TRS-80 question

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: 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. JCE -- Joel Ewy mailto:ewy@southwind.net http://www2.southwind.net/~ewy