By Susan J. Shepard

from the July 1987 issue of Computer Language

The Intel 80386 microprocessor is here—at last. It is proving to be all that we expected, and the last obstacle to 386 supermicrocomputers is an operating system that can avail the developer and user of its power. It will provide a powerful and affordable platform for expert systems and other AI applications that are truly useful.

AI has been been waiting for this chip; many AI applications developers whispering, “When the 386 is available…” and hinting of powerful systems for the desktop and a rich development environment for the programmer working and learning in the real world.

by Marshall Kirk McKusick

from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie presented the first UNIX paper at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University in November, 1973. Professor Bob Fabry was in attendance and immediately became interested in obtaining a copy of the system to experiment with at Berkeley.

At the time, Berkeley had only large mainframe computer systems doing batch processing, so the first order of business was to get a PDP-11/45 suitable for running the then current Version 4 of UNIX. The Computer Science Department, together with the Mathematics Department and the Statistics Department were able to jointly purchase a PDP-11/45. In January, 1974, a Version 4 tape was delivered and UNIX was installed by graduate student Keith Standiford.

A Good Buy on UNIX

Special Report by Dean Hannotte

from the June 12, 1984 issue of PC Magazine

The Mark Williams Company’s COHERENT operating system is a rewritten version of the seventh edition of UNIX, with some extensions and enhancements. Regrettably, it has incoherencies.

The Mark Williams Company’s COHERENT operating system is a State-of-the-art microcomputer implementation of AT&T’s UNIX, without the state-of-the-art AT&T licensing fees. It is a completely rewritten version of the seventh edition of UNIX and includes some of its multi-user and multitasking abilities.

from the November 1982 issue of Byte magazine

by Phil Lemmons

Keyboards are meant to let our fingers do the talking, but more often they make us swear aloud. Every manufacturer seems to want its keyboard to be unmistakably different from any other. The only keys that seem to be sacred and immovable are badly placed: the familiar QWERTYUIOP and its companion rows of the alphabet. The Shift and Return keys occasionally stray, and the control keys and function keys wander from one end of the keyboard to the other. Perhaps most puzzling of all, the placement of the cursor keys is not yet standardized in the most logical configuration, with the “up” key above, the “down” key below, the “left” key at the left, and the “right” key at the right. Let’s hope that Chris Rutkowski’s efforts to organize the placement of the most common control functions in sensible groupings will be a major step toward standardization.

A Spiritual Heir to the Macintosh

by Ezra Shapiro

from the October 1987 issue of Byte

The Canon Cat may be Jef Raskin’s long-sought “information appliance”

Editor’s note: The following is a BYTE product preview. It is not a review. We provide an advance look at this new product because we feel it is significant.

The Canon Cat is being advertised as a piece of office equipment-the next step beyond the memory typewriter-but there’s some real computer muscle under this feline’s skin. It’s JefRaskin’s first machine since he left Apple, where he headed the original Macintosh development team., And, as you might expect from this pedigree, the Cat takes an innovative approach to computing in the business environment.

by Stephen L. Childress

from the July 1983 issue of Micro magazine

(Note: The figures are not available for this article because they are impossible to read on my source.)

The modularization of the I/O system allows OS-9 to enhance the standard I/O at run time, not assembly or patch time. Device names and addresses are not fixed by the operating system but, rather, the program may attempt I/O to any device name. Of course, an appropriate module of that name must be loaded and ready to go at that time. Device names, driver procedures, register addresses, peripheral idiosyncracies, etc., are stated outside the core of the operating system and may be extended with ease. A device driver and descriptor for any data acquisition device may be loaded and accessed by programs using these techniques. In fact, should RBF and SCF fail to meet the needs of some device, an entirely new manager may be loaded and used alongside RBF and SCF. An example of this might be a 9-track tape drive that is not random-block oriented but is more than a character-oriented device. Perhaps an SBF (sequential block manager) module would be best:

by Stephen L. Childress

from the June 1983 issue of Micro magazine

Unless you’ve been on sabbatical to Siberia of late you will have noticed the swell of interest in the Unix operating system software. Most new and all the old popular 16-bit computers are supporting Unix or one of the numerous look-alikes. Why all the furor? It seems at last we’ve begun to rethink computer programming and usage. Recognizing that software development is expensive and timeconsuming, we must exploit the falling cost of today’s hardware. In this article, I explain how a new operating system software philosphy is being applied to small microcomputers capable of supporting a MC6809 processor. This software is called “OS-9” and is a good example of the rewards of rethinking system software.

By Stephen J . Shaw

from the November 1983 issue of Mini-Micro Systems magazine

Slowly but earnestly, companies in the artificial intelligence (AI) field are bringing out the tools to build the heralded Fifth Generation computer systems. It’s likely to take several years for any AI-based products to have a major impact in the commercial market. But 1983 could be the year AI emerges from its R&D cocoon.

Many significant product developments are coming from recently formed companies devoted exclusively to AI. More than 20 new enterprises have appeared during the past two years, notes Louis Robinson, editor of AI Reports and former executive director of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Those 20 enterprises form the vanguard of the nascent AI industry. That industry is devoted to revamping the relationship between humans and computers by developing systems that can perform logical inferences, draw on the knowledge of experts in specific applications and be accessed in “natural” languages- that is, in terms familiar to human operators.

by Stephen Beale

from the November 1997 issue of MacWorld magazine

Apple Computer drove spike through the heart of its Mac OS-Iicensing program when it announced on September 2 that it will acquire the core assets of Power Computing, the company that built the largest Mac-clone business. Apple will exchange $ 100 million in common stock for Power Computing’s Mac OS license and 200,000-name mailing list, and also has the right to retain Power Computing executives involved in direct marketing, distribution, and engineering.

by Phil Daley

from the June 1983 issue of Micro magazine

The operating systems that I have seen available for the Apple use essentially the same read/write routines, but they have been modified or changed. All the disks created by any one system can be read by any other system if you know the procedure. Modifying disks to make them copyprotected (unreadable) is a different technique and a different topic. The Operating Systems covered in this article all use standard DOS 3.3 format disks. The list is as follws: DOS 3.3® , Pascal®, ORCA/M®, Flex® , OS-9® and CP/M® . There are also many varieties and colors of patches and fixes for DOS 3.3 on the market, ranging from Craig Peterson’s and the Floeters’ articles in Nibble to ‘DIVERSI DOS’ and ‘MASTER DOS’.