Hi, ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) said: [things about TRS-80 ModelIII] Thanks for the correction, I never used a MIII much, I had a Model I from the very early days. I always thought it was a pity they didn't port it to IBM PCs, moving -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb(a)dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Tony Duell wrote: Will LDOS run on other Z80 machines, and does OS-9 run on any other systems? Back when I was deciding on my first computer (ok, well, my first digital computer... I had one of those Radio Shack "computers" with slide switches and light-bulbs, that one programmed by connecting wires to the switches years earlier---BTW, I found the original box-top for it in the basement several months ago!), I'd narrowed my choices to three machines: a Commodore 64, Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo) and a Texas Instruments 99A. I came very close to purchasing the CoCo, but I think it was out of stock, or somesuch. Then, I re-read an article in Popular Electronics (or was it Popular Computing by then? I'll have to check.) that went into detail about the circuitry in the C-64 and it's video and sound chips; a fascinating article (I'm guessing that many others here may have read it as well). The most fun that I had with the C64 was with a sound-synthesis program, but loading programs to, and saving them from, cassette tapes was somewhat of a pain towards the end, but fun at first. :-) ...I wonder if that tape is still readable if I can find it. Over time, and after finding it a pain to do all that PEEKing and POKEing, and tiring of BASIC, I'd wished that I'd bought the CoCo instead. That's what more computers need. Of course, I don't think that large companies really want lots of people, such as beginning electronics hobbyists and others with minimal electronics knowledge, to have an easy way to perform hardware hacking and learn more about it; the more difficult it is---or at least appears, and the more difficult it is for people to buy reasonably priced things to hack with in local retail stores, the better for them, as they can sell more mass-produced, and annoyingly engineered, rubbish---where they eliminate good features that would make a noticeable difference in the product's usefuleness just to keep costs down so they can sell the product for less, or else sell it for a ridiculously high price and have a large profit margin. Just my 2-cents worth of ranting and grumbling. :-) RDD -- Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & rdd(a)perqlogic.com 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

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

On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Joel Ewy wrote: Yes, I have one like that - XT class card - that comes up asking for an OS-9(68K) disk. Never was able to get the disk to really see what went on from there :-( - don

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