[Coco] [CoCo] NitrOS-9 on real CoCo (Was DriveWire 4)

[William Astle]

On 2018-01-05 04:28 PM, James Ross wrote:
> I get what you are saying that it was inspired by UNIX. However, am I mistaken to say the the I/O is very much UNIX based? Everything from a programming perspective (userland) is just another file at some level (so, to speak). I am not well versed enough to really say, but the standard I/O’s / pipes and shells and redirection and all seemed to be very UNIX-like.

Yes, the I/O subsystem interface is very unix-like. And pipes are 
certainly a big thing in the unix world. And, of course, the device 
descriptors at the head of a path make everything behave like a file. 
Things map almost exactly from the basic Unix I/O interface to the OS9 
interface.

One big thing that OS9 (at least in the 6809 world) doesn't have is a 
VFS (virtual file system) which is quite handy. It's not impossible to 
implement a "VFSMAN" for OS9, of course, but would be quite a job and it 
would need to have "file system drivers" for each supported file system 
type.

Then again, the basic Unix I/O system maps fairly well onto Win32 and 
other non-Unix systems, too.

Anyway, "unix-like" yes, "unix subset" not so much. :)