[Coco] Re: [Color Computer] Owl-Ware Winchester Basic

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 10 September 2004 19:25, puritan_2076 wrote:
>I asked this on bit.listserv.coco but the group seems to have gone
>dead, so please excuse me for repeating my self.
>
>Does anyone know about Owl-Ware Winchester Basic? It was a very
>early (1986) hard drive patch for Basic. It was supposed to be
>compatible with most machine language programs, did not use virtual
>floppys, and allowed up to 10 directories for basic that could be
>read by OS-9, and file size was limited only by disk space.
>
>Was it real or vaporware? Why has it been forgotten and replaced by
>virtual disk type patches if it was real?
>
I never tried to buy it myself, but I did read the advertisements with 
interest, looking for a good reason to.  As I was already into os9 L1 
V2 in a pretty big way, I just couldn't drum up the interest in it 
that I maybe should have.  As advertisements went, I don't ever 
recall seeing an actual "it's shipping" announcement, which also made 
me a bit wary.  The shacks announcement of the coco3 drew a lot more 
interest and I made myself a Christmas present of one that year.  The 
coco3's use of its high memory for its basic extensions pretty well 
wrote the obit for the owl-ware offering as I imagine it was useing 
that memory too.

Now we have HDB-DOS-1.1 that does all that, albeit with the limitation 
of the virtual floppies still being 35 track SS format, but thats so 
ingrained as the medium its not a huge disadvantage given the other 
limitations in that M$ inspired disk format.  IMO the formats 
directory structure itself is broken, but thats what we brought to 
the party way back then.

Today, I have a 1GB disk on my TC^3 controller with HDB-DOS-1.1 in it, 
sitting in the multipack plugged into my coco3, and basic is quite 
happy.  It Just Works(tm).

>
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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