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upstart writes:

But the cure may ruin the web....:

Opinion: With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots.

Cloud services company Fastly agrees. It reports that 80% of all AI bot traffic comes from AI data fetcher bots.  So, you ask, "What's the problem? Haven't web crawlers been around since 1993 with the arrival of the World Wide Web Wanderer in 1993?"  Well, yes, they have. Anyone who runs a website, though, knows there's a huge, honking difference between the old-style crawlers and today's AI crawlers. The new ones are site killers.

Fastly warns that they're causing "performance degradation, service disruption, and increased operational costs." Why? Because they're hammering websites with traffic spikes that can reach up to ten or even twenty times normal levels within minutes.

Moreover, AI crawlers are much more aggressive than standard crawlers. As the InMotionhosting web hosting company notes, they also tend to disregard crawl delays or bandwidth-saving guidelines and extract full page text, and sometimes attempt to follow dynamic links or scripts.

The result? If you're using a shared server for your website, as many small businesses do, even if your site isn't being shaken down for content, other sites on the same hardware with the same Internet pipe may be getting hit. This means your site's performance drops through the floor even if an AI crawler isn't raiding your website.

[...] Yes, of course, we can try to fend them off with logins, paywalls, CAPTCHA challenges, and sophisticated anti-bot technologies. You know one thing AI is good at? It's getting around those walls.

upstart writes:

The data was key evidence in the death of a pedestrian in 2019:

At the beginning of the month, Tesla was found partly liable in a wrongful death lawsuit involving the death of a pedestrian in Florida in 2019. The automaker—which could have settled the case for far less—claimed that it did not have the fatal crash's data. That's until a hacker was able to recover it from the crashed car, according to a report in The Washington Post.

In the past, Tesla has been famously quick to offer up customer data stored on its servers to rebut claims made against the company. But in this case, the company said it had nothing. Specifically, the lawyers for the family wanted what's known as the "collision snapshot," data captured by the car's cameras and other sensors in the seconds leading up to and after the crash.

According to the trial, moments after the collision snapshot was uploaded to Tesla's servers, the local copy on the car was marked for deletion. Then, "someone at Tesla probably took 'affirmative action to delete' the copy of the data on the company's central database," according to the Post.

Tesla only acknowledged that it had received the data once the police took the Tesla's damaged infotainment system and autopilot control unit to a Tesla technician to diagnose, but at that time the local collision snapshot was considered unrecoverable.

That's where the hacker, only identified as @greentheonly, his username on X, came in. Greentheonly told The Washington Post that, "for any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there."

During the trial, Tesla told the court that it hadn't hidden the data, but lost it. The company's lawyer told the Post that Tesla's data handling practices were "clumsy" and that another search turned up the data, after acknowledging that @greentheonly had retrieved the snapshot locally from the car.

"We didn't think we had it, and we found out we did... And, thankfully, we did because this is an amazingly helpful piece of information," said Tesla's lawyer, Joel Smith.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Google warned its 2.5 billion Gmail users worldwide to be on the lookout for a rise in phishing scams:

As a result, the company is advising users to update passwords and use enhanced protections.

"We believe threat actors using the 'ShinyHunters' brand may be preparing to escalate their extortion tactics by launching a data leak site (DLS)," Google said in a June blog post.

[...] The company admitted that a group of hackers breached a massive database and stored contact information for small and medium-sized businesses.

From Newsweek:

The breach involved business contact information such as company and customer names, which hackers have used to craft highly convincing phishing emails and voice-based social engineering scams.

[...] Google has not announced any timeline for further disclosures or technical updates stemming from the breach, but cybersecurity analysts expect continued attacks fueled by the leaked business data. Users are encouraged to switch from passwords to passkeys—biometric-based authentication such as fingerprints or facial recognition—which Google now recommends as the most secure option.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

More than half of patients stopped medical cannabis within a year, especially older adults. Discontinuation was unrelated to pain type or overall health:

New research shows that more than half of patients prescribed medical cannabis for chronic musculoskeletal pain stop treatment within a year. The findings raise concerns about the drug's durability as a long-term pain management option, particularly for older adults.

The study, recently published in PLOS One by researchers at the Rothman Institute Foundation for Opioid Research & Education, reported that 57.9 percent of 78 Pennsylvania patients certified for medical cannabis discontinued use within twelve months. Nearly half of these patients—44.7 percent—stopped during the first three months.

Researchers conducted a retrospective review, following patients newly certified through Pennsylvania's medical marijuana program to determine whether they renewed their certifications or pursued other treatments over a two-year period. Age emerged as the only statistically significant predictor of discontinuation: patients who stopped were, on average, about seven years older than those who continued (71.5 years compared with 64.5 years). Measures of baseline physical and mental health, assessed through PROMIS Global Physical Health and Global Mental Health scores, were similar between the two groups, suggesting that the decision to stop was not linked to overall health status at the outset.

Contrary to what some pain specialists might assume, the location of a patient's pain—whether in the lower back, neck, joints, or elsewhere—was not a significant factor in whether they discontinued cannabis treatment. While a slightly larger proportion of those who stopped reported low back pain, the difference was too small to be statistically meaningful. The results instead suggest that a variety of influences, including dissatisfaction with treatment, unwanted side effects, or choosing more definitive procedures such as injections or surgery, may be more important in determining whether patients continue using cannabis.

[...] The authors caution that their study, while among the first to carefully monitor one-year certification status for medical cannabis in orthopedic pain patients, leaves key questions unanswered. Specific details about cannabis formulation, dosage, and method of delivery were not consistently documented, nor were side effects, functional improvements, or patients' perceptions of relief. This makes it unclear whether discontinuation was due to a lack of effectiveness, adverse effects, financial burden, or even symptom improvement to the point where cannabis was no longer needed. They also point out that their sample was taken from a single institution's patient population and may not represent broader trends.

Journal Reference:
Mohammad Khak, Sina Ramtin, Juliet Chung, et al. Discontinuation rates and predictors of Medical Cannabis cessation for chronic musculoskeletal pain, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0329897)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A popular shortwave Russian radio station dubbed UVB-76 has been an enigma for decades. But its recent messages have turned it into a tool for Kremlin saber-rattling:

Shortly after US president Donald Trump hung up a call with Russia's Vladimir Putin this spring, an obscure shortwave radio channel, broadcasting from a military base somewhere in Russia, sprang to life.

Through a fog of static, at 4625 kHz on the shortwave dial, a man's voice spoke in monotone: "Nikolai, Zhenya, Tatiana, Ivan." He repeats the message—spelled out in the Russian phonetic alphabet—followed by a series of numbers and letters. The whole message reads: "NZhTI 01263 BOLTANKA 4430 9529." What it means is anyone's guess, but lots of people were guessing.

This radio station, dubbed UVB-76, has spent much of 2025 broadcasting cryptic messages, strange music, and pirate interruptions. The channel has elicited fascination for decades. This time, however, something is different. Now, Moscow's network of propagandists and warmongers are suddenly fascinated by this obscure channel.

UVB-76's real purpose is almost certainly innocuous and mundane. But in recent weeks, Moscow has capitalized on the eerie fixation with the channel to stoke fears of nuclear armageddon.

[...] "What have you stumbled on to?" reads a message posted to curious visitors to Spynumbers.com. "Instructions to spies? Messages exchanged between drug dealers? Deliberate attempts at deception and mis-information? Chances are, all of the above!" The website's users kept a meticulous database of the shortwave stations that, they believed, were used by spooks. Operators around the world logged the station at 4625 Khz as "The Buzzer."

The station, which was categorized only as "Slavic," is thought to have come online in the 1970s. The fact that it could be heard straight across the globe—from London to Sydney—suggested that it had some pretty powerful transmitters behind it. A perpetual tone, an incessant buzzing, was thought to be a way for the operator to reserve the frequency, even when it wasn't actively being used. The buzzing would infrequently stop, perhaps once a week, replaced with other tones or a man reading a message using the Russian phonetic alphabet. Try as they might, listeners never decoded those messages.

[...] As a 2011 feature in WIRED explained, theories about UVB-76's true purpose went from the decidedly unsexy, such as the idea that the station was testing atmospheric changes in the ionosphere (as reported in a 2008 academic paper); to the truly cinematic—that it was either a way to contact aliens or a "doomsday device, which had been programmed to launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was flattened by a sneak attack."

[...] In the years since, an online community has sprung up across YouTube, Reddit, X, VKontakte, and across multiple dedicated podcasts and online forums. Its fanbase stretches across history buffs, ham radio operators, and those obsessed with creepypasta. A dedicated site, Priyom.org, sprang up to meticulously catalog UVB-76's many mysterious messages.

[...] "It's natural to be fascinated with things you don't have a clear answer to," says Māris Goldmanis, a historian who runs a website devoted to tracking these shortwave stations, including UVB-76.

upstart writes:

Elon Musk says xAI has open sourced Grok 2.5:

Elon Musk's xAI has made an older version of its AI model Grok — specifically, the model weights used to shape Grok 2.5 — available on the open source platform Hugging Face.

"The @xAI Grok 2.5 model, which was our best model last year, is now open source," Musk wrote on X. He added that Grok 3 "will be made open source in about 6 months."

AI engineer Tim Kellogg described the Grok license as "custom with some anti-competitive terms."

Grok, which is prominently featured on X (which in turn recently merged with xAI), has created considerable controversy this year, particularly after the chatbot seemed to become obsessed with "white genocide" conspiracy theories, expressed skepticism about the Holocaust's death toll, and described itself as "MechaHitler," leading xAI to publish its system prompts on GitHub.

And while Musk described the latest version, Grok 4, as a "maximally truth-seeking AI," the model appears to consult Musk's social media account before answering controversial questions.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The X-37B spaceplane is flying missions few would have foreseen when the program began:

The US military's reusable winged spaceship rocketed back into orbit Thursday night [August 21, 2025] atop a SpaceX rocket, kicking off a mission that will, among other things, demonstrate how future spacecraft can navigate without relying on GPS signals.

The core of the navigation experiment is what the Space Force calls the "world's highest performing quantum inertial sensor ever used in space."

This is one of many payloads mounted on the military's X-37B spaceplane when it lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 11:50 pm EDT Thursday (03:50 UTC Friday).

[...] Military leaders tout the X-37B's purpose as a technological testbed that can ferry experiments from Earth to space and back. Many of the spaceplane's payloads have been classified, but officials typically identify a handful of unclassified experiments flying on each X-37B mission. Past X-37B missions have also deployed small satellites into orbit before returning to Earth for a runway landing at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, or Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

On this mission, the Space Force says the X-37B carries instrumentation to demonstrate quantum navigation, and a laser inter-satellite relay terminal to allow the spaceplane to connect with other spacecraft in orbit.

The quantum sensor package will "inform accurate unaided navigation in space by detecting rotation and acceleration of atoms without reliance on satellite networks like traditional GPS," the Space Force said in a statement before the launch.

[...] Recognizing the importance of GPS signals, the Space Force said the quantum sensor experiment on the X-37B spaceplane will test technology useful for navigation in "GPS-denied environments." Quantum navigation could also help spacecraft navigate in deep space, around the Moon or other planets, where missions can't count on receiving GPS signals.

upstart writes:

A new security flaw in TheTruthSpy phone spyware is putting victims at risk:

A stalkerware maker with a history of multiple data leaks and breaches now has a critical security vulnerability that allows anyone to take over any user account and steal their victim's sensitive personal data, TechCrunch has confirmed.

Independent security researcher Swarang Wade found the vulnerability, which allows anyone to reset the password of any user of the stalkerware app TheTruthSpy and its many companion Android spyware apps, leading to the hijacking of any account on the platform. Given the nature of TheTruthSpy, it's likely that many of its customers are operating it without the consent of their targets, who are unaware that their phone data is being siphoned off to somebody else.

This basic flaw shows, once again, that makers of consumer spyware such as TheTruthSpy — and its many competitors — cannot be trusted with anyone's data. These surveillance apps not only facilitate illegal spying, often by abusive romantic partners, but they also have shoddy security practices that expose the personal data of both victims and perpetrators.

To date, TechCrunch has counted at least 26 spyware operations that've leaked, exposed, or otherwise spilled data in recent years. By our count, this is at least the fourth security lapse involving TheTruthSpy.

TechCrunch verified the vulnerability by providing the researcher with the username of several test accounts. The researcher quickly changed the passwords on the accounts. Wade attempted to contact the owner of TheTruthSpy to alert him of the flaw, but he did not receive any response.

When contacted by TechCrunch, the spyware operation's director Van (Vardy) Thieu said the source code was "lost" and he cannot fix the bug.

As of publication, the vulnerability still exists and presents a significant risk to the thousands of people whose phones are believed to be unknowingly compromised by TheTruthSpy's spyware.

upstart writes:

Transport for London (TfL) asks mobile users to wear headphones:

Transport for London (TfL) is targeting the "disruptive behaviour" of passengers who play music and make calls using mobile phone loudspeakers.

TfL said most bus and Tube travellers considered such behaviour "a nuisance" and that some even found the additional noise very stressful.

The new campaign follows TfL research that found 70% of 1,000 passengers surveyed said they found films, music and calls being played on loudspeakers to be a nuisance.

Posters urging passengers to use headphones or hands-free kits with their device will appear on the Elizabeth line from Tuesday and across other services from the autumn.

During the Monday rush hour BBC Radio London spoke to commuters, who backed the move.

One said: "It should be banned, definitely. It is not polite to anyone else when you are sat on the Tube in the morning and someone is playing music. That's horrendous. It is not comfortable."

Another said: "Maybe someone might be working or they might be tired so yes I think it should be banned. I personally don't mind but I know that other people are a bit more mindful about that. I guess you have to respect what other people think."

A third commuter said: "Recently on a train there was a woman she was playing quite loud [music] and I was smiling to her trying to give the idea that not everyone could like that music. She didn't care."

Loudspeaker noise can be especially acute for those with heightened sensitivity, such as people with autism.

Emma Strain, TfL's customer director, told BBC Radio London that TfL by-laws prohibit playing music and streaming content out loud without permission.

She added: "When our enforcement officers encounter someone doing this they usually ask the person to stop.

"Most people comply at that stage, but if someone refuses then further enforcement action can be taken, which might include them being asked to leave the service or the station, or being reported for possible prosecution."

The new posters will be accompanied by Instagram posts.

Passengers will also be asked to look up from their screens in case someone else needs their seat more, said TfL.

In February, a man was fined €200 (£172) for making a call on loudspeaker in a designated quiet area of a French train station.

The man, named only as David, told French broadcaster BFM TV he was on a call with his sister at Nantes station when an employee from SNCF, the French railway company, approached him. He planned to appeal against the fine.

The French Transport Code says those who use "sound devices or instruments" or "disturb the peace of others by noise" in areas used for public transport could face a fine.

It is believed the use of mobiles and other devices has increased on the Tube, as large sections of the network across central London now have 4G or 5G coverage.

Work is under way to expand coverage to major interchange stations such as Green Park and King's Cross St Pancras, and further sections of the Northern, Piccadilly, Jubilee and Victoria lines by the end of the year, TfL said.

I think that minimum decency demands that people use headphones but not everyone gets the message, what is the situation where you live? Can such people be asked to leave, be fined or detained?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Phys.org published an article about a new experiment:

In the everyday world that humans experience, objects behave in a predictable way, explained by classical physics. One of the important aspects of classical physics is that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed of light. However, in the 1930s, scientists discovered that very small particles abide by some very different rules. One of the most mind-boggling behaviors exhibited by these particles is quantum entanglement—which Albert Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance."

In quantum entanglement, two particles can become linked so that their properties are correlated, even when separated by large distances. If you measure a property of one particle—such as its orientation—you instantly know the corresponding property of the other, no matter how far apart they are. Although this correlation appears to happen instantaneously, it cannot be used to send information faster than light. Instead, it reveals a deep and puzzling connection that defies classical explanation, while still respecting the fundamental speed limit set by relativity. This phenomenon is known as "nonlocality"—the appearance of effects at a distance that would be impossible under classical physics.

Up until recently, it was thought that only entangled particles could exhibit this nonlocality. But a new study, published in Science Advances, has used Bell's inequality to test whether nonlocal quantum correlations can arise from other non-entanglement quantum features.

The experiment used photons generated by laser light hitting a particular type of crystal in such a way that it is impossible to determine their source. The setup ensures that the photons cannot become entangled before their detection at two separate detectors. The researchers used Bell's inequality to determine if the experiment resulted in violations of local realism.

According to their calculations, the experiment resulted in a violation of the Bell inequality, exceeding the threshold by more than four standard deviations. This kind of violation using unentangled photons had not been seen before. The researchers say these violations of Bell's inequality arise from a property called quantum indistinguishability by path identity, instead of entanglement.

"Our work establishes a connection between quantum correlation and quantum indistinguishability, providing insights into the fundamental origin of the counterintuitive characteristics observed in quantum physics," the study authors write.

While this work might be groundbreaking, there are still some possible issues that need to be ironed out in future studies. For example, the experiment relies on post selection—where only certain photons are detected, possibly giving misleading results.

Another possible issue comes from a locality loophole due to the phase settings of the detectors not being separated properly. However, the study authors are aware of this study's limitations and are eager to find fixes to these issues and try again.

They end by saying, "We not only expect that tailored loopholes and local hidden variable to the work reported here can be identified, but also expect that they will be consistently excluded by hardware improvements of high-quality quantum photonic devices and experiments, as we witnessed in the 90-year endeavor in the violations of local realism with entangled particles.

"Moreover, our work could very well lead to other interesting experiments, such as in the development of the Bell experiment. In analogy to the Bell experiment with two particles, we expect that quantum mechanics will lastly prevail."

• Violation of Bell inequality with unentangled photons

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Rare quadruple star system may solve the mystery of brown dwarfs:

Space just dealt astronomers a curveball – one that's 82 light-years from home, potentially capable of answering fundamental questions about some of the strangest objects in our galaxy: brown dwarfs.

Brown dwarfs are neither stars nor planets. They're caught in between. Too small to fuel the nuclear fusion that powers true stars, but too massive to be planets, they've always been difficult to define.

Now, a strange new quadruple system might give researchers exactly what they've needed to make sense of these in-between objects.

Two stars, two dwarfs, one orbit

Astronomers have discovered a system with not just one, but four objects locked together in space. Two red dwarf stars orbit each other on one side.

On the opposite, two brown dwarfs are in another close pair. And these two pairs, in concert, orbit a common center of mass – like an intergalactic waltz taking more than 100,000 years to complete a full rotation.

This unusual system is called UPM J1040−3551 AabBab. It's located in the constellation Antlia, about 82 light-years away from us. That might sound far, but on a cosmic scale, it's relatively close.

The researchers who found the system used data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite and NASA's WISE mission. These tools helped them spot the signs of two separate objects moving in sync through space.

Because the orbit is so slow, scientists couldn't see it directly. Instead, they matched angular velocity – basically, the speed and direction of the objects' motion.

The system breaks down into two main parts. The brighter pair, UPM J1040−3551 Aab, consists of two red dwarfs. These are small, cool stars that appear orange in visible light.

You'd never spot them with your naked eye – not even the closest red dwarf, Proxima Centauri, is visible without a telescope. This pair is about 100,000 times dimmer than Polaris, the North Star.

Then there's the dimmer pair, UPM J1040−3551 Bab. They are brown dwarfs, and they produce hardly any visible light. They're only visible in the near-infrared part of the spectrum and are about 1,000 times fainter than their red dwarf stars. That makes them extremely difficult to observe.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://reclaimthenet.org/4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-uk-regulator-ofcom

Two of the internet's most free-speech supporting platforms, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, are taking their fight for online free speech to court, targeting the UK's communications regulator, Ofcom, for what they describe as an unconstitutional attempt to enforce British censorship laws on American websites.

In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the plaintiffs argue that the UK's controversial Online Safety Act is not only an unlawful extraterritorial power grab but a direct attack on foundational American liberties.

Read the complaint here [PDF].

Original Submission

upstart writes:

They singled out the behaviors of Meta's AI chatbots in their letter:

The US Attorneys General of 44 jurisdictions have signed a letter [PDF] addressed to the Chief Executive Officers of multiple AI companies, urging them to protect children "from exploitation by predatory artificial intelligence products." In the letter, the AGs singled out Meta and said its policies "provide an instructive opportunity to candidly convey [their] concerns." Specifically, they mentioned a recent report by Reuters, which revealed that Meta allowed its AI chatbots to "flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children." Reuters got its information from an internal Meta document containing guidelines for its bots.

They also pointed out a previous Wall Street Journal investigation wherein Meta's AI chatbots, even those using the voices of celebrities like Kristen Bell, were caught having sexual roleplay conversations with accounts labeled as underage. The AGs briefly mentioned a lawsuit against Google and Character.ai, as well, accusing the latter's chatbot of persuading the plaintiff's child to commit suicide. Another lawsuit they mentioned was also against Character.ai, after a chatbot allegedly told a teenager that it's okay to kill their parents after they limited their screentime.

"You are well aware that interactive technology has a particularly intense impact on developing brains," the Attorneys General wrote in their letter. "Your immediate access to data about user interactions makes you the most immediate line of defense to mitigate harm to kids. And, as the entities benefitting from children's engagement with your products, you have a legal obligation to them as consumers." The group specifically addressed the letter to Anthropic, Apple, Chai AI, Character Technologies Inc., Google, Luka Inc., Meta, Microsoft, Nomi AI, OpenAI, Perplexity AI, Replika and XAi.

They ended their letter by warning the companies that they "will be held accountable" for their decisions. Social networks have caused significant harm to children, they said, in part because "government watchdogs did not do their job fast enough." But now, the AGs said they are paying attention, and companies "will answer" if they "knowingly harm kids."

What do you think? Does the letter have any teeth or is it just vague announcements so that the AGs can claim they are doing 'something'. Who will enforce it, and how?

Original Submission

One of our own Anonymous Cowards has found the following story:

According to MotorTrend, https://www.motortrend.com/news/new-cars-2026-tech-savvier-less-annoying-driver-assist-systems the annoying driver assist systems on many cars are about to have an upgrade, in this case on a 2026 BMW they just tried. Extra sensors and more nuanced software attempt to take away some of the annoyance.

Driver assist technology often works great in the lab and in safety tests, but too often it makes drivers crazy, causing them to switch it off, rendering the development and purchase cost wasted. With its brainier forthcoming Neue Klasse models, BMW is reimagining many of these features to make them appealing enough to, you know, use.
Capacitive sensors in the steering wheel know for certain when you're holding the wheel, so you'll never have to jiggle the wheel on a straight highway to confirm you're there. And a sharper infrared driver-monitoring camera inside the rearview mirror determines precisely what the driver is looking at, because not all "distractions" are bad. The computer allows considerably more "eyes off the road" time when those eyes are looking at the mirrors—perhaps monitoring emergency vehicles, lane-splitting motorcycles, etc. We're also promised way fewer (if any) unwarranted drowsy detection warnings.

The article goes on to describe other details (there are many).

Maybe someday these automated things will trickle down to sensibly priced cars, as often happens with features initially offered on luxury cars.

Personally, I'm sticking with my non-automated car for awhile longer. A generation back, I waited out the first round of high powered airbags, and I guess now I can wait out the first generation of annoying ADAS.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Eerie Linux blog (also in Gemini) has a longer post about how to actually get started using CP/M, the Control Program for Microcomputers.

This article is just what the headline promises: an introduction to the CP/M operating system. No previous knowledge of 1970s and early ’80s operating systems is required. However, some familiarity with Linux or a BSD-style operating system is assumed, as the setup process suggested here involves using a package manager and command-line tools. But why explore CP/M in the 2020s? There are (at least) two good reasons: 1) historical education 2) gaining a better understanding of how computers actually work.

Last year I wrote two articles about CP/M after having taken a first look at it:

A journey into the 8-Bit microcomputing past: Exploring the CP/M operating system – part 1
A journey into the 8-Bit microcomputing past: Exploring the CP/M operating system – part 2

These were written with a focus on the first reason; I had (partially) read the manuals and tried out a few commands in an emulator (as well as done a little bit of research). I wrote an outsider’s look at CP/M and covered the various versions that were released and some of their notable features.

This article is different. It’s for readers who want to get started with CP/M themselves. Expect a practical introduction to get familiar enough with the platform to be able to explore a wealth of historic software, often enough ground-breaking and influential.

CP/M was of great importance back during the 8-bit microcomputer era. It was ubiquitous in small businesses and government offices for a while. It ran on the Zilog Z80 and Intel 8080 hardware architectures. MicroPro International's WordStar and Ashton Tate's dBase II were among the killer apps of the era. Networking was by sneakernet or, maybe, if your cable smithing skills were up to it, by null modem.

Previously:
(2024) Complete WordStar 7.0 Archive
(2024) End of an Era: End-Of-Life for the Venerable Zilog Z80
(2024) Intel 8080 Emulator. 19th IOCCC. Best of Show.
(2022) Z80—The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive
(2016) Portion of Gary Kildall's Memoir Made Public

Original Submission