[Coco] CoCo TALK #18 an introduction to OS9

[Steve Strowbridge]

I love how this thread continues to further itself, and I'm taking mental
notes as the replies roll in..
I can at least answer some of the questions as to "why didn't we talk about
____"

First and foremost this initial talk was meant to be an "introduction" to
OS-9, it was intended to be high level and pretty much show and tell, and
what it looks like, and demo some of the capabilities.
Also, since I was the one driving the demo on my CoCo, and I had zero
exposure or experience to OS-9 less than a week before this presentation,
my own knowledge and experience base was very limited to draw from, so this
was pretty much a show "for me, and people like me" who really never saw it
before and wanted to look at it.

We did try to give examples and explanations of things along the way, but
also tried to keep the depth of techno babble to a minimum.

What I'm hoping will stem from this, is I can compile a list of maybe 3-4
virtual hard drive images that we can make available to the public, and I
can revisit this talk in a few weeks after I've learned a little more and
we have some good resources for people to pull up and use themselves.  I am
under the impression that there is an image or two on the archive, I think
Barry Nelson has made a few available to me, and I'm hoping to work with
Curtis and Bill a bit more to further tweak the image I got from Bill to do
the demo.

Future shows will dig deeper into the OS and get more technical as time
goes on, but it's impossible to cover "it all" in only a few hours.  I
think we have certainly gotten some newfound interest in the OS and I hope
this interest, and these discussions will continue to move forward.

I just got my USB to serial adapter which I've yet to hook up, but another
thing I've been aching to play with his DriveWire on my real CoCo3, so I'm
looking forward to possibly combining the two of these in a future talk, as
well.

I'd love to get more people to join the skype call the next time we talk
about OS-9, so for all of you who want to share your experiences with us in
the future, please add me as a Skype contact as "ogStevieStrow" and please
join us in the future, love to have you all.

There are very few rules on CoCo TALK, as long as we're taking about the
CoCo, and we don't take any topic and "beat it to death" it's worth talking
about, so please join us in the skype call in the future!

Long live the CoCo!




Steve Strowbridge, aka
The Original Gamer Stevie Strow
Website/Merchandise/CoCo links page:
http://ogsteviestrow.com
Email:  ogsteviestrow at gmail.com
Get your "Game Play Goodnes" fix of CoCo and retro videos at:
http://youtube.com/ogsteviestrow


On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 3:48 PM, Wayne Campbell <asa.rand at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 10:47 AM, Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com> wrote:
>
> > Actually, in my opinion if you write a program that requires an external
> > program (OS9 command) then you should probably be prepared for the fact
> > that that external program could change in which case it would behoove
> you
> > to include the external program with your distribution. And, if you find
> > that you really do have a problem with such a program that calls an
> > external program (like tmode and dir) then just use the older version of
> > the program which behaves correctly with your program.
>
>
> I actually did write DCom to use tmode. When I came back to it and found I
> had to change that, it became part of the reason I decided to start over. I
> determined that it was better to use system calls since they had not
> changed. However, I was actually referring to other programs I had heard
> about that used some of the command modules (predominantly tmode) and
> realized that many such programs were now broken due to the changes  in
> option syntax. I believe that this information is vital to anyone being
> introduced to OS-9, as they may run into the problem when they try to run
> some older program under NitrOS-9 and otherwise don't know why it doesn't
> work.
>
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