Note: This article is about the system monitors for early microchip based desktop computers. This is part of series of articles about CP/M, the operating system.
Around 1974, when personal computing was very new, single chip microprocessors made it possible to build small, comparatively inexpensive computers. This lead to birth of several small start-up companies, which sold kits for home hobbyists who wanted to build their own computer. These kits typically contained a circuit board, a microprocessor, some memory chips,(this means, these kits "typically" did not contain video monitors), and some additional device controller chips. These additional chips were for controlling various input and output devices like paper tape, cassette tape, and floppy disk drives.
In early days, these computer systems had one to four kilobytes of memory, or sometimes even less. Application programs were written in machine language and/or assembly language.
Because of this lack of memory, there was typically no operating system. But, there was a small "monitor program" usually stored in a ROM (Read Only Memory), that would allow an application to do simple common tasks, such as:
- get character from keyboard device
- output character to a device such as teleprinter or printer
- save the contents to a cassette tape or a floppy disk
- restore contents from tape or floppy
The monitors did only such basic tasks, that is all about them.
Sources :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-8
Regards,
Kiran :)
End of Line <
Around 1974, when personal computing was very new, single chip microprocessors made it possible to build small, comparatively inexpensive computers. This lead to birth of several small start-up companies, which sold kits for home hobbyists who wanted to build their own computer. These kits typically contained a circuit board, a microprocessor, some memory chips,(this means, these kits "typically" did not contain video monitors), and some additional device controller chips. These additional chips were for controlling various input and output devices like paper tape, cassette tape, and floppy disk drives.
In early days, these computer systems had one to four kilobytes of memory, or sometimes even less. Application programs were written in machine language and/or assembly language.
Because of this lack of memory, there was typically no operating system. But, there was a small "monitor program" usually stored in a ROM (Read Only Memory), that would allow an application to do simple common tasks, such as:
- get character from keyboard device
- output character to a device such as teleprinter or printer
- save the contents to a cassette tape or a floppy disk
- restore contents from tape or floppy
The monitors did only such basic tasks, that is all about them.
Sources :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-8
Regards,
Kiran :)
End of Line <
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