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CP/M serialization requirements

SomeGuySomeGuy
edited July 2016 in Software
So I found this in with a Columbia Data Products CP/M-86 manual I recently acquired

?zdrly

I had noticed many Digital Research disks were serialized - that is, no two disks of the same product are identical, they each have a unique serial number written in them. But I had always assumed that they were pre-serialized before purchase.

So, bring your shiny new ~1983 computer home and the first thing you have to do before using any CP/M-86 applications is... mail this the fuck in and wait for a disk?

Meanwhile the user was already plugging in their MS-DOS disk and up and running. It's really no wonder CP/M lost out to DOS. Digital Research fancied themselves as having a higher bracket product even when there was plenty of competition.

It looks like CDP was making these disks by hand - not with a duplicator, and that also explains why both CDP OEM CP/M-86 disks I have have a hand-written serial number on the label. They must have recorded this information and associated it with the serial numbers to discourage unlicensed copying. But I have a hard time imagining all vendors/OEMs did this.

Comments

  • birdybirdy
    That is quite a surprising find there, I would have thought that you would just buy the program and just run it. Funny how my college course didn't go into to much detail with this, hell why should I expect any thing more from an Intro to CIS class. Only to think of that now, and how mad people would be just to get open the sucker up to find a forum for people to fill out and wait for their program. "That is Bull Shit" is what people would say to that.
  • SomeGuySomeGuy
    I would really sort of expect that other vendors would have recorded this information at the time of purchase, and then pass that info along to DR if needed.

    I dare say most current "classes" on the subject are just a regurgitation of whatever is on Wikipedia. :P

    But that is why I like to dig through this old software. It sometimes turns up little long forgotten historical oddities.
  • altracker9altracker9
    My early CP/M experience came with my Tandy Model II. I needed accounting software and Tandy's Trsdos packages were outrageously expensive. Most other options required CP/M, so I ended up buying CP/M 2.2m direct from Picles & Trout. As I remember, I created working CP/M disks immediately, no serial number issues.

    The nice thing about 8" CP/M disks is that the single sided single density disks (about 250k) were an industry standard. So when I ordered my accounting package, there was no need to specify my system. They were all shipped on the SSSD 8" disks. I never had to put up with the incompatibilty problems of 5.25" disks.

    DIgital Research had really poor user documentation. It seemed to be aimed only at OEMs.
    Thankfully, Pickles & Trout CP/M came with very good manuals for the end user.
    I later used Montezuma CP/M on my TRS80 Model 4, and their manuals were also very good.

    Just think, if DR hadn't been so 'high & mighty' in their negotiations with IBM on the new OS for the PC, CP/M86 would have been the Dos standard.
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