Wow - I did a lot of work with CP/M in the early 80s, but I'd never even heard of that variant. Yours may have been the only copy ever purchased :)
> It wasn't because they needed some accounting software that wasn't available for Unix.
Well, actually, it may well have been - there was a lot of accounting software (and other end user stuff such as word processors, databases and spreadsheets) written for CP/M, and back then not so much for Unix (which I was also working on at the time).
Yours may have been the only copy ever purchased :)
Hardly. It wasn't wildly popular, but it was widely available on early 68000 machines. It was easy to port, and you got a little bit of useful software along for the ride. In addition to various Motorola (VERSAbus) machines and the small guys like Sage and Stride, HP sold it for early HP 9000s. And it was available on the Tandy model 16.
You want really rare...there was a Zilog Z8000 version of CP/M. I think there was only 1 production machine it was released on (Olivetti M20).
Thinking more about it, I'm not actually sure it was CP/M-68K. I remember hearing something about before building the 68k workstations they built a couple test units with x86 motherboards to test out the proposed workstation form factor.
Accounting may have ended up with one of those, in which case it would have been plain old CP/M-86.
How much accounting software was there for CP/M-86 or CP/M-68K?
CP/M-80 was a popular platform for business software in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but CP/M-80 software wouldn't run on CP/M-86 or CP/M-68K due to the different CPU architecture. A lot of this software was written in assembler (for performance), which meant that porting to another CPU architecture was closer to a rewrite than just a recompile. (There were tools to convert 8080 assembly source to 8086, although I don't how well they worked.)
I was under the impression that most CP/M-80 business software vendors moved to the IBM PC and PC-DOS/MS-DOS as their target platform, and not very many of them ported their software to CP/M-86 or CP/M-86K. (I could be wrong about that–this was all happening when I was a baby.)
IIRC, its propietary OS, SIM/M, was apparently a CP/M clone, later retronamed CP/M-80. Both dBase ii and iii ran on this fantastic small business machine.
Wow - I did a lot of work with CP/M in the early 80s, but I'd never even heard of that variant. Yours may have been the only copy ever purchased :)
> It wasn't because they needed some accounting software that wasn't available for Unix.
Well, actually, it may well have been - there was a lot of accounting software (and other end user stuff such as word processors, databases and spreadsheets) written for CP/M, and back then not so much for Unix (which I was also working on at the time).