[Coco] NitrOS9 Sources

[Allen Huffman]

On Mar 11, 2013, at 4:21 PM, Bill Gunshannon <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu> wrote:
> If I am not mistaken, OS9000 was a complete re-write of the OS9
> paradigm and not jut a translation of the original code.  There
> was OS9-68K in between and I believe it was also completely or
> mostly in 68K assembler as well.

It's like this... Boisy may be able to correct my years, since it's been a long time since I have written this out.

1977 - Microware forms in a basement in Des Moines. (maybe 1978?)
1978 - RT68 - first product, for Motorola 6800.
1980 - OS-9 for the 6809
1983 - OS-9 for 68000 (kernel, etc. in assembly, but some utilities and such in C). The kernel was 28K or so - tiny and fast.
1989 - OS-9000 for X86/68020 - "Portable OS-9" rewritten in C, with some API compatibility, but quite a bit of new capabilities. From this point forward, all new ports would be from the OS-9000 code base.
1995 - (?) OS-9000 for PowerPC

After that, it was ported to Sparc, MIPS, ARM/StrongARM. SuperHitachi (SH-3, SH-4), and maybe some others I forgot. We started referring to everything as "OS-9 for (CPU)" since, at the heart, they were all OS-9.

Today, not all of those ports survive, but 68K does, and ARM and X86 do, for sure.

> There seems to be some confusion here.  If you dis-assembled MicroWare's
> OS9 and then cleaned up the listings to make NitrOS9 then you are most
> definitely in violation of their Copyrights.  If I, having ever seen

What we know today as NitrOS-9 started out at a series of overlay patches, that were done on top of a stock OS-9 disk. Over they years, disassemblies were made, rewrites were made, and although it started out long ago as patches on top of, it eventually got to the point where it is unlikely the original Microware engineers would recognize it -- other than it running OS-9 API stuff :)

By the time NitrOS-9 was around like this, OS-9/6809 was long dead and off the radar at Microware, too. When I started at Microware in 1995, I don't think I ever saw any trace of 6809 even existing there until Boisy showed me the old OS-9/6809 system (and we had a engineers that had CoCos in their cubes).

> Isn't MicroWare gone?  And, in any event I am fairly certain they are
> not interested in moving to any paltform I would be looking at.

Microware was sold to RadiSys in 2001. They owned OS-9 and all the Microware IP. Originally, they were known as something like "Microware Communications Software Division" or something like that, then eventually the name faded away and it was just RadiSys selling "Microware OS-9".

Beyond appearing at a 1993 CoCoFEST (and offering a cheap copy of OS-9000/X86), Microware took a very hands-off approach to the hobbyist community. There were some efforts, though. The OS-9 "demo" disc that was, for a time, freely available, contained a .tar file that had command line compilers, etc. This let hobbyists get the demo, then make a native OS-9000 system and build stuff for it. Unfortunately, by then it seems folks who wanted to do that had moved to Linux or just stopped tinkering, and it never got any traction.

-
Allen Huffman - PO Box 22031 - Clive IA 50325 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT only)
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22nd Annual "Last" Chicago CoCoFEST! April 27-28, 2013. Lombard, IL. http://www.glensideccc.com