At Last! CP/M for Protected Mode

CP/M, the operating system that ran on computers decades before the IBM PC, is making a comeback of sorts. Hackaday reports that developer johnsonjh has successfully ported an early version of CP/M to run in protected mode on the Intel 80386 processor. Originally, CP/M was limited by hardware constraints—the Z-80 processor it often ran on could only address sixty-four kilobytes of memory, requiring bank-switching to access additional memory. The 386, by contrast, features a memory management unit that can remap memory dynamically, similar to Motorola 68000 systems. The port now allows CP/M to use far more memory than ever before, though CP/M software from different versions won't run on each other—users would need to rebuild their tools for this new platform.

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