I refer here to 'screen-based programs' that are not actually graphical, but take full advantage of the screen as a two-dimensional array of 80x25 characters, as opposed to typical 'command-line programs' whose output is essentially one dimensional.
MS-DOS provided compatibility for command-line programs. A single binary could run on many different and incompatible computers, provided they all ran MS-DOS.
MS-DOS did not provide compatibility for screen-based programs. In theory it did but in practice it didn't; the screen display routines provided by the operating system were so slow that we all wrote directly to video RAM instead, which meant our programs would only run on an IBM PC or clone.
CP/M was in a sense the precursor of MS-DOS. Did it provide practical compatibility for screen-based programs? Could CP/M versions of programs like VisiCalc and WordStar provide a single binary that would run on any Z80 machine with CP/M, or did they have to be reassembled or modified for each incompatible computer?