OS9 login / shutdown

Tim wrote: It's a 68008 coprocessor made by Cumana (the people famous for making disk drive units for the BBC micro) and uses a BBC B as the host for I/O. Unlike other BBC coprocessors, it plugs straight into the BBC's CPU socket (the BBC's 6502 CPU then lives on the Cumana board too). It's got a SASI and floppy interface on board, as well as a 50-pin expansion connector. I've only ever heard of one other survivor of these, and that was a few years ago (I'm trying to dig out emails now to see who it was) - I believe the owner only had the board too, not any of the software or boot ROM to go with it. I don't know of any docs surviving anywhere. Presumably Cumana did quite a bit of work on the OS too in order to get it to interact with the BBC hardware for keyboard and video I/O... A 'strings' dump on a modern system from the ROM image gives the following: 68008 on the BBC Version 1.0 (C) Vivaway 1985 OS9 - OS-9/68000 from Cumana 68008 Upgrade Board for the BBC from Cumana According to Google, Vivaway were responsible for UK marketing of OS-9. 68k processors for the BBC are few and far between. Torch made one which enjoyed reasonable success and would run UNIX. The only other board I know of was called Casper (the company name eludes me right now) but I don't even know of a single survivor there - I think it was aimed more as teaching aid and so there was no official OS release of any kind for it. Acorn themselves of course backed the Natsemi 32k chips during that time period rather than any of Motorola's offerings, and then eventually moved solely to 32 bit via the ARM CPU. cheers Jules