On 11/22/23 16:47, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > When the 5150 came out, the CP/M software companies, such as MicroPro > (Wordstar) and Sourcim (Supercalc), were able to port their products to > it much faster than anybody could port stuff to Macintosh.
Yup. I have vivid memories of the Intel rep telling us that not only was the 8086 compatible with the 8085, conversion could be automated through their ISIS-II based conversion program--and it would result in a smaller (memory footprint) program. I decided to take them up on those claims. I brought, as a sample, a floating-point math package with a small program to compute the value of pi to 12 or so places. No macros, nothing funny--plain old ASM80 code. We met at the (San Jose?--I don't recall) sales office, together with "Fast Eddie", Intel's outside sales rep. Confidently, he took my disk, stuck it in the MDS and confirmed that it assembled and ran. The he said "watch this", and started up the conversion program. After about a half-hour, he suggested that we might want to go to lunch, Intel's treat. That took another hour. We came back, fairly well lubricated, and found the thing was still cranking. Ed suggested that maybe we should take the rest of the afternoon off and that he'd get back to us the next day. Well, the next day passed, then the next... About 2 weeks later, he said the that the development team had gotten on the problem and finally had a working binary. It ran with the correct result, naturally. However it was nearly half-again as large. The guys at Sorcim wrote not only their own converter, but their own x86 assembler. Building the PC versions of SuperCalc was a very involved procedure, involving a VAX 11/730, a Compupro box with an 8085/88 CPU card and an IBM 5150. Martin Herbach was apparently the one who could confidently master the process, so he was kept on when Sorcim was puchased by CA. Ah, the old days... Chuck
