[Coco] Why DECB is important to OS-9 folk.

[Stephen H. Fischer]

Hi,

John R. Hogerhuis wrote:
 ...
> Of course developers focusing on tools (meta-development) has always
> been a problem with the coco, and hobby OSes in general. It comes from
> programmers being their own marketing department. Programmer to self:
> "What do users want?" to which the answer invariably is, well I'm a user
> too, and I need better development tools and OS utilties. So obviously
> the users want more and better tools!
>
> But you look back at the great hot selling coco programs, and what do
> you find? CocoMax and its successors, a few word processors, and various
> games. The fact is that users don't care much about tools, by and large.
> They (can you believe this) actually want to *do something* with their
> computers.

You have hit a nerve with this.

The people posting for the most part are building things that they
themselves like. And just the process of building new stuff.

Why the silent majority are still here is becoming more and more unknown to
me. They will not say why.

This may be due to fear of spam and not believe that we have built a safe
list.

The same may be true of Web sites, but perhaps a web site poll may gather
more votes.

I wonder if we set up a snail mail address where questions could be sent to
with no return address required except the post office supplied zip code
canceling which we could promise to not use in any manner when we discuss or
answer the questions. Not even a name.

I an not a game player or a game writer. As a tool smith I could bring some
order to the huge number of games that are currently available on the web.

Perhaps starting with the Tandy released ones. There are many on line right
now, some hidden in zip files and DSK images on RTSI.

Most all do not expose any more information about themselves except their
names.

The RTSI files do not have the short and long descriptions that were
available on Delphi and CompuServe.

As we are a group of people dwelling in the past, perhaps many old members
of these services want to return there and look for games that they did not
download when they were members. Remember that access was at 300 Baud! They
may have not downloaded many files then.

> OS-9 is hard to set up and use>

>With
> DECB, you turn on the machine, and you're ready to run or develop
> whatever application to actually make use of those computing resources.
> If OS-9 just booted to a menu with a BASIC-09 environment, a text
> editor/formatter, a terminal program and your most recent files, and an
> option to start a shell prompt, that would be a big improvement.

> -- John.

This is just one step past my "OS-9 as Replacement for DECB" idea.

That idea would place the user in a protected environment that all OS-9
error messages are translated to DECB error numbers if possible. DECB and 
preselected other programs would be available with the possibility of more 
being added when they have been certified for their use. By experienced OS-9 
people that keep in mind that OS-9 knowledge is not required for the users 
in the protected environment.