halkoD@batman.moravian.edu (David Halko) (11/02/90)
the following articles were posted to Compuserve, then reposted to the Princeton
CoCo Listserver (where there are alot of OS9-68K conversations) and reposted to
the appropriate news groups over the internet. It is really nice to know that
we all keep good company in our community with a common operating system (OS-9
for the Atari ST, MAC's, Amiga's, MM/1's, TomCat's, etc.) Affordable home
computers have come such a long way... you can get systems like these for under
$1000.... More articles will follow upon mailed request request...
Enjoy the articles...
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With all the chatter about what was at the Atlanta 'fest in terms of the
new machines, I would have thought someone would have posted this OS9
Forum exchange to the LIST by now.
<<<>>>
CompuServe The OS-9 Forum
Atlanta Fest?
Date Range: 19-Oct-90 to 24-Oct-90
#7585
Fm: Colin J. Smith 73777,1360
To: [F] Paul K. Ward 73477,2004
Dt: 19-Oct-90
So, now that everybody has kissed (?) and made up, I have a question.
Just what was at the 'fest? Some of us didn't make it to Atlanta. I take it
there was some neat stuff from the conversation that has been going on, but
would somebody please tell me what IMS, FHL, and Delmar actually had?
Thanks a lot!
--Colin
#7595 reply to #7585
Fm: Steve Wegert 76703,4255
To: Colin J. Smith 73777,1360
Dt: 20-Oct-90
Colin,
As I, too, came away a bit confused (is Kev's mini review in error?), maybe
each of the pricipals, Frank, Ed and Paul, would post _their own_ impressions
of the fest and what was going on in their booths.
Nothing like getting it from the horses ....ahhh...err..hmmm.... mouth.
Yeah ... that's the ticket!
Steve
#7603 reply to #7595
Fm: Colin J. Smith 73777,1360
To: Steve Wegert 76703,4255
Dt: 20-Oct-90
Yeah, a report of what was going on in thier OWN booths! (Sorry, couldn't
resist! Heh heh heh)
;-)
--Colin
#7721 reply to #7603
Fm: Paul K. Ward 73477,2004
To: Colin J. Smith 73777,1360
Dt: 24-Oct-90
Colin,
Well, OK, a report of what was goin on in our OWN booth!
First, we were right next to the guys from Detroit who do Lyra, so we had
musical accompaniment -- and we were right across from the CoCo Pro! booth,
where frequent PA announcements were being made -- made us all feel at home!
All we missed were Lonnie's sales ladies and his fancy wardrobe! <grin>
It was especially nice to see Cray Augsburg and Greg Law, also of Rainbow fame.
At our booth we have five MM/1's (actually we had four later as one went up to
someone's room for something) showing a lot of Mike Haaland's and Kevin
Darling's demos, as well as a slide show viewer for the M/1 by Kevin Pease, our
hardworking hardware designer. The slide show viewer runs from a simple script
file and shows a bunch of GIF images that have been moved to the IFF format,
which IMS believes is the Way To Go for a great deal of work (it is the CD-I
standard, and is used by Amigas and by HUGE software firms like Electronic Arts
-- also, it is the standard accepted by the ANSI Hypermedia committee that IMS
is part of).
Mike Haaland had his version of Tetrix running, and the CoCo Maze program,
screaming by in random colors. There were severalother graphics demos from Mike
that were showing off the library support he has built up from Kevin's drivers.
Also, Kevin showed some Amiga demos he had downloaded and modified for the
MM/1, including an Imperial Walker from Star Wars, firing lasers, Star Trek,
The Next Generation's Enterprise going into hyperspeed in a flash, while the
them song played (and played and played, in beautiful Ives-esque antiphony to
our booth next door) ...
and there was my personal favorite, Dave Letterman, in an animated sequence,
throwing a wad of paper at the monitor.
Kevin worked very hard on these demos -- thanks! It should be noted, too, that
one of the demos shown EATS UP an Amiga, but runs nicely on ours and allows you
to flip to another window and do some other work.
We also had a database and wordprocessor there, but, strangely, no one asked
about them ... <grin>.
We had some press releases to hand out (we'll get thos posted here!) and sold T
shirts and other things. Zack Sessions helped us out by selling some of our Bob
van der Poel stock, which sold nicely (as did Zack's OS9 games). Incidentally,
one of the demos was Pyramid Solitaire, by Zack, ported by Mike Haaland in
about a day and a half.
Computers were there for preorders, but not for sale, pending FCC Class B
approval, something IMS feels very strongly about, and I think our customers
appreciate it when we say that, for OSK to become mainstream on the MM/1, the
MM/1 has to compete with the big boys, FCC approval and all.
We also put little orange stickers on the lapels of folks who came by and
really liked the MM/1. By the end of Saturday, just about everyone had a
sticker (only some vendors were without, because they had not come over,
especially some folks selling RS-DOS stuff. i am not sure they understood where
all the OS9 interest had come from!
Some people even had several orange stickers.
We had a great time, and BOY, it was tiring -- and exhilirating.
Excellent response.
The next day after the Fest, we had lunch at the Coca Cola headquarters,
courtesy of Newton White, a Fest organizer. Then we hopped over to Georgia Tech
to a fest that included Macs and PS/2s, getting information and insight into
what students want. One popular PS/2 demo was a game of -- get this -- Pyramid
Solitaire. The Windows 3.0 demo seemed dead in comparison. There was also a
MIDI demo on the PS/2.
That's all for now!
#7777 reply to #7603
Fm: Ed Gresick 76576,3312
To: Colin J. Smith 73777,1360
Dt: 26-Oct-90
Hi Colin!
Reporting on our booth ...
We displayed five operating production SYSTEM IV machines, one of which was
installed in a tower case to accomodate additional drives. Three machines were
running a slide show demonstrating the VGA graphics capabilty of the SYSTEM IV.
In addition to a wide variety of pictures, a pc board layout and a schematic
diagram were displayed with amazing detail and clarity. The reaction by the
attendees to the SYSTEM IV and especially the VGA graphics was very rewarding.
Many commented that the graphics displayed were the best at the show.
The machine in the tower case was used to demonstrate various application
programs including my Point-of-Sale System written in SCULPTOR. We were able
to compare how they performed on a VGA monitor vs normal terminals (Wyse 60,
Wyse 30 and a Tandy DT100).
We were showing a public domain 'windows' program from the TOP Munich group in
Germany. This program not only allows windows on the VGA screen but you can
have windows on terminals hooked up to the serial ports. And, flipping between
windows was fast - as fast as the terminals could write their screens. And
when flipping windows on the VGA screen, the rewrite was virtually
instantaneous!
The remaining machine was used to demonstrate an alternate operating system
written by Dan Farnsworth called MONK (an excellent single-user operating
system similar to FLEX but with improvements). Dan has written some excellent
software and is writing more. Of special interest is a program that will allow
Color Computer RS-DOS programs to run on the SYSTEM IV. Dan has more work to
do to finish it.
No special procedures were necessary to boot MONK. Place the MONK boot disk in
the floppy drive and hit the RESET button. A menu appears allowing the user to
select the device to boot from. Select the floppy drive and MONK is up and
running. If desired, the boot file can be placed on the hard drive and the
hard drive can be selected for boot. The menu includes an option to set which
device to autoboot from. BTW, the SYSTEM IV will allow installing most any
operating system capable of being run on a 68000.
Peripheral Technology (co-exhibitor and manufacturer of the SYSTEM IV) was
selling K4 boards and kits. The 16 MHz high-performance K4 board is the heart
of the SYSTEM IV. Based upon the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, this XT size
system board is jam-packed with features such as 4 serial and 2 parallel ports,
battery-backed up clock, on-board floppy disk controller supporting high
density drives and 7 PC/XT expansion slots. The K4 is IBM PC/XT hardware
compatible - meaning you can use top-notch, low-cost peripherals available from
your local computer store! Up to 4 MBytes of RAM on the mother board with an
additional 8 MBytes available on an optional expansion board should more than
satisfy the needs of the most memory-hungry user.
One of the highlights of the show for us, was when Kevin Pease came over to our
booth and asked if he could run his 'DRYSTONE' test on our machine. We agreed
and he measured the performance of the SYSTEM IV at 1666 drystones! This was
with VGA installed and running and other processes either waiting or sleeping.
Had VGA been removed, no change in performance would have occurred. The SYSTEM
IV performance is independent of the graphics and memory installed.
Software - we had SCULPTOR from MPD and QUICK ED from Windsor Systems for sale
at some very good prices . QUICK ED is one of the most powerful
editor/formatters I have worked with - and it is fairly easy to use. Its
document formatting capabilities are awesome. QUICK ED is also available for
MS-DOS. (If graphic capabilities were added to QUICK ED, it would make a great
desk top publishing system.) I think most everyone is familar with SCULPTOR -
don't need to say more here.
We also had some OSK productivity tools from Windsor Systems for sale:
IMP - an Intelligent Make Program, far superior to MW's Make program.
FLEXELINT - A lint program and a must for serious C programmers.
DISAM_OS9 - A high-speed, three-pass 680x0 disassembler.
WINDOWS - C Source Code Windowing Library.
PROFILE - Designed to profile user-state programs.
PAN UTILITIES - 40 useful utilities supplied in a C Source Code package.
DISK CACHING - A high speed disk caching system - won't work on all
systems, but when it does, can speed things up a great deal.
Expensive - but a free demo is available to try on your machine.
PC9 - MSDOS to OS-9 Windowing System.
Full details of the SYSTEM IV are in DL15 - 'SYS.TXT' or contact me directly.
For other information, contact me directly. Overall I was very satisfied at
the reception we received from the show attendees. BTW - all orders we
received at the show have been shipped.
Thanks for your interest.
Ed Gresick
DELMAR CO
<<>>
Hope it's of interest to some. Both Paul and Ed have given permission to
post their comments..
Steve
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David J. Halko