Experimental Archaeology: the MP/M-80 Operating System
Track two is in Jupiter Original
An archaeological look at an abandoned 8-bit operating system: Digital Research’s MP/M, for the Intel 8080 8-bit microcontroller. MP/M provided preemptive multitasking, multiple consoles, daemons, inter-process messaging, and file sharing, field proven after its third release in 1982, 13 years before these features were available in Windows 95(*).
I will show MP/M II 2.1 running on my Friendly fZ80 standalone computer (emulated Z80 CPU, 220K RAM, fixed and removable drives, USB keyboard, multi-window VGA display, powered by Teensy 4.1) and I am tuning MP/M features, writing missing tools, developing workflows, a small fraction of what needs to be done. All work is done natively on the machine.
This lets us ask, in an experimental, archaeological way: How might one have used a multi-programming system in 1982? [MULTI TERMINAL VS SINGLE USER] What were then expectations of MP/M? What was Digital Research’s intent for MP/M? What problems does it solve, and which new issues does it raise? What’s good about it? What sucks (beyond the obvious)? How does this affect what we can, and should, demand from our computing systems today?
In the presentation and discussion, I’ll demonstrate my use of MP/M as a “daily driver” environment, as I use it for writing some of the tools and techniques MP/M never received; how the workflow compares to modern expectations; an example of DR’s frugal and succinct design to task resource-busy management; how one can talk to (some) daemons through a command line; inter-task messaging and queues.
About the Speaker
Thomas Jennings is an artist, technician, punk and programmer. Notable past works include HOMOCORE zine, Fido BBS and FidoNet.
