Mini Z80 boards running CP/M, any followers here?

[Phil_G]

Back in the day (™) at British Telecom, the bulk of my programming was under CP/M, at work we had Casu Mini-C's, & DMS Hinet MP/M systems and at home I had a homebrew system based on a second-hand Ferguson 'Big Board'.  These were rewarding times as BT had few computerised systems and being in a position to save others many hours of boring manual labour made us quite popular :-)

The Big Board machine at home was huge. Monster huge. The case was like a two-week-holiday suitcase and the massive twin 8" drives held IIRC 70k each. Or was it 140k? It was long, long ago.
Of late I've been revisiting these times, I've built a Z80-MBC2 and three Z80 Playgrounds, there's also the RC2014 and others but they're all fascinating projects as they have all the ability of my old Big Board and more - but in a 4" square package.  No more drives the size of breeze-blocks, the Z80MBC2 uses a micro-SD and the Playground an ordinary USB flashdrive.  So convenient and so more-ish I cant stop fiddling with them!

I've rediscovered the CP/M User Group archives and I've been editing source with WordStar 3 and assembling it with Z80ASMUK, and rediscovering PL/I. Its true timewarp computing.
Is anyone else here enjoying this particular 80's -fest?

Cheers
Phil

[tpowell1830]

Wordstar, that rings my bell. I acquired an Osborne in the late '80s and wrote some software with Turbo Pascal. Many hours working that out.


EDIT: I still have my Osborne.

[james_s]

I have CP/M running on a small FPGA dev board using Grant Searle's Multicomp design. I laid out a daughterboard that has RAM and IO.

[woofy]

I cut my teeth on the Z80 starting with a Nascom1, then an SC84 (Z180) and finally a Tatung Z80 based CP/M machine.
All are now gone, I mostly regret giving away the Nascom and SC84.
I may build the Z80 MBC2 some time and get a Z80 system running again.

[SiliconWizard]

Enjoying, yes, somewhat. Practicing, nope.

Like probably many others, I also cut my teeth on Z80 systems back in the days, so that always brings up fond memories. But that also reminds me how annoying the limits of those systems could be, even back then!

[syau]

Did some BBS software development with CP/M running on the Microsoft Z80 card in Apple ][, mainly using Turbo Pascal. Managed to handshake with FidoNet software running on IBM PC and getting the BBS message exchanged through.

Everything can fit on 2 Apple floppy disk with 2 floppy drive