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