[Coco] OS-9 Level1 Version 02.00.00 FYI

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 17 April 2020 17:52:16 David Gettle wrote:
And sent as PM but the story needs told so reply is to the list.

> Gene, I think you mis-read my post, I did nothing with NitrOS9, I made
> a zip file of RadioShack catalog 700-2331 OS9 level1 version 02.00.00
> system and config disk images  for archive purposes and uploaded it to
> the coco archive web site.
>
Possibly so. I have that disk someplace in my midden heap.

But it had undergone quite a few patches to a copy of it before I used 
that to build my gvg e-disk emulator for the tv station, which used it 
for around 17 years with 2 different GVG-300/3A/B production video 
switchers. That particular coco2 also had "the forgotten chip" 
conversion. The only one I did, and they gave it back to me 17 yeas ago.

Because that gave me the tools to do things in the far reaches of that 
switchers digital circuitry, I was able to do signature analysis, 
compareing various channels, and troubleshoot it to the exact digital 
chip that had failed.  At one point early on it was down to 2 working 
channels, and I must have run up a thousand in long distance  calls 
because the failed chip was never jedec registered, but almost by 
accident I called AMD, who it turned out had made it for grass in the 
first place. Grass had just one, no guarantee it was good and they still 
wanted $1750 for me to plug it in and see it it fixed it.  But AMD did 
have a house number for it, and sold me a 24 count stick of them for 
around 50 bucks COD. I used about half of them over the next 16 years.

At the time I had about $200 in the whole kit, compared to $20,000 for it 
from GVG.  My version ran 8x faster than theirs, and had English 
filenames limited only by the a 720k disk drive used for each tech 
directors favorite bag of tricks. But that as I approached retirement, 
was obviously very long in the tooth, and no one at GVG then knew 
anything about it.  So I made it plain that the first failure was likely 
its last and the station should budget for its replacement.  So they 
bought a piece of excrement that lasted 6 months before the company went 
bust.  What they have now is pretty good, but I left them with a builder 
in the form of our IT guy, who was 17 and fresh out of high school when 
I walked in the door in late 84. Learning as he went and taking some 
night courses, who proceeded to build the gear we needed, to first buy 
the bankrupt Fox affiliate, then as the digital transformation came, and 
video servers were still strange  creatures, and they are now feeding 2 
transmitters with 8 different program sources, all being fed from 2 
servers this man built from scratch. Either one can function stand 
alone, recording and playing back those 8 channels at the same time. But 
the FBI just north of Clarksburg came calling 20 months back, looking 
for a linux guy, and he is now making about 3x what the station was 
paying by driving another 3  miles to work. In the meantime, the owner 
died about 4 years back, and his daughter/heir was a radio only girl, 
sold it for 26 Mil.

The new owners have been to the MBA (spit) school, and since an MBA 
always has to have somebody else to blame when something goes toes up, 
the first order was to get rid of any linux stuff.

Funny thing happened though. The linux stuff just kept on working which 
took away much of the incentive to get rid of it, plus the price of 
commercial windows based stuff to replace it was also extremely eye 
opening.  So nearly 3 years later, its still there, with a stool pulled 
up to the cash cow, milking away.

Ya gotta luv it when the dependability and performance per dollar get 
itemized in the P&L statements.  MBA's can understand that.

> Tim, I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't boot on the VCC, I even
> switched the VCC to 6809 mode and it still would not boot, unless
> there's something that was missed in creating it that the actual
> hardware does, because I did boot my CoCo3 with the disk I made the
> images from, then loaded the disk image into /D0 in the VCC typed
> "dos[enter]" and it tried and failed to load. I used nitros9 and
> drivewire to create the disk images which are formatted as SSDD 35
> track standard OS9 disks, and used backup to copy the dta into the
> .DSK files.

I've never (successfully) dealt with a coco emulator. Nothing beats the 
original IMO.  I may have copies of one or 2 of them, but have yet to 
make one of them boot on anything else I've had. OTOH, windows is an 
endangered specie around my place, I own exactly 1 win10 machine which 
only gets fired up when I need to analyze/adjust an AM BC tower. And 
that was because the linux drivers that came with the gear I bought to 
do that, didn't work on linux, so I had to buy a cheap winders box for a 
display.

Now I'll do an Andy Capp and shud-up.
>
> On 4/16/2020 3:32 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > On Thursday 16 April 2020 14:53:31 David Gettle wrote:
> >> For those interested, I made a zip file of the disk images and
> >> submitted them to the CoCo Archive. the images do not work with VCC
> >> but do work on actual CoCo hardware.
> >
> > This should not be encouraged. If you are making changes to nitros9,
> > they should be committed to the repo and tested/shared by all.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>