[Coco] DW4 Turbo 230kb mode was : Eureka!

[Bill Pierce]

Well said Chris. You are right. It is a programmer's OS but with a twist. The programmer has the option to write good software that's plug-n-play so the non-programming public doesn't have to do a ton of setup work just to run a program.

A good example is the Radio Shack line of games for OS9. Infocom, Sierra, etc. I enjoyed just sliding the King's Quest III disk in, typing DOS and playing the game. If you had a Coco 3 and a disk drive, you were in. It couldn't have been easier.

These days with the advent of things like DriveWire, it's almost mandatory to run a virtual HD system. This I don't mind at all, it's just the actual setup to get a good stable DW VHD system going that it take a little while to grasp the whole concept. Again, it all comes down to making new OS9Boot files. There's no way around it even with the versatility of the current repo offerings, there's no "complete" systems.
 In DriveWire, the optimum setup disk would actually be a VHD with all commands, games, software, utilities, system files and a complet copy of the built repo modules for building new boot files.
All programs would be setup properly, ready to run from the startup.
This would be a VHD you could stick in DW slot 0, type DOS in HDBDOS and it "just works". From there, if you need a few "custom" drivers for your hardware, an Automated Boot Creation utility (easy as ABC?) could be run which with a few mouse clicks, would create your new boot on that same VHD, reboot and you've got a custom system.
This is the kind of software I am currently trying to develope. Along with this utility comes a GUI that will also host other "swapable" modules that will make life with OS9 much easier for those who fear the cmd line, just point and click to run anything. This GUI can be run from the startup therefore completely avoiding the cmd line. I have so far, about 8 modules in design and some nearly finished that automates the very things that people hate about OS9. I have about 8 or 9 more in planning. Right now it's all waiting on the GUI to get finished and that's where the most thought is going. On how to make it all easy.

And if OS9 wasn't a programmer's OS, I guess it would have been much harder to even think of doing this any other way. The built in power of OS9's system calls were way ahead of their time.
So no, it's not a myth that OS9's a programmer's language, it was a myth that the software would come out to make it more than that. Too many programmers writing too many utilities to make programming easier so they could write more utilities.

It's long past the time for us to write real software, not utilities to write software... that never gets written :-)

Bill Pierce
My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
https://sites.google.com/site/dabarnstudio/
Co-Webmaster of The TRS-80 Color Computer Archive
http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/
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E-Mail: ooogalapasooo at aol.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Smith <csmith at wolfram.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Fri, Sep 20, 2013 1:33 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] DW4 Turbo 230kb mode was : Eureka!


So far I see two problems here.  Bill's "myth that OS-9 is a programmer's OS" 
may not be a myth.  I don't mean this in a bad way as Bill seems to.  It's just 
that since I've gotten serious about writing code and started to look once more 
at this system, I see a certain brilliance behind it that is far and away 
greater than what I previously have seen.  So, I think it certainly is as much 
of a programmer's system as anything can be, even if it is also a good system 
for others, which I think it is.  The myth is that programmers and 
non-programmers can't use the same software.  Maybe this is a bit of a semantic 
distinction.

Next, Al has been writing CoCo software for years, but thinks the OS-9 build 
process is for geeks and doesn't like to do it.  I was going to ask what other 
types of people would still use a machine that was completely de-supported by 
the manufacturer in the 80s or early 90s.  Yes, at this point it probably is for 
geeks.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn't mean that each of us 
have to enjoy working with these machine is precisely the same way.  Still, to 
suggest that writing code or installing an OS on one of these systems is a 
"geek" pursuit while still using them to play games or run word processors is 
not, well that seems to be a bit of a pot vs. kettle problem.  By all means, I 
think people should make things as easy to use as possible.  It widens the 
audience for the project, and it saves some people a good bit of time.  The only 
point is that we're not all that different here regardless of what we're doing 
still using a computer platform that was designed
  in the 70s. :)

Chris