steve@ea.UUCP (08/21/84)
#N:ea:7300005:000:3716 ea!steve Aug 21 04:04:00 1984 OS9/68k Lives... I and 5 companions just spent 3 very informative days at the annual Microware OS9 Seminar. It was at this conference that they officially unveiled OS9/68000 and Basic09 for the MC68000. Various vendors including some old favorites in the SS-50 marketplace had 68K machines running OS9. I personally benchmarked a 3 MHz 6809E vs a 3 MHz 68008 both in an SS-50 box, running a C compile on the same source code on the same filesystem. The program was 'Hello world'. On the 68K the compile took 46 seconds and on the 6809 it took 49 seconds. The difference may be so small because most of the time is spent waiting on the disk (a Tandon 10 MB drive with 56K cache). In general the 68k version of OS9 is quite similar to the level II version for the 6809. The 68k kernel was derived directly from the 6809 kernel and then hand modified to improve performance on the 68k. The most remarkable part of the new os9 is its size. It is about 24k of code. The utilities which include terse help and command line wild cards are only slightly larger than the level II utilities. This means that all of the distribution utilities including a minimal level screen editor will all fit on an 80 track 5 1/4 inch floppy. This is accomplished by making the C io library (yes they wrote the utilities in C) a resident module. The overhead is roughly 6K of memory and an enormous reduction in load time and size of the utilities. In the Beta test version of os9/68k the C io functions remained in the utilities themselves. They were distributed then to the Beta sites and the OEM's on 3 8 inch double-sided floppies. All-in-all, OS9/68K does all of the user level stuff that os9 Level II does and more. The new shell has more comprehensive IO redirection operators and prompts by default with a '$'. The arguments to utilities are now preceded by a '-' after the fashion of UNIX. The system is being distributed to those who want to make ports to new hardware in several forms. The 'Portapaks' are available for 4.1BSD, 4.2BSD, UNIX V, OS9 level II and soon to be available for VMS. The port pack consists of enough stuff to get a system up on a target machine. The cost of the 'Portapaks' ranges from $1500 to $2000 depending on both machine and the type of media on which the distribution is made. OS9/68000 is being distributed to us regular folks for $500. It is worth noting that turnkey versions are available from Microboards of Japan for their Multibus machine (which is FAST!), from Mizar Corporation for their VMEBus machines (VERY FAST with 600x400 graphics), from Smoke Signal and Helix from the SS-50 bus. There were 2 6809 products worthy of honorable mention. First was the GIMIX mainframe running terminals all over the place. It had 512K and a 60 Meg disk. As far as I could tell at any point it was running at least 2 compiles and 6 to 8 users without ANY noticable degradation in the response time. Very impressive box with smart IO processors. Second was the Fujitsu FM-11 running OS9 and some phenomenal windowing software written in Lisp09 (a Maclisp-like lisp from SEIKOU of Japan). The Fujitsu fellow that was there tells me that they haven't marketed the FM11 in this country because of FCC RFI compliance problems. I asked what the retail for the machine was in Japan (REAL NICE 600x400 graphics and 12 inch color monitor mind you)... Ready for this? $2000 I have seriously considered flying to Japan and bringing some back. You guys with Macintoshes and Lisas can defenistrate them cause they don't even hold a candle to this. I WANT ONE! More information will be forthcoming from ea!jejones and myself. Steve Blasingame (at Oklahoma City University) ucbvax!mtxinu!ea!steve