[Coco] origins of OS-9

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 10:08 PM, George Ramsower
<georgeramsower at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: Aaron Wolfe
> Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2010 7:46 PM
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm writing an article about OS-9 for a "retro computing" magazine.
> I'm interested in exactly how and why OS-9 came to exist and any
> related stories.
>
> --------------------------
>
>  A long time ago in a place far away, I seem to recall...
>
>  I read somewhere that the origin of OS9 for the COCO was initiated by
> Motorola.
>  I'm sure the motivation was sales of chips.
>  The way I remember this is that Motorola was already hooked up with both
> Tandy and Microware. Motorola negotiated some sort of understanding and OS9
> was released for the 64K Color Computer.
>  I have no clue of the origins of OS9 except for what I've just told y'all
> and, that's just rusty memory.
>
>  I think my "wet RAM" may have dried out and now it's rusting and corroding
> and ...
>

This is suggested in a few different places, although all seem to be
personal accounts, nothing "official".  But I think the general
consensus is that Motorola introduced Microware to Tandy, and this is
how OS-9 came to the CoCo.  Motorola also apparently owned a portion
of Microware at this time, so there was likely quite a bit of
collaberation going on, the Basic09 project being the most famous.

The article I'm working on is not CoCo centric, although I plan to
talk about OS-9's tour of duty on our favorite machines.  I have found
enough talk about OS-9 in the 68 Micro Journal prior to the CoCo era
to suspect the Tandy deal was not directly part of the reason OS-9
came to be.  It seems Motorola was working with all these parties
around the release of the 6809 (Tandy with the Agvision/Videotex) so
there could have been some influence.. not sure.


> George
>
>
>
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