I was speaking to my uncle yesterday, and he told me that MS-DOS was based off of the CP/M OS (Not the Emulator). It was released in 1976.
Wait... what emulator? CP/M was Digital Research's Operating System, "Control Program for Microcomputers".
QDOS was based on CP/M only as much as, say, Linux is based off of UNIX. Which is to say, not at all. It tries to seem similar to it's environment, but saying it was "based" off of CP/M implies that QDOS was actually based off of CP/M at the source code level, which it wasn't; Tim Patterson wrote QDOS because there was a need for it.
Why all this talk of QDOS? QDOS was purchased by Microsoft, renamed to DOS, and licensed to IBM as part of their agreement.
Would someone recommend it, but not the Emulator to learn MS-DOS as for the OS?
What? I'm going to say "no" here, although I'm not sure what you are asking. What Emulator? Either run it in a Virtual Machine, or don't run it at all. As buggy and problematic as DOS itself is, CP/M raises that by quite a factor, particularly in regards to disk corruption.
Most importantly, you aren't going to get CP/M working on a modern machine. A Boot disk, maybe. But have it boot from, say a partition of your hard disk? Very doubtful.
Would it be released as so many decades went by?
No idea what you are asking.
Was it really based off of FAT8?
No. CP/M does NOT use anything remotely compatible with the MS-DOS FAT file system.
Could I turn the floppy images into a bootable CD?
I usually try to avoid speaking in absolutes but I'm going to say "No" here. Certainly not without some level of virtualization. In fact I doubt you could boot up CP/M on a modern system at all.
