OS9 login / shutdown

[Jules Richardson]

Tim wrote:
> 
>  --- On Mon 11/21, Jules Richardson < julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk > wrote:
> From: Jules Richardson [mailto: julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk]
> To: General at excite.com, Discussion at excite.com, UNEXPECTED_DATA_AFTER_ADDRESS at .SYNTAX-ERROR.
> Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:32:51 +0000
> Subject: Re: OS9 login / shutdown
> 
> Jules Richardson wrote:> > I've just come across my first OS9 system
 >
> I am curious as to what type of system it is.

It's a 68008 coprocessor made by Cumana (the people famous for making disk 
drive units for the BBC micro) and uses a BBC B as the host for I/O. Unlike 
other BBC coprocessors, it plugs straight into the BBC's CPU socket (the BBC's 
6502 CPU then lives on the Cumana board too).

It's got a SASI and floppy interface on board, as well as a 50-pin expansion 
connector.

I've only ever heard of one other survivor of these, and that was a few years 
ago (I'm trying to dig out emails now to see who it was) - I believe the owner 
only had the board too, not any of the software or boot ROM to go with it.

I don't know of any docs surviving anywhere. Presumably Cumana did quite a bit 
of work on the OS too in order to get it to interact with the BBC hardware for 
keyboard and video I/O...

A 'strings' dump on a modern system from the ROM image gives the following:

   68008 on the BBC
   Version 1.0
   (C) Vivaway 1985
   OS9 - OS-9/68000 from Cumana
   68008 Upgrade Board for the BBC from Cumana

According to Google, Vivaway were responsible for UK marketing of OS-9.


68k processors for the BBC are few and far between. Torch made one which 
enjoyed reasonable success and would run UNIX. The only other board I know of 
was called Casper (the company name eludes me right now) but I don't even know 
of a single survivor there - I think it was aimed more as teaching aid and so 
there was no official OS release of any kind for it.

Acorn themselves of course backed the Natsemi 32k chips during that time 
period rather than any of Motorola's offerings, and then eventually moved 
solely to 32 bit via the ARM CPU.

cheers

Jules