Rise of CP/M : A Brief History

        In the 70's decade, there were many companies building computer kits, and all of them were providing a monitor program of their own. (There was issue about "Portability", which I'll explain later.) These monitors were small in memory, and required very few memory space varying from a few hundred to few thousand bytes. Typically a monitor provided only a few functions ranging from 10 to 15 functions. But these programs required time and expertise to develop, debug, and build. Even worse, there was no standard monitor.Each company simply added the functions they thought that users wanted. This created a problem for application programming. Because of the different monitor programs, application programs had to be especially written for each manufacturers computer. This situation led to development of CP/M [Control Program/Monitor].
        In 1973 Gary Kildall 1973 developed the first high-level programming language for microprocessors, called PL/M. While working for intel, in the same year,Gary created CP/M as the first operating system for the new microprocessor Intel 8080. He demonstrated CP/M to Intel, but Intel had little interest in CP/M and chose to market PL/M instead.
        Later, Gary and his wife Dorothy established a company, originally called "Intergalactic Digital Research" (later renamed as Digital Research, Inc), to market CP/M. Digital Research licensed CP/M for the IMSAI 8080, a popular clone of the Altair 8800. As more manufacturers licensed CP/M, it became a standard and CP/M had to support an increasing number of hardware variations. In response, Gary pioneered the concept of a BIOS, a set of simple programs stored in the computer hardware which enabled CP/M to run on different systems without modification.
        CP/M's quick success took Gary by surprise, and he was slow to update it for high density floppy disks and hard disks. After hardware manufacturers talked about creating a rival operating system, Gary started a rush project to develop CP/M 2. By 1981, at the peak of its popularity, CP/M ran on 3,000 different computer models and DRI had $5.4 million in yearly revenues.

Sources:

Study of Computers and History of Computers since last almost 12 years.

http://www.digitalresearch.biz/CPM.HTM (Official Home Page of CP/M)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems

See Also :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8080 (The Intel 8080 Microprocessor)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004  (World's first Microprocessor, an entire Central Processing Unit on one single chip)

Regards,
Kiran :)

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