[Oberon] The Modula-2 System for Z80 CP/M (Peter Hochstrasser)

[Steven Hirsch]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2017, Bob Walkden wrote:

>> Some years back I wrote to Borland in an attempt to get the sources for 
>> TM2, but they denied ever selling such a product - go figure.
>>

> If I remember correctly, Borland bought Topspeed Modula-2, formerly JPI 
> Modula-2, and it eventually became absorbed in Clarion Developer (?) and 
> lost its separate identity. I don't remember it ever being called Turbo 
> M2, but it was a long time ago, and I may have it wrong.

They may have acquired Topspeed / JPI M2, but those were for the Intel PC 
environment.  The product I'm referring to was specific for Z80 CP/M and 
never appeared in a PC flavor.  It compiled to "M-Code" and linked in the 
runtime engine.  Programs may have run somewhat slower than the output 
from a true native compiler but the intermediate code was very compact 
and, I believe, relocatable.  My application had a lot of hardware 
interface requirements and TM2 supported modules written in Z80 assembler 
for bit-tickling.  There was even a special version written to take 
advantage of Zilog Z180 / Hitachi 64180 memory mapping.  That variant
supported an extended address space (up to almost 1 MB) for executable 
code (though not data).

Turbo Modula-2 was marketed through a third party, but had Borland's name 
on it. Odd arrangement, but it was definitely their product.



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