The Computer Journal, Issue 51

Z-System Corner

© Jay Sage

Reproduced with permission of author and publisher.

Announcements

The announcements for this time are about some exciting price reductions. A small band of programmers has long enjoyed the help of the wonderful DSD (Dynamic Screen Debugger) in getting the bugs out of our code. The $130 price tag, however, was a deterrent to many. I recently located and spoke with the author, John Otken, and suggested that there would be a great advantage in reducing the price. More people would get to take advantage of his superb program, and he would actually make more money because of the increased sales. He agreed to my suggested price of $50!

I hope that many more of you will take advantage of this opportunity. DSD is not only a powerful aid in debugging problems with code; it is also a wonderful way to learn about how programs work. The full-screen display allows one to see everything that is happening during program execution. One sees a section of disassembled source code, the contents of the CPU registers, the contents of the stack, and two blocks of memory. In all cases, symbolic as well as numeric data can be seen, and all user entries can make use of defined symbols.

There have been two price reductions of interest to owners of SB180 computers. XBIOS has been reduced from $75 to $50, as a reflection of the fact that it is no longer actively supported. We have also acquired the remaining stock of the excellent Electronic Technical Services ETSIO180+ board. Its low power CMOS design includes a battery-backed real-time clock, two high speed (115.2 kbps) serial ports, 24 bits of parallel I/O, and an SCSI interface for hard disk drives. It is fully supported by XBIOS (which is required to run the board). I use the ETSIO180+ on my own computer and have been very satisfied with it. The original price was $280; we will sell the remaining stock (currently about six boards) for just $100 each (or $145 including XBIOS).

The Trenton Fiascos

The main contents of my column for this month were originally intended for publication in the printed proceedings for this year's Trenton Computer Festival. Although our session there was again a great success (because of the speakers), the organization of TCF has deteriorated alarmingly over the past few years.

When I originally sent in my speaker form for TCF, I checked the box indicating that I would contribute a written piece. Shortly before the deadline, when they had not received my submission, I was called by Sol Libes, who runs the conference, asking if I was going to write something. I told him that I was still interested if there was time. He said that it could be accepted if I got it in by the end of the next weekend. We agreed that I would upload it to the board run by the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey. Once it was there, I was to call Sol.

I worked extremely hard for a couple of days, staying up until 3 am to get it finished and uploaded to the ACGNJ board. As instructed, I placed a voice call to Sol. He was not there, so I left a message on his answering machine. When he did not call back, I called several more times, leaving messages each time. Finally he returned my call, and we agreed that he would call me again if there was any problem with the file I had left for him. I never heard anything further.

You can imagine my dismay when I learned during the festival that my article had not been included. I still have no idea why, as no one has had the courtesy to contact me. Was its omission deliberate? I'm inclined to think it was administrative incompetence, since most other aspects of the conference organization were also handled poorly.

On my speaker registration form I had checked boxes indicating the equipment that I wanted them to supply in our meeting room. My speaker confirmation form indicated that the information had been recorded, but I telephoned the program coordinator the day before I drove down just to be absolutely sure. Do you think the equipment was there? No. And do you think that anyone at TCF knew what to do about it? No. We had to struggle through a couple of talks before, almost by accident, we stumbled upon the people who had the equipment (no one had told them we needed it).

I had hoped that the following material would be read by an audience that might include many people with CP/M computers who did not know that magazines like TCJ and advances like Z-System existed. So that my effort on this composition was not totally wasted, I am presenting it here.

CP/M Is Not Dead!

I'm sure you all know the famous Mark Twain anecdote. Somehow the newspapers picked up a story that he had died. At his next public appearance he delighted in relating that his reported death was, as he put it, "greatly exaggerated". The rumored death of CP/M, the granddaddy of microcomputer operating systems, is similarly exaggerated!

Unfortunately, the erroneous impression about CP/M is much harder to correct. Were it simply the result of false reports in the media, one could bring the truth to the media's attention and have them publish a correction. Regrettably, the belief that CP/M is dead arises via a mechanism that cannot be used to correct the view.

I will try here to give you some impression of the vitality that continues to flourish in the CP/M world, particularly in connection with the development of the Z-System, a highly advanced successor operating system to CP/M. While maintaining total compatibility with CP/M and its software base, the Z-System brings concepts and features that are as advanced as can be found on any computer anywhere. Nothing can give a 4-MHz Z80 with 64 kilobytes of memory the raw computing horsepower of a 33-MHz 80386 microprocessor with several megabytes of memory, but the Z-System can give an old CP/M computer a surprisingly powerful user interface and can turn it into a fun, educational, and productive machine.

At the end of this article, I have listed three magazines with strong CP/M support. By subscribing to them you will be able to learn about sources for public-domain programs and the names and addresses of vendors who actively support 8-bit software and hardware products. You are also welcome to call me.

Why Do People Think CP/M Is Dead?

The community did not learn of the death of CP/M, as with Mark Twain, by reading a report; they inferred it from personal experience. The mainline computer magazines, such as Byte, gradually carried less and less news about CP/M until eventually they carried none. Why did they stop? Basically because the volume of interest shifted naturally enough to MS-DOS and the newer hardware. There was no longer much activity in CP/M hardware development or sales, and almost all mainline software houses stopped developing new CP/M programs. Soon most of them stopped even offering their old CP/M programs for sale. Some, like Borland, have even gone so far as to deny that CP/M products they once offered were ever offered by their company! (I swear I remember a Borland Turbo Modula 2, but many people tell me that when they contact Borland they are assured that Borland never offered that product.)

This situation notwithstanding, a very high level of CP/M activity did continue, but not in the spotlight. There were smaller, specialty magazines that continued to focus on hobbyist computing, and there were also smaller software vendors who continued to support CP/M with great enthusiasm. For veteran CP/M users there was some chance of their learning about these alternate sources of support before the mainline sources shut the door on CP/M, but even many of the veterans lost touch.

For new owners of CP/M computers - and though it might surprise you, there are many - the situation is worse. Typically, they have inherited a retired CP/M computer from a family member, friend, user group, or even a stranger. When they try to contact the sources for CP/M information and support listed in their old documentation, they find them to be either out of business totally or at least out of the CP/M business. And these days the sales representatives at the software houses have often never even heard of CP/M! No wonder these new CP/M computer owners conclude that CP/M is dead.

The Real Story

It is natural that the major focus of interest in computers will continually shift toward the latest, most advanced, and most widely sold hardware. Nevertheless, a tremendous level of activity still exists in the CP/M world, most of it centered on the further development of the Z-System.

Why would someone still be interested in CP/M? The special spirit that persists in the CP/M world is one important factor. As in the Unix world, there is a very strong sense of community and sharing. This includes a well established tradition of public-domain software, that is, programs written specifically for the benefit of the general community and shared totally with that community. By contrast, the MS-DOS world has what they misleadingly call "shareware." These programs are distributed for free, but users are told that they must send money to the author if they continue to use them.

A second attraction in the CP/M world is the intellectual challenges and rewards it offers. The relative simplicity of the Z80 microprocessor and the CP/M operating system allow easy entry to new programmers. Although extremely rare in the DOS world, it is nearly universal in the CP/M world that programs are published with source code. This has several far-reaching consequences. In terms of quality, it means that the development of a program is not limited to the conceptual and coding ability of a single author. Others in the community can take that source code, make improvements to the program, and return the results to the community. Many of the most important CP/M programs have a very long history of development involving many authors.

Reading source code is also an indispensable vehicle for learning about how a computer system works. New programmers can quickly learn coding techniques and apply them to new applications. Amazingly, source code is available not only for the numerous utility programs but also for at least some versions of all parts of the operating system as well.

The seminal event in the survival of CP/M took place almost exactly a decade ago. Richard Conn, eager to make his own contribution to a community that he felt had helped him so much, spearheaded a group effort to write replacement code for the Console Command Processor (CCP) portion of the CP/M operating system. The result, named ZCPR for Z80 Command Processor Replacement, was released to the public in February, 1982.

Not much later, I discovered this much improved command processor and installed it on my CP/M computer. Then I did something even more significant: I looked at the source code. To my amazement, I discovered that the operating system, that "holy of holies," is nothing more than a computer program, rather like any other, and that I, albeit untrained in systems programming, could not only understand it but experiment with changing it! Discoveries like this from reading source code continue to inspire new CP/M hobbyist programmers, and computer bulletin boards and user group meetings continue to be scenes of intense discussion.

The Features of Z-System

The ZCPR command processor has gone through several stages of evolution, and the same approach has now been applied as well to the Basic Disk Operating System (BDOS) component of the CP/M operating system. The combined result is now referred to as the Z-System, and it represents a remarkable point in the development of microcomputer operating systems. It has many, many features inspired by minicomputer and mainframe operating systems and some not available even on those powerful machines. When I use my DOS 386 machine at work, there are many Z-System features that I sorely miss, and I am constantly amazed at their absence from an operating system whose code is bigger than the entire memory address space on a CP/M machine!

For the most part, the original Digital Research CP/M accomplished in admirable fashion the essential functions it was required to perform: to run a few resident commands and to load external commands from disk. However, it devoted little attention to the user interface and did not provide many services to make the operator's life easy. To be fair, of course, CP/M was born in the days when 16K of memory cost about $500 (in 1970s dollars, no less) and occupied an entire S-100 card, roughly the size of the motherboard of a modern DOS machine.

The central goal of the Z-System since the beginning has been to make it easier and more convenient to operate the computer. My own ideal has been to have the computer perform all tasks that it can handle on its own and to leave to the user only those tasks that a computer cannot figure out by itself. In other words, the computer should take care of all the routine matters; the human operator should handle only the thinking. I will now run through a short summary of Z-System features and try to indicate how they make the operator's life easier.

User Area Access

CP/M introduced the concept of disk "user" areas, which allowed the operating system to group files into separate logical directories. Unfortunately, CP/M provided no practical way to access files across user areas, which made them almost useless.

Z-System makes it very easy and convenient to organize your files. Where CP/M allowed only a drive prefix in file specifications (e.g., B:TEXT.DOC), Z-System allows drive and/or user number prefixes (e.g., A3:WORK.WS) so that files in other user areas as well as other drives can be referenced directly. In addition, Z-System allows meaningful names (similar to DOS subdirectory names) to be assigned to drive/user areas (so we might have LETTERS:JOE.WS). This provides an interface that is far more suitable to the way people think and remember.

Terminal Independence and the Environment

While some would argue that the DOS hardware and software standards established by IBM's market dominance have resulted in an enforced mediocrity, there is no doubt that having a single environment in which to operate makes life much easier for applications programmers. Programs for DOS generally work right out of the box on any IBM-compatible computer. Configuration is required only for fine-tuning.

CP/M, on the other hand, was designed to allow programs to run on an extremely wide variety of hardware. In those days, "personal" computer took on a different meaning - each person designed and built his own hardware. CP/M could be made to work with all of them, but elaborate configuration procedures were generally required, especially to match programs to the particular terminal used. To this day, we still have to deal with this hardware diversity.

What CP/M could have provided, but didn't, was a means for conveying to application programs information about the operating environment. Z- System has several modules that afford such communication. An area called the environment descriptor (ENV) contains information about the system configuration. Another system area called the message buffer (MSG) stores information that one program can leave for use by another program that runs later.

Part of the ENV is a section called the TCAP or Terminal-CAPability descriptor (if you know Unix, you will recognize this). When the appropriate TCAP has been loaded, a Z-System program will automatically use the right video control codes for that terminal.

Command Processing Enhancements

Under CP/M, you had to specify where the COM file to be run was located (otherwise the current drive was assumed). This is a perfect example of something that a computer can easily be smart enough to do for you, and Z-System does. As with modern versions of DOS (which took many years to catch on to this Z-System feature), you specify a list of directory areas that the operating system will scan for a requested COM file. Unlike DOS, Z-System does not insist that the current directory be first in the path; it can appear wherever you want it to, or not at all.

With Z-System one is also no longer limited to issuing commands one at a time (DOS has been even slower to catch on to this). A single line of command input can contain a whole sequence of commands. As a result, you do not have to interrupt your thinking to wait for one command to finish before you can specify the second and subsequent steps in a process. You can work out a strategy for what you want to accomplish and issue all the commands at once, before you forget or get confused.

Many oft-repeated computational tasks involve sequences of commands (e.g., editing, spell-checking, printing). In such cases, the Z-System alias facility (similar in some ways to CP/M's submit or DOS's batch operations but far more flexible - more akin to Unix scripts) can be used to define a new command name, which, when invoked, performs the entire sequence. This saves the user a lot of typing but more importantly eliminates the need to remember exactly what the sequence is. Basically, you solve the problem once and put the solution into an alias script. From then on, the computer is smart enough to take care of the complex details for you.

Conditional Command Execution

There is only so much one can accomplish on a computer (or in life) without making decisions. Have you ever seen a programming language with no ability to perform tests and act in different ways depending on the results? Flow control (IF/ELSE/ENDIF) is unique to the Z-System command processor. Other operating systems that offer flow control at all limit it to operation inside a batch or script language. A special set of Z-System commands can test a wide range of conditions, and the tests can be nested to a depth of eight levels.

Command Processor Shells

If you do not want to deal with the operating system at the command level or if you want to have a command processor with extended features, the Z-System shell facility allows you to install substitute user interfaces of your own choice at will. They can even be nested within each other.

Shells come in two common varieties: menu shells and history shells. The menu interfaces allow the user to pick tasks with single keystrokes and have the shell program generate the complex sequences of commands required to perform those tasks. The menu system shields the user from complexity, saves typing, and greatly reduces the chance of error.

History shells are enhanced command processors that remember your commands and allow you to recall and edit previous command lines. I wish the Apollo Domain minicomputer system I use at work (not to mention my DOS computer) had a history shell as nice as Z-System's LSH. It works like a wordprocessor on the command history, allowing searching and extensive editing.

What If You Make a Mistake

This is one of the other areas in which most operating systems behave in an abominably primitive manner. When you issue a command that cannot be performed, they just issue an error message and then dump you back to square one. Often you are not even told what sort of error occurred (consider DOS's wonderfully helpful "bad command" message).

The Z-System behaves in a civilized manner under these circumstances. When an error occurs, the command processor turns the bad command line over to a user-specified error handler. The most sophisticated error handlers allow the operator to edit the command and thus recover easily from typing mistakes.

The system environment even contains an error type, which the error handler can use to give you more specific information about what went wrong. It may be the familiar error of a COM file that could not be found, but there are many other possible causes for the difficulty. A file that you specified as an argument might not have been found (e.g., "TYPE FILENAM" when you meant "TYPE FILENAME"), or you may have specified an ambiguous file name to a program that cannot accept one (e.g., "TYPE *.DOC").

System Security

Like minicomputer and mainframe operating systems, the Z-System is a secure operating system. This means that it has mechanisms for limiting what any particular user can do or get access to. Commands that perform dangerous operations (such as erasing, copying, or renaming files) can be disabled when ordinary users are operating the system but enabled when a privileged user is at work. Areas of your disk can be restricted from access for storage of confidential or other sensitive information. These security features come in very handy in the implementation of a remote access system or bulletin board.

Summary

To sum it up, the goal of the Z-System is to provide an operating environment that can be tailored extensively to user preferences and that can be made to handle on its own and automatically as many computational details as it can, leaving the user free to concentrate solely on those aspects of computer operation that require human intelligence.

Z-System, The State of the CP/M Art

Now that you've seen the remarkable features of the Z-System, you might be curious about how it can be installed on your CP/M computer. In this regard, the most spectacular step in the evolution of Z-System took place about three years ago. At that time some major programming breakthroughs made it possible to configure and install the Z-System as if it were an application program running on the CP/M computer. Before that, you really had to be a rather skilled assembly language programmer to get Z-System running.

The new Z-System comes in two flavors: NZCOM for computers that use version 2.2 of CP/M and Z3PLUS for computers running CP/M-Plus. Joe Wright, Bridger Mitchell, and I were the main developers.

NZCOM and Z3PLUS embody, I believe, some of the most exciting and remarkable developments in the history of microcomputer operating systems. With all the microcomputers I have had experience with, the operating system has been a static entity. You boot up the computer, and there you have the operating system, fixed and immutable. Few computers offer more than one operating system. With those that do, changing the operating system usually requires rebooting and starting over. And never do you, the user, get to define the characteristics of the operating system. You just take what the manufacturer decides to give you.

With NZCOM and Z3PLUS the operating system becomes a flexible tool just like an application program. You can change operating system configurations at any time, even right in the middle of a multiple command line sequence. You can do it manually, or alias scripts can do it automatically in response to conditions in the system!

You can change the whole operating system or just a part of it. Would you like a different command processor? No problem. With a simple command, NZCOM or Z3PLUS will load another one. No assembly or configuration is required. If you want to experiment with a new disk operating system (BDOS), NZCOM can load a new one in a jiffy. This makes for a whole new world of flexibility and adaptability, learning and experimentation.

Do you need more memory to run a big application program? Fine. While that application is running, just load a small operating system without some of the bells and whistles. Then, after that task is finished, go back to the big system with named directories, lots of resident commands, or special input/output facilities (such as keyboard redefiners or redirection of screen or printer output to disk). Until you try NZCOM or Z3PLUS, it is hard to imagine how easy it is to do these things.

Sources of Support

Here are three magazines that provide significant CP/M support. By reading them you will learn about sources for public-domain software (both by modem and on disk) and about vendors who sell CP/M commercial software (a vendor listing, CPMSRC.LST, posted on bulletin boards runs to 15 printed pages).

The major, professional publication with strong coverage of Z-System and CP/M is "The Computer Journal." Its six issues per year have a broad hobbyist focus, with articles on several operating systems, programming languages, embedded controllers, hardware projects, and many other topics.

The Computer Journal ($18/yr)
P.O. Box 12
S. Plainfield, NJ 07080-0012
voice: 908-755-6186
modem (Z-Node #32): 908-754-9067
on GEnie as $TCJ

Two other, more informal magazines of interest to the 8-bit community are:

The Z-Letter ($15/yr)
Lambda Software Publishing
720 S. Second Street
San Jose, CA 95112
voice: 408-293-5176

Eight Bits and Change ($15/yr)
Small Computer Support
24 East Cedar Street
Newington, CT 06111
voice: 203-666-3139
modem (Z-Node #12): 203-665-1100.

[This article was originally published in issue 51 of The Computer Journal, P.O. Box 12, South Plainfield, NJ 07080-0012 and is reproduced with the permission of the author and the publisher. Further reproduction for non-commercial purposes is authorized. This copyright notice must be retained. (c) Copyright 1991 Socrates Press and respective authors]