[Coco] Open Letter to those who will be attending the The 24thAnnual "Last Chicago CoCoFEST April 25-26, 2015

[Stephen H. Fischer]

Brother Jeremy's work AFAIK required that he have the source. If he gave the hard drive back this is the first clue that it might have happened. 

Kevin Darling gave his entire system to Brother Jeremy and appeared to have no further interest in it. Once you go OSK you never come back. He earned a living with OSK, it was his day job. I ran across proof of that. The OSK "thugs" took over the Delphi OS-9 forum and drove the 6809 people away. They ran a chat room on Sunday for OSK folks. I opened a 6809 room each Sunday in case someone came by. No one did sadly. 

I was not suggesting that Kevin be contacted but Brother Jeremy yes, or someone who has knowledge and perhaps contact with him. I looked at the tables for one of the last CoCoFests and it appeared that while Brother Jeremy was not making an appearance that someone was selling his work. 

At the moment I am very interested in the Original Source for Shell, ShellPlus various versions and so on. 

The OS-9 manual and the ShellPlus documentation are failing me in understanding why "1" is part of i=1, (i=device name in the manual) and what happens with stuff before the i=1 and stuff after. 

OP just reported success! Little less of an need. 

There are lots of things that I have in my system that are not in NitrOS-9 because they just wanted to recreate what Tandy released and not the great improvements that the Delphi and CI$ people did. It's their work that may have great value. 

Yes you were burned by Kevin, it was to be expected. 

Disassembly is never as good as the original authors comments. 

Just trying to get in contact with Brother Jeremy was my intention, I never thought about Kevin being of any help. And it's perhaps not his work that would be the reward, it's the work of others that he downloaded from CI$.

I know of no other effort to get Kevin's hard drive. Despite all the great work the NotrOS-9 people have done it just is not ready for prime time and I see more reasons every day.

The 120 GB which was lost and the hording by the website owner are the only two other places to look. You may not want to look at ~ 120 GB of CoCo files but I have even more tools to handle the job. One file I have has 81,478 entries. I think that the CoCo world has ~ 300,000 files which I could handle with the tools I now have.

When I was being paid to program I could walk downstairs and find the source tape for all of the OS, Compilers, Assembler and so on. 

I know the value of the original source. Well perhaps not the work of one person who used four letter works for all of his tags and an old maid would faint looking at them.

I was a Super Computer, Programmer. Note the position of the comma.

SHF

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Boisy Pitre" <coco at toughmac.com>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2015 7:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] Open Letter to those who will be attending the The 24thAnnual "Last Chicago CoCoFEST April 25-26, 2015


> Stephen,
> 
> The OS-9 Level 2 Upgrade source search reminds me of the quest for the Holy Grail — years and years of rumor and yet still no closer to finding it.
> 
> I am mystified why there is a continued desire to worship at the altar of Kevin Darling. Yes, he did some great things at one time, but now he has made it quite clear that he has no time for the CoCo community, and that was reiterated tome when I reached out to him on multiple occasions for an interview for the CoCo book.
> 
> Why anyone would continue to go to him on bended knee is beyond me. Brother Jeremy’s persistence did yield a couple of boot disks (sans source), but that’s probably the best it will get. That’s despite the rumor that Kevin’s hard drive, which contains the source, is supposedly in storage somewhere in Denver. If true, by this point in time, the platters are probably demagnetized.
> 
> If Kevin had any desire to give the sources out, he would have done so years ago. He doesn’t care about the source or about getting it out to you or anyone else.
> 
> Beyond that, I’m not sure what value the sources would have. Significant work has been done to disassemble OS-9, and the NitrOS-9 Project is result. If its resizable, movable windows that everyone wants, those modules could be disassembled and commented with some work (I’m pretty sure that these modules are in the NitOS-9 Project repository). If the effort expended to get Kevin’s hard drive had been instead focused on disassembling these modules, there would be no need to go hat in hand to Kevin Darling.
> 
> Sorry if this comes off as cynical, but I’m not sure how else to spin it. 
> 
>> On Apr 3, 2015, at 8:47 PM, Stephen H. Fischer <SFischer1 at Mindspring.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi, 
>> 
>> Br. Jeremy who AFAIK is in England across the pond received Kevin Darlings CoCo 3 system with the never released by Tandy new version of OS-9 Level-II. 
>> 
>> He sold this new version and I was one of the persons who purchased it.
>> 
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> The computer's hard drive contained the source code for the never released by Tandy new version of OS-9 Level-II.
>> 
>> I also believe that the source code for other parts of OS-9 are on this hard drive including the original shell and shellplus source code and lots more. Maybe ALL of OS-9's source code is on that hard drive as Kevin was the leader of the project that was an official Tandy one.
>> 
>> I was on Delphi and patches to OS-9 were uploaded, utilities and so on. But usually not the source.
>> 
>> I have no proof but IMHO CI$ had the source uploaded for most of this work. Kevin was on CI$.
>> 
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> We all would benefit if Kevin Darlings system could be located and obtained for the community. A bounty like the one collected for Jeff Vavasour to write the CoCo 3 emulator I am sure Br. Jeremy would welcome in exchange for Kevin's Computer. 
>> 
>> I should have written this letter years ago just like I should have communicated with Little John for a copy of the ~ 120 GB that he offered. (The CoCoFest was soon to start and I decided to wait after it had occurred. Sadly it was too late in his short life.) The offer was in one of the Glenside's newsletters.
>> 
>> There is one other person that may have sources that we would welcome, but he and I disagreed and I am not the person to approach him. He is the owner of one of our important websites but has not posted for years now. You all know that I am not the best person to try and do these tasks.
>> 
>> Hopefully others will attempt these tasks.
>> 
>> Stephen H. Fischer