[Coco] Anyone else collect other old computers/game consoles beside the Coco?

[Joel Ewy]

On 08/27/2011 10:36 AM, gene heskett wrote:
> On Saturday, August 27, 2011 10:59:30 AM Joel Ewy did opine:
>
>> On 08/27/2011 05:16 AM, Mark Marlette wrote:
>> ...
>>> I met David Graham as well at the fest but never purchased one then.
>>> Got one at one of the CoCoFest auctions. Carl Kreider was at this
>>> past years fest, now the AT306/WCP306 was a cool machine. We had some
>>> great conversations on that machine, Karl is truly at talented
>>> Engineer, hardware, software, he got it. Sigh....the memories!!!
>> Yeah.  It seemed like there was a real opportunity for a while for
>> motivated people to develop OS-9 drivers for all kinds of ISA bus
>> hardware for the AT306 / MM/1b / PT-68K.  But I guess the OS-9/68K
>> market was too fragmented.
>>
>> JCE
> I don't think that was it at all Joel.  The only place to get a legal copy
> of os9-68k was from Prof. Digby Tarvan, whom I have had correspondence with
> just in the last 3 or 4 years.  He said he lost his shirt on it at $600+ a
> copy, and did not really push it since it had no gui at all.  I had at one
> point, considered putting it on my amiga, but with no gui, and no support
> for the 68040 card and its 64 megs of dram, that was a deal killer for me.
>

That may have been true for the Amiga port, but IMS -> Blackhawk 
Enterprises had a license for the MM/1 that must have been significantly 
less per copy, since I don't think I paid more than $250-$300 for my 
MM/1 motherboard, which included OS-9, and all the printed manuals -- 
though memory of the dollar amounts is starting to fade.

David Graham reasoned that since they had a license for OS-9 for the 
MM/1, and nowhere was it spelled out just exactly what comprised an 
MM/1, he could sell the AT306 as the MM/1b, and the license would hold 
for that as well.  I don't remember what those were going for at the 
time, but I bet you could have gotten the whole ball of wax for less 
than what you would have paid for Amiga OS-9.

> The bottom line I think was that Microware saw it as a controller type of
> program and never put any more effort into it that it took to make it run
> traffic lights.  Zero interest in attempting to compete with amigados was
> what killed os9-68k....

True.  But the great thing about OS-9 was its modularity, and the fact 
that (in theory, anyway) it should have been relatively easy for third 
party developers to come up with drivers for existing commodity ISA bus 
hardware.  But for most of them to put forth the effort they would have 
needed to see a sufficiently large number of potential customers.  OS-9 
drivers for Zorro bus expansion boards on the Amiga would be a whole 
other deal.  But didn't the A2000 have a couple ISA slots?  If I recall 
correctly, there were only ever a few ISA devices supported under 
AmigaOS, like some modems, perhaps.  Maybe a few other things could be 
used under DOS running on a Bridgeboard.  There again, memory is fuzzy.

> ...
>
> As for DW on a 68k board, I have not checked, but since I expect the m68k
> versions of linux, uclib equipt because most of those machines do not have
> a memory manager chip at all, might be able to build java, at which point
> DW4 written in java might accidentally work.  I think it is something that
> should be investigated, and will if and when I can get an external PSU
> cobbled up for the A4k/060 machine I brought home from the tv station a
> year ago.

Ah, I was talking about a DW client, not the server part.  With SCSI 
hard drives gradually dropping off the face of the earth, it would be 
nice to have a different mass storage option for the OS-9/68K machines, 
as well as some network access.  As for Linux/m68k, I know there is/was 
a version of uCLinux for 68K that needed no MMU, but I would be a little 
surprised if there is a working Java VM for that.  Debian/m68k, which I 
have installed on archaic Macs, just for the perverse thrill, never had 
working Java, that I can recall.  But the m68k architecture has been 
dropped as an official Debian port, and from what I can understand of 
the talk on the mail list, the m68k guys are struggling to modernize the 
kernel and the toolchain, and get build machines running (many of which 
have switched to emulation with ARANYM, because it's faster, and the 
virtual hardware is significantly easier to maintain).  Now, if you 
could get your A4k/060 running Debian and get Java running, I'm sure the 
Debian guys would applaud, though there are probably higher priority 
packages.

> Maybe this winter when the garage workshop has been commandeered
> by Dee&  the Toyota.  Right now its mid-project, making seating/storage
> benches to go around a neighbors nearly 10 foot long dining room table. ;-)
>

But first you need to uncover the lathe and stick a tuit in, right?  :-)

JCE

> Cheers, gene