cj7hawk
Veteran Member
Just wondering around some of the issues of the era and realized the simple explanation of DOS replacing CP/M probably is far from the whole story...
After all, if you ignore the 86 versions of CP/M, there was no DOS on z80 machines, so it's more of a 86 killed z80 type battle than a simple DOS vs CP/M battle.
It's easy to understand what happened after DOS became dominant, but CP/M and z80 were well established. There's no question the 8088 was pushing a new architecture, but it wasn't any faster than many z80 machines of the era, and it's competitor was the 8MHz z80, but the battle between the two architectures never really eventuated. z80 based systems were already on the decline by the mid 80s while the 86 architectures were slowly climbing despite not really being that far above the z80 systems and without all of the legacy business software support.
So what were the main factors in driving the PCs dominance over z80 systems? Is it as simple to say "It was IBM"? Was it cheaper? Was it the promise of upgrades to 286 and backwardly compatible architectures? Did they just look cooler? Was z80 still associated with 64K machines ( even though later z80 machines came out with memory similar to the IBM PCs )
I'm curious as to what the thinking of others during the era was... What really killed z80 based CP/M machines.
As for my own thinking, I know there was an assumption that the 86 architecture was new, and the z80 architecture was old.... But then I also considered z80 to be a "Home PC" processor since that's where I encountered it. It was seeing Microsoft Flight Simulator for the first time that I decided that the PC was the way to go for the future, and the modularity of the systems seems the final clincher to me, since I knew I could upgrade later, and sure enough, in 87 my first machine was a 286 - by which point the speed difference and commonality of the disk systems was just too much to look at anything else on the market and by this time, there were no modern z80 machines... What did exist were a lot of old 64K machines from the previous micro-era that people were moving away from. My thinking was flawed of course - there wasn't such a big power difference between the models at the time and it really was an era of word processors and business software for most people.
So what else was going on that I completely ignored at the time?
After all, if you ignore the 86 versions of CP/M, there was no DOS on z80 machines, so it's more of a 86 killed z80 type battle than a simple DOS vs CP/M battle.
It's easy to understand what happened after DOS became dominant, but CP/M and z80 were well established. There's no question the 8088 was pushing a new architecture, but it wasn't any faster than many z80 machines of the era, and it's competitor was the 8MHz z80, but the battle between the two architectures never really eventuated. z80 based systems were already on the decline by the mid 80s while the 86 architectures were slowly climbing despite not really being that far above the z80 systems and without all of the legacy business software support.
So what were the main factors in driving the PCs dominance over z80 systems? Is it as simple to say "It was IBM"? Was it cheaper? Was it the promise of upgrades to 286 and backwardly compatible architectures? Did they just look cooler? Was z80 still associated with 64K machines ( even though later z80 machines came out with memory similar to the IBM PCs )
I'm curious as to what the thinking of others during the era was... What really killed z80 based CP/M machines.
As for my own thinking, I know there was an assumption that the 86 architecture was new, and the z80 architecture was old.... But then I also considered z80 to be a "Home PC" processor since that's where I encountered it. It was seeing Microsoft Flight Simulator for the first time that I decided that the PC was the way to go for the future, and the modularity of the systems seems the final clincher to me, since I knew I could upgrade later, and sure enough, in 87 my first machine was a 286 - by which point the speed difference and commonality of the disk systems was just too much to look at anything else on the market and by this time, there were no modern z80 machines... What did exist were a lot of old 64K machines from the previous micro-era that people were moving away from. My thinking was flawed of course - there wasn't such a big power difference between the models at the time and it really was an era of word processors and business software for most people.
So what else was going on that I completely ignored at the time?