Another interesting place to find OS-9 was Philips' CD-i. Supposedly
there is a way to get an OS-9 shell by hooking up a terminal to the
controller ports. The CD-i players used Philips/Signetics 68070, which
was just a 16 Mhz 68000 with a couple DMA channels, a UART, and maybe
some timers integrated into the chip. That and the video chip for the
CD-i player went into the MM/1 computer, which was designed around 1990,
if I remember right. It was targeted at Tandy's Color Computer orphans.
It wasn't CoCo compatible, but it ran OS-9 and had a window system and
graphics libraries that were source compatible with the stuff Tandy
included with OS-9/Level II for the CoCo 3, the idea being that it would
be quick and easy to port CoCo OS-9 software -- some of which had already
been ported from "RS-DOS"/MS-BASIC.
OS-9 was also available for the Atari ST, and there was a version of
it that ran as a user application on a Mac. You could also at one time
get a 68000 board that plugged into an IBM compatible (don't remember if
it was an 8-bit or a 16-bit board) that could run OS-9 and leeched off
the PC hardware, but it had a bunch of serial ports built in for
terminals, as it was intended to be used as a multi-user system.
It would also run on machines like the PT-68K, and its descendants,
which was featured in a series of articles in Radio-Electronics magazine
in the late '80s. This was an interesting computer that I always wanted
to build, but didn't have the money at the time. It was a 68000
motherboard with an XT bus.
The cool thing about OS-9 is that, even though it isn't a truly open
system, in the sense of all the source code being available, it was
written with the intention that it should be expandable by the user
base. It's entirely modular, and the module interface is well
documented. Device drivers and file managers are not compiled into the
same piece of object code as the rest of the kernel. For that reason,
they could be replaced, or added to, by user-designed modules without
needing to recompile the kernel. This made it much more hardware neutral
and therefore much more adaptable than most of the other microcomputer
operating systems that were around at the time.
Jeff Hellige wrote:
> >Will LDOS run on other Z80 machines, and does OS-9 run on any other
> >systems? Back when I was deciding on my first computer (ok, well, my
>
> OS-9 was supported on a variety of hardware, i ncluding 6800
> and 68000 series CPU's.
The only 6800 series CPU it would run on was the 6809, of course.
That's where the name comes from. I think the story was that Motorola
contracted with Microware to write a structured BASIC to show off the
advanced features of the 6809. Microware came up with BASIC-09, and then
wrote a multitasking kernel to go along with it.
> 3-4 years ago there were even Set-Top boxes
> being prototyped that used OS-9 as the core OS. My SWTPc 6809 box
> came configured with support ROMs from Microware for OS-9.
>
> Jeff
> --
> Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems:
> Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
> http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757
JCE
--
Joel Ewy
mailto:ewy_at_southwind.net
http://www2.southwind.net/~ewy
Received on Fri Apr 27 2001 - 11:56:51 BST