[Coco] OS9 vs Flex

[John Kent]

Flex was more intended for early business systems, word processing and 
software development where as the CoCo was more intended for games.

On 31/12/2011 5:51 PM, John Kent wrote:
> Hi Aaron & others,
>
> Yes, Flex is a single user system. There is a lot of software for it 
> though. Flex has to sit between $C000 and $DFFF. Calls to Flex are 
> made by jumps to absolute memory locations rather than vectoring 
> through software interrupts and function codes like I think OS9 does, 
> so it's not position independent. There is also Uniflex, which I don't 
> know a great deal about, but I think that is a multitasking upgrade 
> from Flex.
>
> Flex was designed for the South West Technical Products, Smoke Signal 
> Broadcasting, and Gimix computers. There might have been a few more. 
> They were mainly bases on the SS50 bus, so were more like the S100 
> card slot systems. They were designed more for use with serial 
> terminals although there were some memory mapped video cards you could 
> get for them.
>
> The CoCo really integrated all the video display and graphics into a 
> single box, which made it a lot less expensive and more accessible to 
> the general public. It allowed you to use your colour TV as the 
> display again saving on cost.
>
> John.
>
> On 31/12/2011 4:14 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>> The 68 Micro Journal has tons of articles about FLEX.  Several
>> different varieties existed, some of which were
>> multitasking/multiuser, but the basic/stock/original flavor was single
>> tasking and a lot like CPM.   Like OS9 there was a version available
>> for most of the 6809 systems.
>>
>> John Kent has a neat 6809 FPGA system that runs FLEX.  I only messed
>> around with it a little bit, but I think it fits in somewhere between
>> DECB and OS9 as far as capabilities.  If you want to know an awful lot
>> about it, spend some time in the 68 MJ:
>>
>> https://sites.google.com/a/aaronwolfe.com/cococoding/home/magazines/68-micro-journal 
>>
>>
>> You can sort of feel how it was initially fairly popular, but became
>> overshadowed by OS9 in time by noticing the relative # of ads and
>> number of articles in the journal over time.
>>
>> -Aaron
>>
>>
>

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