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 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’.

by Mark G. Boyd

from the June 1983 issue of Micro magazine

When something new comes along most of us tend to be conservative about giving up the familiar. A good example of this behavior is the use of structured programming languages on microcomputers. Languages like Pascal have been available to us for a couple of years; they are easier to program in and more efficient than BASIC. However, only a relative minority of microcomputer users have switched to a structured language, and none of the major manufacturers offer anything other than BASIC as standard equipment.