24 Nov
2005
24 Nov
'05
8:59 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
The calls are very unix-like, but the internals of the OS are very
different. It's much more modular for one thing (device drivers and
descriptors are sepeare modules which can be loaded from the command
line, for example).
Warning : My knowledge of OS-9 is beased entirely
on the 6809 (8 bit)
version, I've never used a 68K version. I suspect some of the things that
I think were 'misisng' on the 6809 version (like shell variables and
wildcards) are present in the stnadard shell of the 68K version. But
anyway...
More UNIX-like than anything. In fact, some text implies that library calls
were kept as close to UNIX as possible to aid porting between the two. To begin to understand it, consider it to be a
CP/M clone with
multi-user extensions. List the files in the system directory and most
Internally it's not a bit like CP/M According to the flyer, both Acorn and QL versions
should come with a word
processor, spreadsheet, database, BASIC compiler, C compiler, Pascal compiler,
assembler, and graphics kernel.
Having used the 6809 version, the C should be pretty much original K&R,
the Pascal will be ISO level 0 with some extras (it doesn't quite make
level 1), and the BASIC should be BASIC-09, which IMHO is the best BASIC
ever (nicer, even, than BBC BASIC).
I can only assume they're on the hard drive (which
I can't access at present)
- but having said that, the flyer talks as though a hard disk was totally
optional. Wish I had all the install floppies!
It was certainly possible to run the 8-bit versions from floppies. Two
drives helped a lot, but it was just about possible on a single-drive
machine by swapping disks.
-tony