We had a pretty active CP/M community in the 80's when the C128 was released. Most of the time I spent in CP/M mode was either running Turbo Pascal or MEX ( the Modem EXecutive ... a telecommunications program. ) We had some CP/M bulletin board systems in the area with downloadable software and source code. This was where I first used archivers such as Gary Novosielski's LU / Library Utilty ... which was kind of like tar. It stored archives in files ending in the extension ".LBR". Versions of ARC were also used at the time. There were stand-alone versions of LZW and Huffman compressors ( Crunch and Squeeze, respectively ) which were often used in conjunction with LU in the same manner that gzip is often used with tar archives.<p>The posted article mentions how slow C128 CP/M when compared to comparable machines, but I really didn't notice. It ran quickly enough for my needs.
<i>"I had a brief encounter with CP/M when I was 14 or 15 years old; I can’t remember exactly. At the time, I was in high school in Aveiro, and the local computer shop, which I visited daily on my way to the train station, just to stare at the window, the same way a pilgrim would visit and contemplate at a shrine, had two beautiful machines on display: the brand-new Amiga 1000 and a C128D."</i><p>This hit me with so much nostalgia. Different parts of the world - same experience.
I had a C128 as a kid, but I almost exclusively booted into C64 mode to play games. I <i>did</i> have a CP/M floppy, but I only booted it once or twice, had no clue what to do with it, and forgot about it quickly.
I had a card to run CP/M on my Franklin (apple ][+ clone] it was to use WordStar I never used it. A computer store clerk in December 1982 basically said, "you should wait for the C64", but we just plowed ahead and got the Apple clone. It was easier in college as I could write my paper, take my 5.25 over to the big 24-7 study room at Rutgers, called the roost and they had a small computer print lab. I got a 3.5 disc and could use an Apple 11c the had with both disk types to move the doc over. Then I'd take my 3.5 disk over to a Mac and typeset my paper. For 86-89 that really felt modern. I just used AppleWrite or whatever knockoff name Franklin called it, and a couple of times when I had a longish paper I just spit it into two docs, I think the limit was under 15 pages. I wish I had gotten info on how to get going with CP/M there as I've heard Dos and Windows are based on it.
While I had a friend who had a 128, we never thought to boot up that CP/M disk on his shelf. I had a Apple ][+ with a Z80 daughter card, and a Pascal compiler... so I would have been interested if I had only known (I was 12 and not reading the right computer magazines). Years later I have tried all of this through Commodore emulation. It was fun for a bit and definitely felt nostalgic.
CP/M was the first serious OS I used. By serious I mean one with the full set of office tools (Supercalc, WordStar, dBase) and languages like BCPL, Pascal, C (BDS). I think this had a significant effect on my views on what can be achieved in a small system with scarce resources.