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Aucbvax.1902 fa.unix-cpm utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!AFITGORDON@BBNB Wed Jun 24 04:16:35 1981 Xerox, IBM, and CP/M for Office Automation

Re Dave Farber's message of 23 June, I think Dave brought up a very good point. UNIX development costs would be higher than CP/M costs if the target processor is an 8080/Z80. Since the majority (90%+) of UNIX is written in C, problems would arise in bootstrapping up UNIX (provided in source). Among these problems would be the creation of the machine-dependent interface, the writing or modifying of a C compiler on the development OS thru which to compile UNIX, and the media transportability problem from the C/UNIX world to the development environment to the target environment. CP/M, on the other hand, only requires that a new BIOS (Basic I/O System, which provides the machine-dependent drivers for CP/M) be created for the target.

I feel, however, that Xerox and IBM are not aiming at the "home" market, but at the "personal computer" market. The latter (which includes the "home" market as a subset) is being used with increasing frequency by small businesses for automated office support. Accounting, word processing, data base manipulation, and electronic mail are just some of the applications in this environment, and these applications are similar to those required by the automated office in general. Hence, Xerox and IBM COULD be further aiming at this market and set of applications, and could significantly add to the CP/M software base for office automation.

Rick -------

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