Geof Wheelwright unpacks the CP/M Gold Card for Apple II and hits paydirt

One big headache for Apple II owners has always been in trying to easily turn the machine into something halfway usable as a business system.

Because the Apple is an 'open-plan' machine, it doesn't come with many of the features that owners of other micros would consider as standard. The unexpanded Apple still comes only with 64K, doesn't have true upper and lower case text generation, displays only in 40-columns and uses the now non-standard S100 bus to connect itself to the outside world.

The traditional fix for this problem has been to buy an 80-column card, upper and lower case adaptor, extra memory, a Z80 processor and the CP/M business operating system to bring the machine up to something approaching a full business specification. Not only did this require a good deal of cash, but also lots of fiddling to insert two or three more cards inside a machine already populated by at least two cards (the disk controller and printer interface) and at least a modicum of good luck.

Digital Research, the company which developed the original CP/M, has now come up with a solution combining all these elements on a single plug-in card. The company has also developed a go-faster version of CP/M to add lots of new commands to the traditional stable.

This package, the CP/M Gold Card, comes with either 64K (at a price of £299) or 192K (at £399) and fits in either Slot 4 or Slot 7 on the Apple IIe, Apple IIe Plus or Apple II. And you'll need two disk drives to make use of the system.

The package's box is big enough to fit any small micro - which is not surprising as that's pretty much what it is. The Gold Card includes 64K (minimum) of RAM, its own Z80b processor and 80-column video circuitry - almsot all the components needed to turn this card into a micro in its own right.

Once you get the box open, you'll immediately encounter a long, cardboard tray containing the card. Because it's longer than most standard cards, it's bevelled at one end to fit under the sloping front part of the Apple. Two large IBM-style boxes contain a thick ringbinder each.

The first binder offers a short user's guide to installing the card, a thick CP/M Plus reference manual and a CBasic reference manual of almost equal thickness and four disks containing CP/M Plus, CBasic and Assembler Plus Tools.

The second box, the programmer's kit, comprises a lengthy programmer's guide, a programmer's utility guide and a short reference manual for the symbolic instruction debugger (known to friends as SID).

Installation is a far simpler matter than with traditional Apple expansion cards. You don't have to unsocket the character set ROM or pull out a RAM chip to patch into the memory or invent careful town planning to make sure the village of spaghettit inside most Apples has no unfortunate intersections.

The card slots in either slot four or seven. I recommend slot four to give you the maximum amount of room between cards. The Apple disk controller tends to sit in slot six, and anything in slot seven may jam up against it and put undue pressure on the cards in both slots.

Once the card is slotted, you need only to stick one end of the supplied y-shaped video cable on the card and each of the other two ends in the Apple's video socket and your monitor socket.

Your Apple is now ready to perform as a full-spec CP/M Plus machine. Just fit the CP/M Plus system disk in Drive 1 (known under CP/M as Drive A) and turn on.

If you've installed the Gold Card properly and have the system disk in drive A, you should be greeted by this message:

   CP/M Gold Card, Digital Research, Inc.,
   CP/M Plus Ver. 3.0, 64K nonbanked version.

You're now ready to plumb the depths of the old Operating System in its new clothes.

Aside from combining all the components needed for an Apple CP/M system, the most interesting aspect of the Gold Card is the Operating System. But there are several differences between the old and new versions of CP/M and also between the non-banked minimum configuration of the Gold Card and the full bells-and-whistles banked 192 job.

CP/M plus seems to have brought the war of Operating Systems full circle. After Microsoft developed MSDOS as a sort of upmarket answer to CP/M and brought it to great fame and popularity in the form of PCDOS and its equivalents. Digital struck back with both its concurrent systems on the upmarket micros and now this new CP/M Plus on the good old 8-bit Apple II. Here are just a few new features of CP/M Plus:

• Date-stamping - like the directory on an MSDOS machine, CP/M Plus now offers the time and date display facility. In addition to the time and date facility. In addition to the time and date facility showing when a file was created, CP/M Plus also supports a date stamp update to show the last time any given file was accessed.
   
• Better overall filing system information - CP/M Plus supports directory information such as the size of a file in both bytes and records, the attributes of a file (whether it has read/write access) and what if any protections the file has. The DIR (FULL) option tells you pretty well everything you'd want to quickly know about your directory.
   
• Passwords - this function is limited to the 192K version of the Gold Card, so cannot be properly tested with the 64K non-banked version of the system. Although I could set passwords and protection by booting up with the 192K system disk, the Gold Card figured out that I wasn't a bona fide 192K user when I tried to access a password-protected file. The documentation mentions that the 192K card enables you to set passwords for disks, different users and different files.
   
• An extensive disk-based help facility - this took a while to find, being hidden away on disk 3 of the four disks. A COM file sets up the help facility and document files contain all the help information. On using the datestamp, setting user numbers, renaming files, copy disks and so on.
   
  You type HELP with the help disk in drive A and a HELP prompt with a list of topics. You can get help on main topics and then on subtopics which lead off from them. To get information on the passwords command, for example, type SET at the HELP prompt. This will then lead you to information about SET and then below a list of subtopics, further information is offered about the kinds of things you can SET: PASSWORDS is one of these topics. You then type .PASSWORDS (the full stop is required as a prefix because PASSWORDS is a sub-topic) and get information on each of the types of password protections.
   
• Non-Disk Input-Output commands - sending information to the printer is made easier in CP/M Plus by a Control-P toggle: pressing CTRL-P once sends all output to the printer; hitting it again cuts off output to the printer.

In all, the CP/M Plus does seem to live up to its name as it really is CP/M with a lot of plusses. And don't worry that you may already have some CP/M 2.2 programs or files. Digital claims full compatibility with this earlier version of CP/M and I found no reason to dispute that claim. I tried several CP/M 2.2 pprograms - including an old CP/M 2.2 Apple II Plus version of Wordstar that had previously refused to run on an Apple IIe. I found they all worked fautlessly under CP/M Plus.

The CP/M Gold Card would be a worthwhile and welcome addition to any Apple II or IIe, although I can't help but shake the feeling that its high rice (about £300 for the minimum 64K configuration) and the declining pre-eminence of CP/M make it perhaps worse value for money than it should be.

The appearance of the new £175 Appleworks integrated software suite - inclouding word-processor, database and spreadsheet - could make the need for CP/M slightly irrelevant. All you would need to get Appleworks running is a simple 80-column card - an investment of under £100.

Despite those objections, I still found CP/M Plus to be a real joy of an Operating System to work with and the Gold Card was the simplest Apple add-on to install since I bought my first joystick.

The real question of whether or not you really need or want CP/M is one that only you can answer.

Directory for Drive C:  User  0
 
    Name     Bytes   Recs  Attributes  Prot      Update           Access
------------ ----- ------- ---------- ------ --------------- ---------------
DITS     BAK     1k      1 Dir RW      Read   09/01/82 13:04  09/01/82 13:07
DITS     TES     1k      1 Dir RO      None   09/01/82 13:07  09/01/82 13:09
DITS     Y       1k      1 Dir RW      None   08/25/82 03:33  08/25/82 03:33
DITS     ZZ      1k      1 Dir RW      None   08/25/82 03:36  08/25/82 03:36
SETDEF   COM     4k     29 Dir RO      None                   08/25/82 03:36
SUBMIT   TX2     1k      1 Dir RO      None  
SUBMIT   TX1     5k     43 Dir RO      None  
 
Total Bytes     =     14k  Total Records =     77  Files Found =     7
Total 1k Blocks =     14   Used/Max Dir Entries for Drive C:   11/  84

Example of the full directory of a CP/M plus disk