[Coco] OS-9 on Raspberry Pi

[Allen Huffman]

> On Feb 3, 2015, at 9:38 AM, Bill Pierce via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:
> Allen, what kind of price will be tagged to it?

Too early to tell, but there is movement to see about doing something for the hobbyists.

> And is the current OS9 anywhere near resembling what we know of as OS9?

It would be completely familiar, but commands have many more options :) and there are new things like events, semaphores, trap libraries, etc.

It's the OS formerly known as OS-9000, but today known as "OS-9 for CPU" (Hmmm, it would be nice if the new Microware would do away with that and revert to OS-9 and OS-9000.) Here is an ancient writeup I did on my old website about the differences between OSK (OS-9/68K) and OS-9000:

http://os9al.com/appnotes/os9vsos9000.shtml

> All that aside, OS9 on a raspi would be awsome. Being the "controller" oriented OS that it is, OS9 on a raspi would be a perfect platform since so many things can be inerfaced/connected, then controlled easily.

Yes, and OS-9's low memory footprint would be far less than the Linux install (but without all the X-Windows layers and stuff available; I don't think anyone has touched any of that in decades).

> One of these days I'm going to install the Intel x86 demo version of OS9 that I have and check it out. I downloaded it from RTOS a few years ago (2008) and it has an intel x86 kernel. About time I got it, my intel x86 computer died and I bought an AMD quad core so I never used it.
> I had to actually "apply" for it to download it and after an email or 2 with Allan Batteiger, he sent me a link for a demo and manual along with a passcode to install. One of these days I'll set up one of my old x86 machines and try it.

I ran it in a virtual machine on my Mac, back when I still worked there. The original VirtualPC (Connectix, later bought by Microsoft) didn't fully do something with low level floppies, and OS-9000 wouldn't boot on it. I worked with a developer there and he debugged it to figure out why, and enabled it to work :) But that product disappeared once MS bought them, it seems. I don't know if it will boot on modern VMs, though I assume it should.

		-- A