sdyer@bbncca.ARPA (Steve Dyer) (10/14/83)
I went to my local CoCo users' group last night, and was surprised to see that one of the members had purchased OS-9 at the downtown Boston R/S Computer Center. Apparently selected Computer Centers are receiving two or so every few days--don't ask me why! I called around and found a center that had just received one that morning, and drove dowm immediately to claim it. It is labelled as version 1.00.00, so one wonders if the rumored recall for a bug fix was true, or whether they felt it wasn't worth the recall. It is very handsomely packaged in an IBM-PC-size documentation folder, with three wire-ring volumes of documentation, "OS-9 Technical Information", "OS-9 Program Development", and "OS-9 Commands", and a pamphlet, "Getting Started with OS-9". Two floppies are included, a boot floopy and the OS-9 system master. I will be spending the weekend getting more familiar with the system. A brief demo last night at the meeting was very impressive--redirection, background tasks, subdirectories, wow! It uses the default text screen of the CoCo, 16 x 32, but that might be necessary in a system which is straining 64K to the limit. FHL has a utility which is supposed to provide a 24 x 51 graphics screen, but this uses up system memory. More later. /Steve Dyer decvax!genrad!wjh12!bbncca!sdyer