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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> so would have had a bigger software library available to it.

The SMC-70 could run CP/M software. CP/M was the MS-DOS of its time.

The video covers how CP/Ms big problem was that the disk formats weren't the same between machines, doubly true for this Sony which used new 3.5" disks. So all the existing CP/M software had to be specifically re-released for this machine, which caused a chicken and egg problem (who is going to release software for a machine nobody is buying because there is no software for it)

The MS-DOS world solved the problem by everyone just cloning the IBM hardware down to the disk format.

This is, indeed, an issue. IIRC, the only interchangeable disk format with CP/M was with 8 inch media.

Unless the disks had copy protection, you could copy them over a serial link. I did that a lot between my Apple II and other CP/M machines.

That's true but all the cool SMC-70 features, like the graphics modes, were custom to it.

CP/M programs written for other machines couldn't really make use of any of that unless they were rewritten specifically for the SMC-70.

If you just wanted the CP/M text compatibility and not the extended features you could buy a machine capable of that for much, much less.

As Kalleboo points out, if you wanted to buy off the shelf CP/M software you'd probably have to buy an external 5 1/4" disk drive too.

Digital Research had GSX, which provided a rich set of graphics primitives. Sony would need to offer a device driver or, alternatively, make the console/terminal emulate a graphics terminal such as the DEC VT-240 (and GSX would use a Tek4014 or ReGIS backend).

A lot of CP/M machines had graphics-capable built-in displays. Unfortunately, publishing software in machine-native media was a real chore back then, a bit like in the 1990's, where we had a "Unix version of NetScape" which was actually 27 slightly different versions for 27 different operating systems and binary architectures.

Some would argue MS-DOS was the CP/M of its time. >smile<

At least it had the FCB, some interrupts and COM executable format from CP/M. :)

Kind of, because while MS-DOS was compatible between PCs, CP/M depended pretty much on what 8 bit machine you had, and like UNIX required compilation from source for proper compatibility.

FTL Modula-2 for example, had several low level portability modules depending on which CP/M machine you were actually using.

MS-DOS was “mostly” compatible across different machines but there were non-PC MS-DOS machines with different disk controllers and media recording formats, giving them better capacity or performance. Only machines that followed the IBM PC recording formats would be media-interchangeable.

Since the PC used off-the-shelf components, it was tempting to be compatible, but some cursed machines tried to be different.

I’m not sure how compatible are floppies from the Victor 9000 or Epson QX-10, but I know the Sanyo 550 (?) and the Mindset, which were not quite PC-compatibles could interchange media with a PC.

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