CP Pro – E-commerce
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Wikipedia
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors.
The combination of CP/M and S-100 bus computers became an early standard in the microcomputer industry. This computer platform was widely used in business through the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s. CP/M increased the market size for both hardware and software by greatly reducing the amount of programming required to install an application on a new manufacturer’s computer. An important driver of software innovation was the advent of (comparatively) low-cost microcomputers running CP/M, as independent programmers and hackers bought them and shared their creations in user groups. CP/M was eventually displaced by DOS following the 1981 introduction of the IBM PC.
Gary Kildall originally developed CP/M during 1974, as an operating system to run on an Intel Intellec-8 development system, equipped with a Shugart Associates 8-inch floppy-disk drive interfaced via a custom floppy-disk controller. It was written in Kildall’s own PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers). Various aspects of CP/M were influenced by the TOPS-10 operating system of the DECsystem-10 mainframe computer, which Kildall had used as a development environment.
Under Kildall’s direction, the development of CP/M 2.0 was mostly carried out by John Pierce in 1978. Kathryn Strutynski, a friend of Kildall from Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) times, became the fourth employee of Digital Research Inc. in early 1979. She started by debugging CP/M 2.0, and later became influential as key developer for CP/M 2.2 and CP/M Plus. Other early developers of the CP/M base included Robert “Bob” Silberstein and David “Dave” K. Brown.
CP/M originally stood for “Control Program/Monitor”, a name which implies a resident monitor—a primitive precursor to the operating system. However, during the conversion of CP/M to a commercial product, trademark registration documents filed in November 1977 gave the product’s name as “Control Program for Microcomputers”. The CP/M name follows a prevailing naming scheme of the time, as in Kildall’s PL/M language, and Prime Computer’s PL/P (Programming Language for Prime), both suggesting IBM’s PL/I; and IBM’s CP/CMS operating system, which Kildall had used when working at the NPS. This renaming of CP/M was part of a larger effort by Kildall and his wife with business partner, Dorothy McEwen to convert Kildall’s personal project of CP/M and the Intel-contracted PL/M compiler into a commercial enterprise. The Kildalls intended to establish the Digital Research brand and its product lines as synonymous with “microcomputer” in the consumer’s mind, similar to what IBM and Microsoft together later successfully accomplished in making “personal computer” synonymous with their product offerings. Intergalactic Digital Research, Inc. was later renamed via a corporation change-of-name filing to Digital Research, Inc.
By September 1981, Digital Research had sold more than 260000 CP/M licenses; InfoWorld stated that the actual market was likely larger because of sublicenses. Many different companies produced CP/M-based computers for many different markets; the magazine stated that “CP/M is well on its way to establishing itself as the small-computer operating system”. The companies chose to support CP/M because of its large library of software. The Xerox 820 ran the operating system because “where there are literally thousands of programs written for it, it would be unwise not to take advantage of it”, Xerox said. (Xerox included a Howard W. Sams CP/M manual as compensation for Digital Research’s documentation, which InfoWorld in 1982 described as atrocious.) By 1984 Columbia University used the same source code to build Kermit binaries for more than a dozen different CP/M systems, plus a generic version. The operating system was described as a “software bus”, allowing multiple programs to interact with different hardware in a standardized way. Programs written for CP/M were typically portable among different machines, usually requiring only the specification of the escape sequences for control of the screen and printer. This portability made CP/M popular, and much more software was written for CP/M than for operating systems that ran on only one brand of hardware. One restriction on portability was that certain programs used the extended instruction set of the Z80 processor and would not operate on an 8080 or 8085 processor. Another was graphics routines, especially in games and graphics programs, which were generally machine-specific as they used direct hardware access for speed, bypassing the OS and BIOS (this was also a common problem in early DOS machines).
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. E-commerce is in turn driven by the technological advances of the semiconductor industry, and is the largest sector of the electronics industry.
The term was coined and first employed by Dr. Robert Jacobson, Principal Consultant to the California State Assembly’s Utilities & Commerce Committee, in the title and text of California’s Electronic Commerce Act, carried by the late Committee Chairwoman Gwen Moore (D-L.A.) and enacted in 1984.
E-commerce typically uses the web for at least a part of a transaction’s life cycle although it may also use other technologies such as e-mail. Typical e-commerce transactions include the purchase of products (such as books from Amazon) or services (such as music downloads in the form of digital distribution such as iTunes Store). There are three areas of e-commerce: online retailing, electronic markets, and online auctions. E-commerce is supported by electronic business. The existence value of e-commerce is to allow consumers to shop online and pay online through the Internet, saving the time and space of customers and enterprises, greatly improving transaction efficiency, especially for busy office workers, but also saving a lot of valuable time.
E-commerce businesses may also employ some or all of the following:
- Online shopping for retail sales direct to consumers via web sites and mobile apps, and conversational commerce via live chat, chat bots, and voice assistants;
- Providing or participating in online marketplaces, which process third-party business-to-consumer (B2C) or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sales;
- Business-to-business (B2B) buying and selling;
- Gathering and using demographic data through web contacts and social media;
- B2B electronic data interchange;
- Marketing to prospective and established customers by e-mail or fax (for example, with newsletters);
- Engaging in pretail for launching new products and services;
- Online financial exchanges for currency exchanges or trading purposes.
There are five essential categories of E-commerce:
- Business to Business
- Business to Consumer
- Business to Government
- Consumer to Business
- Consumer to Consumer
Forms
Contemporary electronic commerce can be classified into two categories. The first category is business based on types of goods sold (involves everything from ordering “digital” content for immediate online consumption, to ordering conventional goods and services, to “meta” services to facilitate other types of electronic commerce). The second category is based on the nature of the participant (B2B, B2C, C2B and C2C).
On the institutional level, big corporations and financial institutions use the internet to exchange financial data to facilitate domestic and international business. Data integrity and security are pressing issues for electronic commerce.
Aside from traditional e-commerce, the terms m-Commerce (mobile commerce) as well (around 2013) t-Commerce have also been used.