[Coco] multitasking was1000sx update

[Willard Goosey]

>From: KnudsenMJ at aol.com
>Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 23:29:33 EDT

>Well, there's a quote for the ages!

Why, thank you. :-)

>Although multi-tasking did work well on my Coco, I soon learned not to  start 
>two procs that both had to access the hard drive -- they spent most of  their 
>time undoing each other's seeks.

Oh yes, as long as everything's in RAM, OS-9 is a beautiful thing to
watch multitask.  But I/O is a REAL bottleneck.
> 
>To make a real OS-9 computer, Tandy should have put in a decent
>interrupt handler,

I guess that was part of the problem... Tandy didn't decide that they
should really push OS-9 until the CoCo 3 had been out for a year or
so.  And then it was too late. :-(

>but that would have cost another big Moto chip. 

A good point.  I read once that when Jobs and Woz were building the
Apple 1, they could get a 6502 for $2... or a 6801 for $50. And since
the CoCo was trying to compete with the dirt-cheap-to-build C64...

> Certainly when they went to the Coco 3 and added the GIME, with its
>additional interrupt sources, it would have been nice to separate out
>the clock interrupts from everything else.
> 
Yeah, just doing that would have helped.

>Coco OS-9 had more funny bugs and misfeatures and wasted time with  
>interrupts than anything else, IMHO.  --Mike K.

Hum, I've never seen anything else running OS-9.  I take it other
ports are better?

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko