CP/M On An Eight Line Display

How many lines do you need on a CP/M terminal? More is usually better, of course, but the MicroOffice RoadRunner managed with an 8-row, 80-column LCD screen. That may sound anemic, but in 1983, it …

Z80s From The ’80s Had Futuristic Design

Ever heard of a Dutch company called Holborn (literally, born in Holland)? We hadn’t either, but [Bryan Lunduke] showed us these computers from the early 1980s, and we wondered if they might …

Obfuscated C 8080 Emulator Ported

[Oscar] is no stranger to writing hard-to-read C code. While most of us do that by accident, there are those who strive to write the most unreadable code and enter it in the IOCCC — the Inter…

Linux Fu: Forward To The Past!

Ok, so the title isn’t as catchy as “Back to the Future,” but my guess is a lot of people who are advanced Linux users have — at least — a slight interest in retrocomp…

Bill, Steve, And Gary… Computer Pioneers

If you ask your neighbor who Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is, they’d probably know. But mention Gary Kildall, and you are likely to get a blank stare unless you live next door to another Hackaday…

An Odd Home Computer From The 1980s

If you were around when the Altair 8800 was king, you might remember the name Cromemco. They were an early vendor of add-ons for the Altair, along with companies like Godbout and Morrow. The compan…

An Easy Z80 And VGA Upgrade For The Apple II

The Apple II was at the forefront of the home computer revolution when it came out in 1977. In its era, nobody really cared about hooking up the Apple II to a VGA monitor, but these days, it’…

CP/M Porting In A Few Hours

If you’ve ever wanted to watch someone bring CP/M up on a new system and you have a couple of hours to spare, check out the recorded live stream of [Poking Technology]. The system in question…

CP/M 6502-Style

There are projects you create to share with the world, but there are also those you do just because you want something for yourself. Lucky for us, [Dietrich-L]’s 30-year-long project to creat…

Is This The Smallest CP/M Machine Ever?

If you had an office word processor in the late 1970s, the chances are it ran Digital Research’s CP/M operating system. IBM went for Microsoft in the 1980s and the once-dominant player fell o…

Modular Z80 Really Racks Up The Retrocomputer Cred

Very few retrocomputing projects are anything other than a labor of love. There’s really no practical reason to build a computer that is woefully inadequate for just about any task compared t…

CP/M Is Now Freer Than It Was

It’s easy to think of the earlier history of desktop computing operating systems in terms of DOS, Windows, and Mac OS with maybe a bit of AmigaOS, TOS, or RiscOS thrown in. But the daddy of d…

Retro Serial Terminal Uses Modern Chips To Get CP/M Machine Talking

The hobbyists of the early days of the home computer era worked wonders with the comparatively primitive chips of the day, and what couldn’t be accomplished with a Z80 or a 6502 was often rel…

CRISS CP/M Provides Modern Hardware For A Classic OS

Today you might choose run Windows, Linux, MacOS or some other OS on your computer. Back in the 1980s however, you generally had little choice: a certain home computer came with a certain OS, and t…

Translate Your CP/M Code To 8086, And Leave The 1970s Behind!

“Bring our home computing out of the 1970s and into the 1980s and beyond” is the irresistible promise made by the creator of 8088ify, a piece of software which translates CP/M executabl…

Apple Gets CP/M

In case you wanted to run WordStar on your Mac, [Tom Harte] offers CP/M for OS/X, and it looks like it would be a lot of fun. Of course you might be happier running Zork or Turbo Pascal, and you ca…