[Coco] early OS-9 ads/articles compilation

[jdaggett at gate.net]

On 9 Mar 2010 at 13:31, Aaron Wolfe wrote:

> The very earliest announcements for OS9 level 1 claim it requires only
> 4k of ram (but I think by the time it actually became available this
> requirement was raised).  Just image a 4k CoCo 1 running OS-9 from rom
> and using tape for storage.  Would have been quite a different
> computer.

Advance forward and look at the Motorola Pagewriter 2000.

It was a 2-way pager that had a full qwerty keyboard and a QVGA LCD screen.

The processor was a MC68328 Dragonball running OS9 out of one 4megabit Flash. A 
second 4 megabit Flash was for application storage and message storage. It also had 
1megabyte of static RAM. 

The Coco OS9 could be made to run totally out of ROM if one had the desire to do so. It 
probably would be a nice featre to run in an embedded applications where hard drive and 
floppy drives are not an option. Today with MMC and Flash drives that is not so much a 
major requirement. 

One thing that Tandy wanted the Coco to be able to do is run either the internal basic or be 
able to switch to OS9. Thus the kind of awkwardness of two OS' in one machine. The early 
computers would be dedicated to either the manufacturer's DOS or to OS9 and not able to 
easily switch both.  

I still have my Pagewriter 2K that I wore at work and was allowed to keep after I left Motorola. 
I think I still have the binary files for the OS and some apps on CD somewhere. I worked with 
two of the software engineers that ported OS9 (68K version) to the Dragonball and putting it 
into ROM. Not an easy task but was doable. The whole OS ran out of Flash and not disk. It is 
doable. I maintained the hardware and did cost reductions on the unit for two years. It was 
one of many pagers that I worked on. 

james