[Coco] OS-9 observations...

[Frank Swygert]

From:"nickma2 at optusnet.com.au"  <nickma2 at optusnet.com.au>
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 5:16 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] Window Writer for OS-9


Ok. Thanks. Another one for the trash by the sounds of it.

It's a pity. Applications for OS-9 seem to fall into the... Too slow,
too primitive or too difficult to install and run. Sometimes all of
these at once.

Shame. OS-9 is definately a powerfull OS. I do honestly believe this.
It just falls over as far as quality applications and ease of use is
concerned.

Nick
=========================================================

For today that is correct, and even "back in the day" it was. OS-9 was written as a robotic control system. It was all command driven and expected to be embedded in a controller. It's modular and flexible enough to make a desk-top system out of it, but that wasn't the original purpose. Back in the day the problem was limited memory. With limited user space in a 64K machine by the time you wrote a kick-butt program you had no space to use it. Not so bad with games (assuming you could get it all in the user space), but applications had little working space. That's why Frank Hogg heavily promoted FLEX -- until the CoCo3 came along. With 128K (or better, 512K!) you had a little room! OS space for drivers and such was still limited, but there was enough working space to make productive programs more usable.

The flexibility is a limiting factor though, along with the limited system space. Drivers have to be loaded in that limited system space, so you can't always have all the drivers you need for a program. The only effective way to use OS-9 with several different programs is to create custom boots for each that has the necessary drivers and deletes unneeded drivers so there is enough system room. Having to reboot the computer when you switch programs can be a nuisance, especially if you would like to use the windowing capability of OS-9 and keep more than one program open at a time.

So it's not a modern OS. It's not running on a modern computer either. If you're running a CoCo you have to realize that the hardware is the limitation, not the OS. OS-9/68K machines don't have the limitations the CoCo does. They have a lot more system space. The limitation for system space is the fact that the 6809 is still an 8 bit microprocessor, and the 8 bit architecture limits addressable system space. OS-9/68K was expensive -- it was intended as an industrial system like the original 8-bit OS-9. There were of course a few machines made with OS-9/68K, but the cost of the OS was part of why they didn't catch on, that and the fact that they weren't compatible with any of the CoCo OS-9 software, so a new software library would have to be created. Then you're back to square one -- few good applications that weren't very expensive. At least there was no problem with space to load drivers...


-- 
Frank Swygert
Editor - American Motors Cars Magazine
www.amc-mag.com