[Coco] origins of OS-9

[Frank Swygert]

You don't realize the irony of your statement, do you? That's almost what happened with Microsoft! IBM came calling to get BASIC, and pretty much told Gate's they'd buy BASIC if he came up with an operating system to go with it...  Of course that was MS-DOS and not Windows, but close enough! 

Microware had to have something to run Basic09 FROM though. Maybe the original intent was to make it a stand-alone product similar to CoCo BASIC -- a programming language with minimal OS-like features so it didn't need to boot a separate OS to run, not a true OS. That would explain the comments about developing B09 then developing a full-blown OS to go with it instead of simpler integrated OS-like functions. 

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Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 11:47:57 -0500
From: Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com>
It's really not a critical point, but I find it strange that the
origin of OS-9 is explained (in several places) as "well, we made
Basic09 and thought we better make an OS to go with it".  It's like
Micro$oft saying "well we had this Word processor so we thought we
better create Windows".   If OS-9 was released even initially as a
simple way to get Basic09 running, it might make more sense, but from
everything I can find OS-9 was a fairly complete OS from v1.0 that
could do much more than launch B09.

-- 
Frank Swygert
Publisher, "American Motors Cars" 
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