27 Apr
2001
27 Apr
'01
6:36 a.m.
Joel Ewy wrote:
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.
Another interesting thing was/is, that it was pretty small, and allowed
to
set up nice multi user systems. We had one OS-9 system running around
16
terminals on a mc68020.
cheers