Date   : Mon, 12 Dec 1983 23:02:17 EST (Mon)
From   : Mike Ciaraldi <ciaraldi@Rochester.ARPA>
Subject: CP/M-86 and Concurrent CP/M-86 for Zenith Z-100

Latest word on CP/M-86 family products for the Zenith Z-100.

CP/M-86 has reached at least some Heathkit stores but
is in tight supply because (supposedly) the machines being
sent to the DOD are getting it.

Concurrent CP/M-86, ported under contract to Zenith by some 
West coast software house, was supposed to show up for
Beta-test this week, but hasn't. Maybe another week or so.
Final release would probably not be until (I'm guessing here,
based on how long CP/M-86 took) March, 1984 or after.

I finished Taylor's internal version of CCP/M in October,
but we will be switching over to the Zenith version when 
available. My version has some limitations (no Winchester support), 
screen image not changed when virtual console switches, etc.,
that would limit its usefulness for the average user.
However, the multi-tasking and message-passing work fine
(nothing I could do to mess them up!), and that's what we
needed for our application.

For the record, it took about two months of solid effort
to bring up CCP/M, starting from the BIOS which Zenith had
already written for CP/M-86. This does not count about two
months of of reading the manuals and looking at the
BIOS for ZDOS (Zenith MS-DOS) to learn about Z-100 hardware
and 8086 assembler. During that time I was doing a lot
of other things too.

Zenith will also be releasing MP/M-86 arounfd the
same time as Concurrent.
ZDOS version 2.0 should be available very soon, if it
is not already.

Mike Ciaraldi
ciaraldi@rochester