rocks also sold in the millions, but that doesn’t mean they matter a whole lot today.

Eastern Europe was big into overgrown Spectrum pseudo-clones mostly because it’s what they could have, not because 1MB Z80 systems are a very good idea. Until the fall of the Soviet Union (and a while afterwards) “good” western technology was hard to import behind the iron curtain and too expensive for anyone to afford even if they could lay hands on it. Obsolete platforms that *could* be legally imported (or reproduced domestically by the relatively crude manufacturing facilities available in places like East Germany) were mostly superior to homegrown soviet garbage (which themselves were usually knockoffs of even more obsolete western hardware) and generally *much* cheaper, so that’s what people bought and made the best of. Pretending this junk was in any way in “competition“ with systems based on the more advanced 16 and 32 bit CPUs being churned out in the West is just silly.

Systems did progress in Japan and Russia - just not in alignment with the PC... And no one said anything about those systems being "superior" but they definitely took them places that they never went in the US/UK. Consoles are arguably inferior to the PC also, but they survived, mainly I think because kids ended up buying them and took their feeling into adulthood.

Likewise, Apple make pretty crappy machines and phones. They are way less reliable than most of the better PC/Phone manufacturers, cost more to buy and are far less capable when compared to equivalent android/PC machines, but their legion of fans will have you believe they are the most amazing machines ever to grace the face of the Earth! Apple held on, not because it was amazing or advanced, but because Apple customers were brought up on Apple and they often convert others to their beliefs in a very cultish way. It's a highly effective way to make and market something if you're in the position to do so.

Remember these ads;

They make *some* impact but I suspect they are more effective on existing Android customers than they are on iPhone customers.

Spectrum owners wanted the Super Spectrum, but it never came. Many waited for the SAM, but that was too little too late. And Amstrad intentionally fretted away the name advantage of the company they had bought out so as not to interfere with their existing marketting strategy ( Amstrad too went from the CPC to the PCWs and they too lasted remarkably long, and even started going the way of the GUI under CP/M and were perhaps the closest to a Super CP/M system. ).

I suspect there was a whole legion of CP/M holdovers also, who stuck it out well into the Pentium era with text only displays...

Same with the Commodore... People grew up on the 64/+4 and I would hazard a guess many of them naturally migrated to the Amiga, but then the Amiga dead-ended. Same with the Atari.

But there was no "Super-CP/M" machine at all in the US - It was a pretty abrupt ending...

 

[cj7hawk]

Score 1 for Commadore.

I didn't see this until I posted... I think this was a huge moment...

It was when I was still a kid that I got my PC clone... Like most Ex-Spectrum owners, it made even more sense to me than the Amiga/Atari of the era. I enjoyed being the underdog with the Spectrum ( Australian's have a funny relationship with the underdog... We actually like and celebrate and encourage them to an unusual degree ) but didn't want to be the underdog with my next choice. Ever. The PC felt like it was the top dog and would stay that way for at least a few years. A lot of Sinclair Spectrum users went straight to the PC, while I think the QL users favoured the Macs.

By this time, I was making hardware for the PC and it did everything I wanted. It had slots and I could work with it. And coming from the Sinclair side of things, I knew what non-standard peripheral approaches looked and felt like.

The PC wasn't all that technically advanced compared to the alternatives, but it felt like it was going to last and I started with a 12MHz 286 back in 1987... In 1990 I moved up to a 486SX with Trident 8900 SVGA. By this time, 1024x768 blew away anything else out there in the range, and VGA games were *good*... Really good.

Did I mind that it wasn't an IBM? No. Did I mind that it didn't have a Tseng Labs VGA card? No. Remember what I said about Aussies celebrating the underdog? I took pride in it being a second-rate PC, because it was still a PC, and there was no way I was going to buy those others brands or parts... Mainly because I couldn't afford them, which tells you something about why many Aussies root for the underdog.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Systems did progress in Japan and Russia - just not in alignment with the PC... And no one said anything about those systems being "superior" but they definitely took them places that they never went in the US/UK.

I mentioned before why Japanese 8-bit computers often seem so fancy compared to Western machines, and it’s almost entirely because of the actual *need* for decent graphics modes to properly display the language. Also, Japanese business computers mostly migrated to 16 bit around the same time as the US; the first PC-98 machine came out only a year after the 5150 and the market for “serious” computers in Japan was solidly locked into MS-DOS by 1984. MSX was a cross between an educational toy and a game console, just like the Commodore 64 effectively was for the second half of its life; I mean, no shade here, the world needs educational toys and game consoles, but effectively there’s no case here to be made here about the Z80 being a legit alternative to newer things in Japan: it wasn’t and they were well aware of it.

(The first NEC PC-9800 was explicitly designed to allow an owner of a Z80-based PC-8800 to throw his old machine out a window and use their existing peripherals on the new machine. They kept making PC-8800 series for years afterwards, but nobody pretended they were targeting the same markets after that.)

 

[Agent Orange]

I didn't see this until I posted... I think this was a huge moment...

It was when I was still a kid that I got my PC clone... Like most Ex-Spectrum owners, it made even more sense to me than the Amiga/Atari of the era. I enjoyed being the underdog with the Spectrum ( Australian's have a funny relationship with the underdog... We actually like and celebrate and encourage them to an unusual degree ) but didn't want to be the underdog with my next choice. Ever. The PC felt like it was the top dog and would stay that way for at least a few years. A lot of Sinclair Spectrum users went straight to the PC, while I think the QL users favoured the Macs.

By this time, I was making hardware for the PC and it did everything I wanted. It had slots and I could work with it. And coming from the Sinclair side of things, I knew what non-standard peripheral approaches looked and felt like.

The PC wasn't all that technically advanced compared to the alternatives, but it felt like it was going to last and I started with a 12MHz 286 back in 1987... In 1990 I moved up to a 486SX with Trident 8900 SVGA. By this time, 1024x768 blew away anything else out there in the range, and VGA games were *good*... Really good.

Did I mind that it wasn't an IBM? No. Did I mind that it didn't have a Tseng Labs VGA card? No. Remember what I said about Aussies celebrating the underdog? I took pride in it being a second-rate PC, because it was still a PC, and there was no way I was going to buy those others brands or parts... Mainly because I couldn't afford them, which tells you something about why many Aussies root for the underdog.

Well, not too many of us over here could afford the IBM for home use. Back in the day people were kludging together PCs and selling them out the the trunks of their cars and software piracy almost seemed legal. Other than some early Tandy's, I mostly built my own stuff from cheap components. It's only been in the last few years that I've been going for the top end stuff and I've succeeded in some real nice gaming machines that no one but me sees or appreciates, least of all my wife. I don't care because I build them for me and I'm like the guy who wraps those fancy casting flies and chuckles about the big ones he's going catch. I was bitten by the bug long ago and I just can't seem to get enough of it.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Apple held on, not because it was amazing or advanced, but because Apple customers were brought up on Apple and they often convert others to their beliefs in a very cultish way.

1. The Apple II was pretty “advanced” for 1977, and while it was thoroughly outmoded in a lot of specifics by the early-mid-1980’s it was still technically capable of doing most of what was expected from a home computer as late as 1987 or so. (And longer for niches like education.) There are legit reasons the platform had the longevity it did.
2. Apple also knew when to quit and moved to the Macintosh at about the right time. Talk whatever smack you want about it, but it stands alone as the last non-Wintel mass-market platform to survive from the first decade of personal computers today. So clearly they must be doing something right.
3. Apple fans may be “cult-ish” in some respects, but see point 2: cult tech products don’t achieve this level of success (around 7% of the PC market, 17-20% of smartphones worldwide) unless they can compete from a technical standpoint. I have “opinions” about Apple and their products, just like I do about a lot of other things, but you’re lying to yourself if you are actually trying to claim that their products are objectively worse on every level (and for every user) than the alternative. It’s not a defensible position.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Has anyone forgotten that Zilog was purchased by Exxon at exactly the wrong time--1980? The oil company, still flush with profits from the OPEC embargo spent lots of cash buying various outfits and running them down. Zilog was saved only by an employee buyback in 1989.

 

[cj7hawk]

I mentioned before why Japanese 8-bit computers often seem so fancy compared to Western machines, and it’s almost entirely because of the actual *need* for decent graphics modes to properly display the language. Also, Japanese business computers mostly migrated to 16 bit around the same time as the US; the first PC-98 machine came out only a year after the 5150 and the market for “serious” computers in Japan was solidly locked into MS-DOS by 1984. MSX was a cross between an educational toy and a game console, just like the Commodore 64 effectively was for the second half of its life; I mean, no shade here, the world needs educational toys and game consoles, but effectively there’s no case here to be made here about the Z80 being a legit alternative to newer things in Japan: it wasn’t and they were well aware of it.

(The first NEC PC-9800 was explicitly designed to allow an owner of a Z80-based PC-8800 to throw his old machine out a window and use their existing peripherals on the new machine. They kept making PC-8800 series for years afterwards, but nobody pretended they were targeting the same markets after that.)

I think you've hit the point of my question there in your last sentence - The PC-8800 had a very specific demographic. The graphics were pretty good and it had a user based of customers and also a big base of developers - everything a PC needs to thrive. They tried making some games for other platforms that fell flat simply because the PC-88 was where people went to play those kinds of games. They didn't go to the PC-98 at all. As for business, well it took a longer to happen in Japan and the PC-88 did, as you note, hold on for quite a while after that, with new models coming out every year or so, faster speeds, higher floppy drive capacities, more graphics (eg, VGA equivalent modes ) and *much* better sound than the PC-98s had. Also the PC-98s didn't dominate the Japanese market until the 90's ( well, around 1990 ) and they too hung in there, a sort of non-PC '86 achitecture until Windows 95 came out... And by then, they didn't need a home-grown PC.

Even then, the Japanese didn't go throwing out old PC-88s and PC-98 if they were working as required. So even if the machines weren't being sold, they really did hang in there for a long time.

Sure, the PC replaced everything in time, almost everywhere, but there were the usual signs of resistance - ie, newer models of obsolete systems coming out. Hence, as per the start of the thread, I was curious as to why the PC and DOS just wiped out CP/M seemingly overnight in the US... No signs of resistance. No holding on to old systems. Just replaced. By the late 80's the PC was the games machine to have also - Firmly cemented by 1992 when ground-breaking games like Ultima Underworld established the PC as the new world. It wasn't even as technologically advanced as some of the 68000 based machines of the era, but it still managed to dominate them as VGA become more common.

 

[cj7hawk]

1. The Apple II was pretty “advanced” for 1977, and while it was thoroughly outmoded in a lot of specifics by the early-mid-1980’s it was still technically capable of doing most of what was expected from a home computer as late as 1987 or so. (And longer for niches like education.) There are legit reasons the platform had the longevity it did.
2. Apple also knew when to quit and moved to the Macintosh at about the right time. Talk whatever smack you want about it, but it stands alone as the last non-Wintel mass-market platform to survive from the first decade of personal computers today. So clearly they must be doing something right.
3. Apple fans may be “cult-ish” in some respects, but see point 2: cult tech products don’t achieve this level of success (around 7% of the PC market, 17-20% of smartphones worldwide) unless they can compete from a technical standpoint. I have “opinions” about Apple and their products, just like I do about a lot of other things, but you’re lying to yourself if you are actually trying to claim that their products are objectively worse on every level (and for every user) than the alternative. It’s not a defensible position.

OK, you got me there... I concede Point 1 & part of 2. I generalised and I shouldn't have. The early Apples were pretty amazing, and the first Mac also did head in a new direction and was fairly groundbreaking as OSs go, despite the simplicity of it's hardware ( or maybe because of it? ). My "Pretty Crappy" comment was a bit unfair, and reflects a personal dislike of apple and I should have chosen other words. However they are and have been for some time, subpar. They do however have a loyal cultish set of followers and they absolutely took advantage of that and surfed that wave right onto the beach. Their market share is pretty solid. I don't think that comes from anything other than taking advantage of their cultish following. I think that's exactly why they manage to keep their customer base - It's loyal. It wants a new iPhone/Mac. Commodore and Atari tried the same. They failed. Amstrad too. Even the brands in the PC arena failed. Apple did not. But I maintain their products are NOT at the top end of town where technology is concerned, nor has it been for a very long time.

I recently tried an Apple phone to learn more about them... I forgot my password. It took over a MONTH to get my password reset. Yes, it's a common problem. I think it drives a lot of iPhone users to Android.

I'll add an image to illustrate: Apples actual rates of failure ( older graph )


Right down in this 2020 one



And a satisfaction based one.



Right up at the top... So Apple users love their machines and think they are reliable even though they aren't that high in broad terms.
That's definitely customer satisfaction. Something Apple's managed to do since the Apple 1 launched. Had Apple ever started making PCs, I think that advantage would be lost.

 

[cj7hawk]

Has anyone forgotten that Zilog was purchased by Exxon at exactly the wrong time--1980? The oil company, still flush with profits from the OPEC embargo spent lots of cash buying various outfits and running them down. Zilog was saved only by an employee buyback in 1989.

It's hard to gauge what affect that had on the outcome... As has often been said, instead of the z8000 they should have build the z280 AND made it better and bug-free. But then, had that happened around 1980, maybe IBM would have selected the z280 for the PC and we might have gotten CP/M by default. How that would have panned out is anyone's guess.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Hence, as per the start of the thread, I was curious as to why the PC and DOS just wiped out CP/M seemingly overnight in the US... No signs of resistance. No holding on to old systems. Just replaced.

And the answer was simple: CP/M was never that popular in the US in the first place. Other 8-bit platforms vastly outsold it in the US from the day the first TRS-80 plopped out of Fort Worth right up until the last Apple IIe shipped to a kindergarten classroom somewhere.

And plenty of people held onto those 8 bit machines until the latter half of the 80’s, it’s not like suddenly everyone bought a PC the day they came out. The blunt fact is, though, that those machines were limited in the scope of things they could do, people wanted more, and it made way more sense for everyone involved to move to a more capable standard.

Also the PC-98s didn't dominate the Japanese market until the 90's

According to statistics from JEIDA unit sales of 16 bit computers exceeded 8 bit computers by mid-1985 in Japan. That is not a lot later than it happened in the US. The PC-98 platform wasn’t as dominant as the IBM PC clone was most other places, it fought it out with both imported and domestic PC clones and various other proprietary PC-like machines, but nonetheless according to the stats I’m looking at 8-bit computer sales were a quarter of 16 bit sales by 1987 and practically dead by 1990… just like the US. I’m not sure where you’re getting the info about the PC-8800 “thriving” into the 1990’s.

 

[cj7hawk]

According to statistics from JEIDA unit sales of 16 bit computers exceeded 8 bit computers by mid-1985 in Japan.

Do you know if they were x86 or a mix of 16 bit architectures?

I wasn't saying that the PC-88 was "thriving" in 1990 - I said that's when the PC-89 finally started to dominate the market ( across all other computers ) however even in the late 80s the PC-88 was the go-to place for certain types of games. A good run-down of the situation is here in this article: https://retronauts.com/article/342/gaming-computers-of-japan-the-nec-pc-8800-series

Also, the article alludes that the PC-88 held on well in the late 80s, which was remarkable.

Given a decade lifespan for the PC-88, a quick survey of the major games for the PC-88 suggests that around 10% of all of it's major game releases were in 1989 ( followed by around 4% in 1990, and just a few percent in 91/92 and none after that )so it definitely hung on to the end of the decade as a dominant player... After that, the PC-98 would have taken over, but given that both were released at roughly the same time, that's quite remarkable. Also the PC-98s would have been significantly more powerful by 1990 than the PC-88s, which were never designed for games...

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Also, the article alludes that the PC-88 held on well in the late 80s, which was remarkable.

New games were being released for the Commodore 64 into the 1990’s by major companies like Broderbund and Activision, so I’m not sure why you think this is at all significant. The Apple II was also still getting plenty of new games and educational releases; software doesn’t just stop being made for computers that have installed bases still willing to make it worth your time to churn out programs.

I mean, let’s get real: even fairly epic games for 8-bit platforms usually only amount to ”dozens” to “hundreds” of man hours of work for a skilled programmer, less if there are assets that can be ported from another version. The PC-88 scene described in that article could easily have been supported by a few thousand motivated customers; it outright says these games were the products of small teams of just a couple people. I don’t get why you think this is good evidence to support your thesis that there was some huge untapped well of technical viability in these machines because… games exist.

 

[cj7hawk]

New games were being released for the Commodore 64 into the 1990’s by major companies like Broderbund and Activision, so I’m not sure why you think this is at all significant. The Apple II was also still getting plenty of new games and educational releases; software doesn’t just stop being made for computers that have installed bases still willing to make it worth your time to churn out programs.

I mean, let’s get real: even fairly epic games for 8-bit platforms usually only amount to ”dozens” to “hundreds” of man hours of work for a skilled programmer, less if there are assets that can be ported from another version. The PC-88 scene described in that article could easily have been supported by a few thousand motivated customers; it outright says these games were the products of small teams of just a couple people. I don’t get why you think this is good evidence to support your thesis that there was some huge untapped well of technical viability in these machines because… games exist.

Can you express the number of major releases for the C64 the 1990's as a percentage of all major releases for the C64? If it's a big number like 10%, I'll agree the C64 was still in it's prime. If it's a small number, say 5%, then I'd say it's still doing amazingly well for it's age. If it's around 1-2% then I think we can conclude that the C64 was in it's dying years. That's why I provided the releases as a percentage, not as an outlier. I'll accept ports in that figure also. Seeing the graph gives a good feeling for the platform's actual life.

New games are *still* being written every year for the Sinclair Spectrum, some of them pretty amazing, but I wouldn't say the Spectrum survived until 2024. ( Although I can't categorically state that any games were released in 2024 for the Spectrum yet ).

A lot of the games for the PC-88 were releases primarily for the PC-88 - not just ported games. It had a specific demographic and catered well to it. The Spectrum OTOH saw a lot of ports after 1985. I don't know about the C64.

I don't think the PC-88 coped particularly well with ported games. Perhaps this also drove the migration to the PC-98 around 1990. I can only go off of what I can read about the era.

 

[DeltaDon]

Toy systems such as the Model One or the Sinclair didn't have a chance against the IBM PC. Expensive S-100 systems such as my 6Mhz Z80/twin 8" DSDD floppy system plus a 1/4Meg MDISK ran circles around any early IBM PC, but that wasn't the issue. Tandy had their Model 2 and follow on systems, but priced them to the moon. IMHO, the lack of a standard disk format (or even diskette size) plus no std. video format more than anything killed off CP/M. If one could just stop at a local computer store and pick up software and drop it into a floppy drive and have it run on multiple brands of computers I think that would have extended CP/M's life by a few years.

The closest std. disk format, I'll guess, was the 8" IBM single sided format that Digital Research and others used. Or perhaps the Osborne format(s)? Even Tandy, at first, had different formats on their 5.25" systems depending upon what floppy OS or supplier created one for the Model One. Everyone was dependent on either the maker of their system or the software developer to supply software on a disk that would run on their system. Need some new program, please please Mr. Software company pleease provide it on the special format my machine runs. God Forbid it was a hard sector format! Price? Whatever the market would bear! Then spend an hour or two configuring your terminal's needs to match the functions of the program. Remember keyboard overlays? Then there was the issue so many times that if you had a friend with an Osborne running the same programs and you had a Epson QX-10 or a Morrow (or or or) you'd have no luck in reading each others diskettes. WTF would you do with an 8" beast brought home from work? So the answer often was transfer with a 300 BPS modem! Yikes!!! Tie up your phone line for hours too. Or upgrade to 1,200? Now just 30 minutes at long distance rates. Wow! Remember. often the next town was a long distance phone call back then!

Or switch to a PC and stop at the local computer shop and go home with a cheap as chips new software package. Let's face it, much more often just go to your friend's house and get a bootleg copy for free. Disks swapped back and forth and you could mail them for next to nothing too. Perhaps that's close to the real answer. Bootlegged software killed CP/M.

 

[cj7hawk]

Toy systems such as the Model One or the Sinclair didn't have a chance against the IBM PC. Expensive S-100 systems such as my 6Mhz Z80/twin 8" DSDD floppy system plus a 1/4Meg MDISK ran circles around any early IBM PC, but that wasn't the issue. Tandy had their Model 2 and follow on systems, but priced them to the moon. IMHO, the lack of a standard disk format (or even diskette size) plus no std. video format more than anything killed off CP/M. If one could just stop at a local computer store and pick up software and drop it into a floppy drive and have it run on multiple brands of computers I think that would have extended CP/M's life by a few years.

The closest std. disk format, I'll guess, was the 8" IBM single sided format that Digital Research and others used. Or perhaps the Osborne format(s)? Even Tandy, at first, had different formats on their 5.25" systems depending upon what floppy OS or supplier created one for the Model One. Everyone was dependent on either the maker of their system or the software developer to supply software on a disk that would run on their system. Need some new program, please please Mr. Software company pleease provide it on the special format my machine runs. God Forbid it was a hard sector format! Price? Whatever the market would bear! Then spend an hour or two configuring your terminal's needs to match the functions of the program. Remember keyboard overlays? Then there was the issue so many times that if you had a friend with an Osborne running the same programs and you had a Epson QX-10 or a Morrow (or or or) you'd have no luck in reading each others diskettes. WTF would you do with an 8" beast brought home from work? So the answer often was transfer with a 300 BPS modem! Yikes!!! Tie up your phone line for hours too. Or upgrade to 1,200? Now just 30 minutes at long distance rates. Wow! Remember. often the next town was a long distance phone call back then!

Or switch to a PC and stop at the local computer shop and go home with a cheap as chips new software package. Let's face it, much more often just go to your friend's house and get a bootleg copy for free. Disks swapped back and forth and you could mail them for next to nothing too. Perhaps that's close to the real answer. Bootlegged software killed CP/M.

Or to rephrase in the context you presented it, the ease of bootlegging PC software killed CP/M.

I agree with all of this - though I did store a lot of my Spectrum programs on the University Mainframe for a while, because the 2400 baud model I had was twice as fast as my tape recorder, and I just stripped some bits and stored it as ascii encoding 4 bits at a time... And I had something like 256K of storage, so I could get a few games I regularly played in there...

And piracy would have helped a *lot*... People still pirated CP/M stuff, but as you noted, the technical barrier reduced this to those with a suitable level of skill. PC piracy was much easier... And you get software on a preconfigured boot disk and it would boot and run and all you had to do was install it and restart the computer. Which expans the number of people who can copy dramatically. None of them would have bought software anyway, so no loss to Microsoft, and there's plenty to suggest Microsoft encouraged Piracy in the early days for this reason - because the big $$$ came from large corporations.

I think that's why Anime distribution companies tolerate and even encourage a little piracy - because it sets the appetite of those who don't and they go and buy it from the distributors... Kind of like how insects are necessary for agriculture in the right proportions.

Maybe the Pastafarians are actually on to something worshipping pirates?