On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Joel Ewy wrote:
> 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.
Yes, I have one like that - XT class card - that comes up asking for an
OS-9(68K) disk. Never was able to get the disk to really see what went
on from there :-(
- don
> 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 - 17:17:11 BST