[Coco] DECB -> Pi2/3

[Francis Swygert]

From: Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com>

> On Mar 6, 2017, at 3:37 PM, Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com> wrote:
> 
> You know about OS9000, right?  It was an OS9 derivative from Microware that was written in C and compiled to run on 80x86, Power PC, and 68000 platforms.  There's probably no reason that it couldn't also be made to work on an ARM machine too.  I wrote some software back in the 90s that ran under OS9000 on an 80486 but it was compiled C code, not directly written in assembler.  I still have the install disks for OS9000 but I don't know if they're good.

Yes, OS-9 for ARM is a thing. (We renamed the product from OS-9000 to "OS-9 for XXX" during my time there, causing a bit of confusion when you just said "OS-9").

And it runs on the Raspberry Pi ;-) 
However, the ethernet hardware is via USB so none of the existing ethernet drivers would work with it, and they were working on a new USB stack to be able to support things like USB ethernet devices.

Microware LLC (the new owners) have said they would like to make some form of "Personal OS-9" available to us if they can get it all worked out.

If anyone remembers the RTSI OS-9 Archive site by Allan Battieger, he is part of the group that now owns OS-9. It's stayed in the family :) os9archive.rtsi.com is still alive, I see, with updates from 2015.
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Seems like there might be a market for "Pi-09"... if it can be made at a low price. Maybe a developers version restricting distribution of any embedded code? Can write software to be used by others with the same system for non-commercial purposes, different license for commercial use? Shouldn't be too hard for one of you programmers to write a driver for the Pi's Ethernet port... or a $10-15 USB to Ethernet port adapter... Frank Swygert
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