[Coco] OS9 vs Flex

[John Kent]

Hi Aaron & others,

Yes, Flex is a single user system. There is a lot of software for it 
though. Flex has to sit between $C000 and $DFFF. Calls to Flex are made 
by jumps to absolute memory locations rather than vectoring through 
software interrupts and function codes like I think OS9 does, so it's 
not position independent. There is also Uniflex, which I don't know a 
great deal about, but I think that is a multitasking upgrade from Flex.

Flex was designed for the South West Technical Products, Smoke Signal 
Broadcasting, and Gimix computers. There might have been a few more. 
They were mainly bases on the SS50 bus, so were more like the S100 card 
slot systems. They were designed more for use with serial terminals 
although there were some memory mapped video cards you could get for them.

The CoCo really integrated all the video display and graphics into a 
single box, which made it a lot less expensive and more accessible to 
the general public. It allowed you to use your colour TV as the display 
again saving on cost.

John.

On 31/12/2011 4:14 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> The 68 Micro Journal has tons of articles about FLEX.  Several
> different varieties existed, some of which were
> multitasking/multiuser, but the basic/stock/original flavor was single
> tasking and a lot like CPM.   Like OS9 there was a version available
> for most of the 6809 systems.
>
> John Kent has a neat 6809 FPGA system that runs FLEX.  I only messed
> around with it a little bit, but I think it fits in somewhere between
> DECB and OS9 as far as capabilities.  If you want to know an awful lot
> about it, spend some time in the 68 MJ:
>
> https://sites.google.com/a/aaronwolfe.com/cococoding/home/magazines/68-micro-journal
>
> You can sort of feel how it was initially fairly popular, but became
> overshadowed by OS9 in time by noticing the relative # of ads and
> number of articles in the journal over time.
>
> -Aaron
>
>

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