[Coco] OS-9 History

[John Donaldson]

I worked at NASA/JSC from 1971 - 1988. We used SWPC (sp)6809 computers 
that ran OS9 OS. Also JSC at one time had the largest COCO club (100+ 
people) that consisted of mostly Engineers and Technicians. The SWPC 
6809 computers ran Fortran 77 under the OS9 OS. The three main 
programming packages that were developed for OS9 and would also run on 
the COCO OS9 port was Fortran 77, PASCAL09, and K&R C. One of the 
Astronaut Engineers took a COCO2 and made it into a talking word 
processor for a blind person that worked at JSC. He had gotten 
permission from Tandy to do some redesign. A few years later an 
aerospace company came out with a device for small aircraft that 
displayed NEXRAD weather graphics. I got a chance to look at the 
electronics and discovered it was basically a re-packaged COCO2. It was 
built by Motorola.

John Donaldson


On 4/26/2013 10:20 PM, George Ramsower wrote:
>   I really want to know, and I'm waiting to hear/read about the history of
> OS9.
>
>   If memory serves me correctly....
>
>   I've read, many years ago, that Microware wanted to make a RTOS for a
> microcomputer to be similar to Unix and that the 6809 was perfect(at the
> time) for this application. I've even read that OS9 was developed for NASA
> on the eary missions and BASIC09 was developed for the Radio Shack release.
>
>   Don't know if any of this is true but, that's what I remember.
>
>   I'm really intersted to see some input on this.
>
> George
>
>    ----- Original Message -----
>    From: Wayne Campbell
>
>    I believe that OS-9 was designed to provide a base from which Basic09
> could show the capabilities of the 6809 processor. In addition the RTS
> capability of the os was to show that a real-time os was possible with the
> 6809 as well.
>
>    Thierry Mella <thierry.mella at skynet.be> wrote:
>
>
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