[Coco] DECB -> Pi2/3

[Allen Huffman]

> On Mar 6, 2017, at 4:58 PM, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Sure, but what good does that do any of us?  It's not free.  It's not available in
> source so it certainly isn't portable.  It runs (or is it ran now?) on a very limited
> hardware set (the PC version did not run on all PC's we tried it at the University.)
> And probably worst of all, it was bloated.  One of OS-9's strengths was the size.

Tiny compared to Linux, but huge compared to OS-9/68K. The 28K assembly kernel for 68K was 60 or 80K in C.

> Maybe when I understand the inards better I will try once again at porting it
> to something else.  But right now I am not even sure what would constitute
> a minimal functionaing system.  (I also have another 6809 based box I would
> love to have it on for reasons most people here probably would never understand,
> the original TAPR TNC 1)  :-)

That’s the problem today. Back then, we could NEVER get all the ethernet drivers written to support all the wants to the X86 platform. We had only a few PCMCIA cards we supported, but there seemed to be hundreds people wanted to use. Ditto for graphics cards, with many being “impossible” to get specs for.

Now, it’s all the USB and such. Microware was very early with Bluetooth (I’d never heard of it when we started supporting it - it didn’t exist in anything that I’d seen). We had a Firewire (IEEE 1394) stack that could control digital camcorders (demonstrated in our court case between Apple Computers) and USB DEVICE support — so an OS-9 device could be plugged up to a PC (think MP3 player and such). We didn’t even have HOST support when I was there, I don’t think.

Today, I think the hardware platforms have settled down greatly. I’d be curious to see what all OS-9 supports today. I know it didn’t support SATA when I was last there.

		— A