30 Dec
1998
30 Dec
'98
6:36 a.m.
Once upon a midnight dreary, Eric Smith had spoken clearly:
Allison wrote:
> Like you said marketing... who outside of us remembers OS-9 and the 6809?
They claim that they still sell a few copies now and
then to some of their
licensees. But if it's not generating any real revenue for them, there's
no particularly good reason NOT to release it. It's all written in 6809
assembly, so it isn't portable to the modern RISC processors and x86
processors that they support with OS-9000, OS-9/68K, and their other
current products.
They could also license it for hobbyist use for free (or fairly cheap) w/o
source and that would still be better than what we have now...
DEC does that with older versions of VMS, don't they? Even Sun saw the
light and non-commercial licenses of Solaris 7 are free ($10.00 shipped, on
3 CD's!)... I have it - not installed it yet, tho.
Does anyone have particularly good contacts inside
MicroWare to try to push
this idea?
Personally, I don't... but I know you will still find a few die-hard CoCo
fans that work for MicroWare on the bit.listserv.coco newsgroup... you
might want to lurk there a while and pick up a few names...
Just a thought.
Happy New Year,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger