2 Jan
2012
2 Jan
'12
12:35 p.m.
Fair enough. That aligns BASIC09 and perhaps all of
OS-9 firmly with
the minicomputer and multiuser end of the OS spectrum. BASIC's
I thin kthat's right. The other languages yo ucould easily get for OS-9
(read : Radio SHack sold them on CoCO-format disks) included PASCAL-09
(which was full ISO Pascal) and C (which iIRC followed the origial K&R).
I don't know much about the Dragon and CoCo, but they certainly had
competent graphics and sound, and as they were the first platforms I
No brillieant on either front! The Text mode was 32*16 characters, upper
case only (porgamming C was 'entertaining, sicne lower-case was displayed
as inverse video), The highest resolution graphics mode was 256*192 dots
in 2 colours. Sounds was a 6 bit DAC, entirely software driven
I seem to remember the OS-9 console driver accepted certain contrl
sequecnests to sset graphics mode, plot a point, on the CoCo. You could
certianyl do that from BASIC-09 (and fro many other language, I remember
wriing programs in Pascal to plot various fucntions).
With the CoCo3 (there was no Drago nequivalent), you had the same sound
facility, but mcu better grpahgics (80*24 text, upper and lower case,
640*192 graphics, selectable colours, etc). I am pretty sure, again, you
could access this from OS-9 probably by sendign the right control
sequences ot the console driver.
Of course, you could write routines to send said contor lsequenes (or get
osmeboy else to write them) and then call them from your program.
ever read of for OS-9, I thought that maybe the
CoCo/Dragon versions
of OS-9 and BASIC09 had media facilities.
For myself, TBH, I was always mainly interested in graphics, and that
is what I mostly did in BASIC. Trivial and childish it might be, but
then, I /was/ a child at the time! Back then, a BASIC with no
*built-in* graphics facilities would not have interested me at all.
Now, well, yes, a little different, but it's mainly what I used to
play with.
Yes, I understnad. Of course The COOC had a ROM BASIC too, which had
grpahicvs and sound commands. But that wasn't multi-tasking, it didn't
let you access an OS-9 filesystem, etc.
One of the things that frustrates me with C21 OSs and languages is
that the graphics facilities of machines are locked away behind the
high walls of libraries and APIs designed for professional developers
- which are simply too hard for an interested amateur such as myself.
Oh,I amsolutely agree. It seems that modern PCs are not intended to be
programmed by the user (look at the adverts, they talk of storing music,
photos, etc, nothing about programming).
For all my comments about BASIC-09, I do thin the BBC Micro is oen of the
all-time great machines, and that it was probably the best educational
computer ever made. The BASIC was good, it was easy to get 'something to
happen' but you could go further if you wanted to. The idea of the user
prot got a lot of people trying simple interface that is now much arder
to do. (Yes, I do know there are USB-parallel ICs available. It's a lot
harder to wire one of those up, get the driver to behavem etc than to
simply wire a pin o nthe user prot connector to a transistor and then to
a relay and enter a simple memory-reference commant to turn on a light or
something).
And yes, in programming terms, I am very much an amateur!
An amateur is somebody who does something because they love it (think
Latin), it has nothing to do with ability.
-tony