CP/M-80 2.2 (8080)

CP/M-80, from Digital Research, was a popular operating system for 8080 and Z80 microcomputers. Each release was customized by OEMs specifically for their hardware.

CP/M (short for Control Program for Microcomputers) provided a standard set of software APIs for applications to use, while its basic I/O routines could be adapted to any arbitrary hardware. This I/O abstraction meant that any well behaved CP/M binary application could be moved between any two vastly different microcomputers and still run - the only requirement being that the microcomputer can execute 8080/Z80 machine code. This enabled vendors to produce uniquely designed platforms, rather than cloning an existing platform.

CP/M was entirely command-line/text based, and frequently made use of serial connected "dumb" terminals. Initially, programs that supported graphics would have had to bypass the operating system, making them platform-specific. Device-independent graphics were later addressed with the GSX graphics library. (Which became the basis for Digital Research GEM)

CP/M inspired the development of Seattle Computer Products 86-DOS, which became MS-DOS, but shares no code with it.

For the versions that ran on 8088/8086 CPUs, see CP/M-86.