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[68.12.97.90]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id q19-20020a05683022d300b0066e93d2b858sm2470175otc.55.2022.12.14.07.14.45 (version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 bits=256/256); Wed, 14 Dec 2022 07:14:46 -0800 (PST) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 09:14:44 -0600 From: "G. Branden Robinson" To: Brad Spencer Message-ID: <20221214151444.niv5xtnxlmoifbrm@illithid> References: <202212140749.2BE7nWE2012686@freefriends.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha256; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="afdhiv6vqca4s4wj" Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Message-ID-Hash: BEXGTQI2SWAIUSOC3E4HSWN6PVZKVCSH X-Message-ID-Hash: BEXGTQI2SWAIUSOC3E4HSWN6PVZKVCSH X-MailFrom: g.branden.robinson@gmail.com X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; header-match-tuhs.tuhs.org-0; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: tuhs@tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Microware's OS-9 (was: Clever code) List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: --afdhiv6vqca4s4wj Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline At 2022-12-14T06:54:04-0500, Brad Spencer wrote: > arnold@skeeve.com writes: > > I suspect because Mach was available if you had the right Unix > > licenses and because it was hot in the research world in the mid > > 80s. Researchy types tend to look at what other researchers are > > doing / using, it seems to me often without knowledge of or caring > > about what people are using in industry. (My two cents, from having > > worked at universities.) The UNSW CSE department seemed to be a bit more outward facing than that, at least in my brief exposure to it, long after the 1980s. > In that time frame there was a number of microkernel designs. One > that has not been mentioned was OS-9 for the 6809/68000 processor. I > used it pretty extensively. OS-9 was very unix like from the userland > POV, when you consider something like V5 unix, however it didn't share > any of the same command names, just many of the same concepts. This is emphatically true. I used this system as a kid on a 64KiB machine, and I don't remember even a mention of Unix in the doorstop of a manual by Dale Puckett and Peter Dibble (who gave you something like 6 chapters of architectural background before introducing the shell prompt). Maybe they did mention Unix , but since it had no meaning to me at the time, it didn't sink in. I think it is also possible they avoided any names that they thought might draw legal ire from AT&T. > It was close enough that if you had the C compiler, a very basic K&R > compiler, you could get some of the unix command to compile without > too much trouble. Years later I went to college, landed on Sun IPC workstations, and quickly recognized OS-9's "T/S Edit" as a vi clone, and its "T/S Word" as a version of nroff. There was also a "T/S Spell" product but I don't recall it clearly enough to venture whether it was a clone of ispell. > OS-9 was very microkernel In that deployment environment, it had to be. > and nothing like Mach or even Minix. With the source of all three available, a technical paper analyzing and contrasting them would be a worthwhile thing to have. (It's unclear to me if even a historical version of QNX is available for study.) > It was also very much positioned to real time OS needs of the time and > was not really marketed generally and unless you happened to have a > Color Computer from Radio Shack Lucky me! How I yearned for a 128KiB Color Computer 3 so I could upgrade to OS-9 Level 2 and the windowing system. (512KiB was preferred, but there had been a spike in RAM prices right about the time the machine was released. Not that greater market success would have kept Tandy from under-promoting and eventually killing the machine.[1]) > It was very clean, but you needed to know 6809 or 68000 assembly to > create anything new for the OS itself, The 6809 was my first exposure to a (relatively) clean ISA design, having come from the Z80. It probably helped that I was born with a big-endian head and thus had an instinctive revulsion to Intel byte order at an extremely young age. In the late 1990s, Apple decided they wanted to rebrand their operating system (still "MacOS [Classic]" at the time), looked at Microware's name for its system, and said, "right, we'll be having that". Microware, having apparently so carefully followed the letter of trademark law with respect to AT&T Unix, sued Apple for peddling "OS/9" in the operating system market, and promptly got their asses handed to them by the federal district court, which dutifully honored the foremost principle of law: big people get to stomp smaller people as often, and as hard, as they would like.[2] (Later, apparently, Apple pointed out this precedent to Cisco with a shark-toothed grin when Apple decided they wanted the name "iOS" for yet another revitalizing rebrand of familiar technology. Cisco rolled over and took some undisclosed amount of money, which they promptly spent on acquisitions--they then were suddenly startled by the proportion of op ex going to salaries, and initiated layoffs.) Apple's never changed its stripes, but OS-9 lives on, as Free Software, under the name NitrOS-9.[4] Regards, Branden [1] Here's a story you may have to sit down for from Frank Durda IV (now deceased) about how the same company knifed their m68k-based line--which ran XENIX--in the gut repeatedly. It's hard to find this story via Web search so I've made a Facebook post temporarily(?) public. I'd simply include it, but it's pretty long. https://www.facebook.com/g.branden.robinson/posts/pfbid0F8MrvauQ6KPQ1tytme9uDiWGvprXft5dsxUzABYtdTKA9viZhB6Q2nadvtP1aDNQl [2] https://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/21/os9.suit.idg/index.html [3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_ios_name_to_apple_screenshot_shows_iwork_on_iphone [4] https://sourceforge.net/projects/nitros9/ --afdhiv6vqca4s4wj Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAABCAAdFiEEh3PWHWjjDgcrENwa0Z6cfXEmbc4FAmOZ6FgACgkQ0Z6cfXEm bc69eBAAsBSVa08mvqkjODuzPu0ozCH5Wwk4hQvqHMepW7PeArvKWOYpGiyMQohV c54t31LDsuBWPfmpVBRxfqN3eongZuQqexTLkCKvPmBYPDK7yHXQvT8lluxsZZY4 eGCRAdzRgCIA6Jj+egV5m2mIgUnWN9Y2BZyy3nquVAiHpOb6znHY5O9BJN9ARymL Qm6BRWLTLqM9DIUVKtpNdVs1eJDjPdPIfE1jWBNo/3i4Un2YOZodaWzMiioyM4YT CrQinGt2TXZ7XbDkUe4DUQbnh1fkRYku0OjlMEsGsCmb60cimDnEZyYQr0w4VNQD EWa5O/7vKzKsFcOv44XHDpvAV9Wio0LnjtoQ98UChsW9QrG4n78Fue9GGizRLI43 R9m6yoGS+vB/aKmaclWLBFg+kENGKZk5Y9TxPfpQRWdYYWoR/3NlFcOlZ12qJsOm Z15hPzLRXS/gUIgD82kbFOnyRQ8OZnAtNFjevxXYPyL5gHEGVVKZ419DJwlEMLEe zeGaxyklcP1UuCXfh6dUD14AnMIL4MUS0Ikk5aWaY7Xq5uunKs5KiaYar12pvpoV BALZi8YDrbvHSPJBSIwOqVt1xYrLVGYJsjdCpNGV9Jc7IgPdxcb3lGELL5nDsJn/ PPLM8dgqeqqm0wWoA8L5zbHJqYBsm4rJkCm1bvEfjrsfJBuHVWE= =bRTe -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --afdhiv6vqca4s4wj--