[Coco] OS-9 observations...

[Luis Antoniosi (CoCoDemus)]

What I see that kills OS-9 performance is its universality of the terminal.
Do you make any idea the amount of code is needed to print a simple
character on screen ?

That's the price for having a terminal that can run on any window, any
character device, on a rs232 remotely, etc.




Luis Felipe Antoniosi



On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 9:05 AM, Frank Swygert <farna at amc-mag.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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