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> Paterson freely admits that he pulled out his CP/M reference manual and duplicated each of its API calls one by one. On the other other hand, and while it may not have reflected much originality or creative thinking, what he did was pretty clearly legal even by the standards of today.

And CP/M itself's command line interface closely matched that of DEC's earlier minicomputer operating system.

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Ancient history few people know. AutoCAD started life as a CP/M application. When you bought ACAD you had to buy an 8087 math co-processor card as well as a 512K RAM drive card.

I ran ACAD for many years on such a system using a DEC VT-100 terminal, an early magnetic tablet with a wired puck having a coil for pickup and a large CRT-based graphics monitor. Memory restrictions were such that you had to do things like unload modules from memory before plotting and write clever code in Lisp to use less memory while drafting. Cool stuff.

That's what I thought as I worked on RT11 on PDP 11's when I saw a CP/M system I was struck by the similarity

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