OSI disk basic disk

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Thu Oct 3 14:47:00 2002

> Does anyone have an image of the OSI Disk BASIC disk?

Did they actually have anything called "Disk BASIC"? When
I used OSI systems, they had two operating systems, OS-65/D
and OS-65/U (not sure of the punctuation in those).

OS-65/D was what was normally found on smaller systems. It was
a pathetic excuse for an operating system. If you wanted to
view the directory, you had to run a BASIC program to do it.
Sorted directory listing? You've got to be kidding. And if you
had a program in memory that you didn't want to lose by loading
the directory program, too bad.

Need to create a file? Run another BASIC program. It prompts
you for the filename, starting track, and ending track. It doesn't
check whether your new file overlaps an existing file.

I guess the good thing about it was that the BASIC programs were
easily modified to add those features. When I was in junior high
school and had less than a year of computer experience, I had
no trouble adding a Shell sort to the directory program, and
enhancing the file creation program to check for sufficient room
and locate the file for you.

I sent my improved versions to Ohio Scientific, but never heard
from them.

The main accomplishment of my friend Tod and I on the C4P at school was
to write a game based on the arcade game "blockout". That taught me
how to do keyboard scanning and direct access to the video memory. We
were pretty good at the game, but we added a cheat feature so that we'd
always beat the other students. If you pressed a particular key
(different for the left and right player), it would enable cheat mode
and automatically turn if you were about to crash.

Nowdays Tod is a professor of Computer Science, and assigns writing
this game (including cheat mode) as an exercise for his students. :-)

Tod and I both migrated from using the C4P to the Apple ][.
Received on Thu Oct 03 2002 - 14:47:00 BST