Editing CP/M (section)

== Legacy ==

A number of behaviors exhibited by [[Microsoft Windows]] are a result of [[backward compatibility]] with MS-DOS, which in turn attempted some backward compatibility with CP/M. The [[drive letter]] and [[8.3 filename]] conventions in MS-DOS (and early Windows versions) were originally adopted from CP/M.<ref name="Chen_2010_Filenames"/> The [[Wildcard character|wildcard]] matching characters used by Windows (? and *) are based on those of CP/M,<ref name="Chen_2010_Wildcards"/> as are the reserved filenames used to [[Redirection (computing)|redirect]] output to a [[printer (computing)|printer]] ("PRN:"), and the [[System console|console]] ("CON:"). The drive names A and B were used to designate the two floppy disk drives that CP/M systems typically used; when hard drives appeared, they were designated C, which survived into MS-DOS as the <code>C:\></code> command prompt.<ref name="Chen_2010_Reserved"/> The [[Substitute character|control character <code>^Z</code>]] marking the [[End-of-file|end of some text files]] can also be attributed to CP/M.<ref name="Chen_2004_CTRLZ"/> Various commands in DOS were modelled after CP/M commands; some of them even carried the same name, like DIR, REN/RENAME, or TYPE (and ERA/ERASE in DR-DOS). File extensions like <code>[[.TXT]]</code> or <code>[[COM file|.COM]]</code> are still used to identify file types on many operating systems.<!-- although they did not origin in CP/M itself -->

In 1997 and 1998, [[Caldera (company)|Caldera]] released some CP/M&nbsp;2.2 binaries and [[source code]] under an [[open source license]], also allowing the redistribution and modification of further collected Digital Research files related to the CP/M and MP/M families through Tim Olmstead's "The Unofficial CP/M Web site" since 1997.<ref name="Olmstead_1997_1"/><ref name="Olmstead_1997_2"/><ref name="Caldera_1997_CP/M"/> After Olmstead's death on 12 September 2001,<ref name="Olmstead_2001_Death"/> the distribution license was refreshed and expanded by [[Lineo]], who had meanwhile become the owner of those Digital Research assets, on 19 October 2001.<ref name="Sparks_2001_CP/M"/><ref name="Chaudry_2001_CP/M"/><ref name="Gasperson_2001_Collection"/><ref name="Swaine_2004_CP/M"/>
In October 2014, to mark the 40th anniversary of the first presentation of CP/M, the [[Computer History Museum]] released early [[source code]] versions of CP/M.<ref name="CHM_2014_CPM"/>

{{As of|2018}}, there are a number of active [[Retrocomputing|vintage, hobby and retro-computer]] people and groups, and some small commercial businesses, still developing and supporting computer platforms that use CP/M (mostly 2.2) as the host operating system.