New subject: Quick question - mneng1.sys

1 Mar 2004

  As the owner of a modified and still-working OSI Superboard 2 running
under OS-65D 3.3, I may have a few insights about the Elektor link to
OS-65D:

 - I had owned my machine for around 5 years (that would make it 1985) when
a friend showed me the two-part Elektor article of a floppy-disk interface
for the ongoing "Junior Computer" series.  Using the schematics, I
hand-wired (anyone else remember Vector's "Pencil Wiring" with
solder-through insulation?) a disk interface for my Superboard.

 - The Elektor article "adopted" OS-65D because OSI sold the DOS as a
stand-alone product, complete with utilities for customizing disks,
developing code in BASIC and Assembler, and capable of running serial or
memory-mapped user I/O with the change of a byte in DOS.  It sounds like the
Elektor authors went forward and used OD-65D for later projects.

 - By 1985, MA/COM had renamed OSI to ISOTRON during the slow- and shut-down
of manufacturing - they stopped buying masked ROMs, and made Superboards and
C1Ps patched to use 2716 EPROMs instead - but were still selling the Disk
OS.  When I telephone-ordered a copy and asked for "OS-65D V. 3.3 for a
C1P", a fellow worker figured I was some sort of spy speaking code!
Fortunately, the folks at the factory knew what I was talking about.  The
documentation binder bears the name ISOTRON on its cover.

 - Like the Elektor authors, I patched my OS-65D, for an 80x24 video card in
my system. I had written extensions into a copy of the OSI Monitor ROM: I
was a little peeved when OS-65D loaded, ignored the redirected video, and
brought in its own drivers for the original 24x24 screen... I was sooo glad
I maintained back-compatibility.

  I still have the original OSI disks and docs: there are 5 disks with all
sorts of utilities (mostly in BASIC), the binder for the OS and separate
manuals for the "Assembler/Editor and Extended Monitor" and disk BASIC.  The
handiest thing (and most well-worn!) is the little fold-out card listing DOS
commands, memory locations and error code descriptions.  I'm a little
puzzled at the reference to OS-65D V3.2... Version 3.3 was the "full"
version, and the single-floppy reduced version was 3.1: perhaps someone
patched a version 3.1 disk for their own project, and just incremented the
number?

Bob Maxwell

--- Original Message ---

...
   I'm
looking for information on the OHIO-DOS system.
 Has anyone some sources, programs or historic info
 on this OS for the 6502?

 Right now I'm rebuilding an 65816 system (EC65K) which
 was published in 1986 by Elektuur/Elektor and was running
 OHIO DOS 65D V3.2.  
 Ohio Scientific Instruments (OSI) had a 6502 OS in the late
 1970's and early 1980's called OS-65D.  They were bought by
 MA/COM (sometimes mistyped as MA-COM) who carried on for a
 couple of years.  I don't know whether they licensed it to
 any other vendors, but you might Google for OS-65D.  Also,
 OS-65U was their multi user OS.  I'm a "fan" of OSI, if it
 turns out that this is the OSI OS, I would be interested to
 know the story of Elektuur/Elektor and how the old (and to
 be honest, rather crude) OS was being used in 1986.

 Bill Sudbrink

Elektor and OSI's OS-65D (was OHIO-DOS)