July 27, 1989 J.D. Hildebrand, Editor Computer Language 500 Howard St. San Francisco CA 94105 Mark Twain would surely say that Tim Parker's report of the "Death of the Hacker" (Computer Language, July 1989) is greatly exaggerated! In fact, "dedicated, infinitely curious, talented systems programmers" still actively hack at least one operating system -- CP/M! Parker notwithstanding, the emergence of the IBM PC did not halt CP/M system innovation, which continues at a strong pace, and without requiring megabytes of ram. Today's well-equipped CP/M system runs the "Z-System" -- version 3.4 of the ZCPR command processing environment. It installs automatically on any Z-80 CP/M computer without assembly-language changes to the BIOS. The Z-System user interface includes command history; an error handler for catching abnormal terminations and editing previous command lines; a general-purpose script language for both command processor and application program input; conditional command execution; command aliases; named directories and password protection; menu and help subsystems; full-screen command shells; etc. ZCPR34 adapts dynamically to memory requirements of applications. And the same environment runs on both CP/M 2.2 and CP/M Plus Z80 systems. Closely related is a task-switching extension to CP/M 2.2 called BackGrounder ii. It provides full-screen windows for any two active CP/M programs, cut-and-paste capability between those tasks, output redirection, and pop-up desk accessories. The original BDOS from Digital Research has long since been overtaken by improved Z80 versions. The latest -- ZSDOS -- includes integrated datestamping and automatic path-searching. File DateStamping, which has been available for five years, provides full UNIX capability -- create, modify, and access dates and times. Z-System tools and applications are developed by a community of programmers driven to share innovations and discoveries. This sense of purposeful, good-natured system hacking can be readily detected by logging into one of the Z-Node remote systems that provide their electronic meeting places. Perhaps in DOSland the true hacker is a dying breed, but CP/M system development thrives. Tim Parker and others longing for the old challenge are most welcome to (re)join us and push the envelope further! Bridger Mitchell Plu*Perfect Systems 410 23rd St. Santa Monica CA 90402