CP/M-86 - weak marketing from Digital Research and also IBM

A 16-Bit variant of CP/M-80, not really a success story...

In 1978, Intel launched a 16-bit CPU with similarities to the former published 8080/8085 CPUs. One year later the 8088 was published, it was the low-cost 8-bit data bus version, which was used for the first IBM PC also. The first version of CP/M-86, 1.0, was published in 1982, but version 1.1 supported hard disks far too late in 1983. Also, CP/M-86 was sold too expensive, compared to the first PC-DOS versions (which were derived from 86-DOS, made from Seattle Computers Products, sold to Microsoft).

CP/M-86 supported originally no 1.44 MB disk format, so it's a bit complicated to run it on modern PC's.
But it's possible to run it on an IBM Thinkpad T23 for example:

Or even in a VMWare/VirtualBox environment with Windows 7 64-bit !
Also, exchanging single files could be an adventure.
I managed both, see my blog entries here and here.

If you're looking for CP/M-86 itself and some applications, try retroarchive.org's files or Gaby's invaluable archive of files.

For utilities take a look at nostalgia8.nl's mirror of "The Klaw" or z80cpu.eu's mirror of it first (mirrored the originally pages of Kirk Lawrence, which were found at http://www.seanet.com/~klaw/ , but they didn't exist anymore).

This page will be redesigned to contain the information in the mentioned blog entries for easier access in general.

Any software here is only offered for educational purposes and for historical reason. It's barely done for fun, and pure non-commercial.