Date   : Sun, 13 Jan 1985 12:57:06-EST
From   : Lee.Sailer@CMU-CS-C.ARPA
Subject: CP/M Standards

Lastbutnotleast, I wish to send up a trial balloon, and see if anybody salutes
it...

People seem to keep asking, or even just claiming, that CP/M is dead. 
I think it is dead the way FORTRAN died about 15 years ago, that is, it now
lives in so many forms, and is "evolving" so much that it will probably never
disappear.  Notice that after years and years of fooling around, the FORTRAN
folk finally got up a "standard", first 66, then 77, and now so-called 8x.

Is anyone doing this for CP/M???

I know of at least ZCPRn, TURBO-DOS, RCPM, the UNIX-like "addons", and a lot
of different little utiliies for time-stamping, making USER 0 files public,
incremental backup, and so on.

Let's call DR's plain version "level 0".  For me, User numbers are nearly
useless in level 0.  How would it be best to fix that, and could we
standardize it, make PIP, ED, STAT, etc. understand it, and call it
level 1?  Could we standardize on a subset of the good features in EX,
SUPERSUB,
etc, and add those to level 1?

and so on.  

In short, CP/M has a lot of good features, and some bad ones.  People add
enhancements, but they (the enhancements) often interfere with one another.
This prohibits developers of compilers and editors and so on from using
the enhancements, and CP/M eventually dies.

I think that this is such a good idea, that I would not be surprised if it is
already happening.  I could be wrong.

One last thing.  I am posting this idea to see if there is any interest in
discussing it publically, so post you responses to INFO-CPM.  Do not send me
a separate copy, I can read it here.  Of course, if you have a
personal message to me that would not be approprate for the BBoard, you should
send it directly to me.