On-Topic! OS-9/Microware contacts (was: Re: Still OT: Pentium...

From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_30below.com>
Date: Wed Dec 30 14:36:17 1998

Once upon a midnight dreary, Eric Smith had spoken clearly:
>Allison wrote:
>> Like you said marketing... who outside of us remembers OS-9 and the 6809?

>They claim that they still sell a few copies now and then to some of their
>licensees. But if it's not generating any real revenue for them, there's
>no particularly good reason NOT to release it. It's all written in 6809
>assembly, so it isn't portable to the modern RISC processors and x86
>processors that they support with OS-9000, OS-9/68K, and their other
>current products.

They could also license it for hobbyist use for free (or fairly cheap) w/o
source and that would still be better than what we have now...

DEC does that with older versions of VMS, don't they? Even Sun saw the
light and non-commercial licenses of Solaris 7 are free ($10.00 shipped, on
3 CD's!)... I have it - not installed it yet, tho.

>Does anyone have particularly good contacts inside MicroWare to try to push
>this idea?

Personally, I don't... but I know you will still find a few die-hard CoCo
fans that work for MicroWare on the bit.listserv.coco newsgroup... you
might want to lurk there a while and pick up a few names...

Just a thought.

Happy New Year,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
Received on Wed Dec 30 1998 - 14:36:17 GMT