While cleaning out some old boxes I found a variety of manuals from my 8-bit days, the days before the Intel 8086 and Motorola 68000 brought us into the 16 bit world. I've scanned them and made PDFs just in case someone should find themselves with an IMSAI 8080 or a Kaypro IV and no manuals...
All of the scans below are Adobe PDF files, optimized for version 8.0 or higher.
The first set is from a little software company in the Pacific Northwest, you may not have heard of them before. These manuals are for the tools we used on Zilog Z80 systems before we started using "C".
You might notice that these are all scans of Xeroxed copies. Back then when you bought software, you never got either a printed book nor - of course - online documentation, you got a stack of paper, 3-hole punched if you were lucky.
Here are the scans of my CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) documentation. CP/M is basically the same as IBM's DOS. In fact, if you looked at the API structure for the original MSDOS, by some strange coincidence, the lower numbers for API access were identical to CP/M and the higher numbers were identical to Xenix (sort of the original Linux for microcomputers).
- CPM 2.2 interface guide
- CPM alteration guide
- CPM ASM users guide
- CPM DDT manual (DDT is the debugger, of course)
- CPM ED manual
- CPM SID users manual
- CPM Users guide
I worked at Kaypro for several years and my first MSDOS computer was a Kaypro 10, purchased through the company at a discount and with payroll deductions (ooh! ah!). Below is the hardware specifications and manuals for the various Kaypro computers.
Lastly I have a manual for my ML 4100 Arium logic analyzer. This was a godsend when working on device drivers in the Z80 world. The Arium replaced the actual Z80 processor chip with a cable and plug. You could then single step the processor, set hardware breakpoints and so forth. Without this gadget debugging device drivers was all trial and error.