[Coco] Why DECB is important to OS-9 folk.

[Stephen H. Fischer]

Hi,

Yes I do have the idea that it may be too late.

But just in case it is not, what is the harm in trying to discover if the
DECB world can be improved and their numbers increased.

Yes there may not be much programming being done with DECB or on OS-9 now.
That might change in the future.

We have few or none new CoCo users that were not using the CoCo in the past
or knew someone who was. None much more likely.

The programming classes today must be talking about current machines, 3.4G
Hz CPU and Windows OS.

For persons who do not take the classes may not be able to write Windows
based programs due to the huge complexity of Windows.

That is an incorrect statement but I do not wish to explain now.

The much smaller world of the CoCo may be a better place to start for many.
But DECB is way too old and different from anything current.

Even if we advertise the CoCo is a good place to start it will be a hard
sell. Is there any CoCo web site really prepared to try and get persons
interested who have no prior experience. They all are for helping old CoCo
people.

The DECB preprocessor will help to make Basic programming a better
experience on the CoCo. I am still typing these message which delay my work
on that. I did discover a way to read my old FLEX disks and surprise they
read just fine. I learned to not put files on a RAM disk and run the CoCo
with out a fan.


--------------------------

Teasing you all with possible coming attractions is great fun.

How about an object that you plug into a CoCo 3 Cassette connector, type
"CLOAD..." and you are quickly in a DECB session running on OS-9 but
appearing to be an unchanged DECB CoCo 3 with no disk drive.


Stephen H. Fischer

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Gault" <robert.gault at worldnet.att.net>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: September 04, 2005 11:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] Why DECB is important to OS-9 folk.


> You probably are right about the ratio of Disk Basic vs OS-9 users in
> general. Hard to tell if the remaining active users are distributed that
> way because the number is very small compared to that before Tandy dropped
> the Coco.
>
> Based on what I've seen of messages the last few years, there is very
> little interest in any kind of programming vs hardware tinkering. The main
> interest of the remaining programmers seems to be either writing emulators
> or in projects such as NitrOS-9. This is not what I'd consider writing
> programs for the Coco.
>
> The amount of e-mail that proudly shows off a new program in Disk Basic ,
> OS-9, or machine language or asks for help creating a routine in any Coco
> language is almost non-existent.
>
> There does not seem to be much point in worrying about how to run Disk
> Basic programs under OS-9 or attempts to make OS-9 work like Disk Basic
> until there is proof that anyone actually is writing programs of any kind.