OS9 login / shutdown

[Jules Richardson]

Tony Duell wrote:
> Warning : My knowledge of OS-9 is beased entirely on the 6809 (8 bit) 
> version, I've never used a 68K version. I suspect some of the things that 
> I think were 'misisng' on the 6809 version (like shell variables and 
> wildcards) are present in the stnadard shell of the 68K version. But 
> anyway...
> 
>> To begin to understand it, consider it to be a CP/M clone with
>> multi-user extensions. List the files in the system directory and most
> 
> Internally it's not a bit like CP/M

More UNIX-like than anything. In fact, some text implies that library calls 
were kept as close to UNIX as possible to aid porting between the two.

Privately someone sent me a link to some very handy OS-9 manuals online after 
reading these posts. I won't quote it here as presumably it was sent privately 
for a reason, but I'm sure they'll pass it on to anyone else interested...

> At least in the 6809 version there was no equivalent to the PATH for 
> lookin for commands. At any time, a user had 2 default directories. One 
> was the data directory, the other the execution directory. The latter is 
> what was searched for commands.

That seems to be exactly the same with the 68k version. It seems a bit strange 
given that the system's supposed to be multi-user and so binaries might be all 
over the place. Presumably it was a memory-saving thing, but I would have 
thought string-splitting routines needed to be in memory for other tasks 
already, and all it needs on top of that is a loop-type construct to iterate 
through each component of a path...

> File paths were somewhat unix-like. But you don't mount all the disks 
> into one filesystem. Rather, the first part of each complete file path is 
> the device name. I remeember floppies called /D0, /D1. etc and hard 
> drives /H0, /H1, etc. Some machines have a device /DD which is a copy of 
> the device descriptor for the drive you want to be the default.

Ahh, that's what /DD is :)

When this system boots from floppy it mentions "don't forget to set execution 
path to /DD/blah/blah/..." or somesuch (user-added to the startup file). I 
knew about /Dx and /Hx, but this was the first time I'd seen /DD anywhere.

> IIRC, the stnadard name for the directory command was DIR, but of course 
> as it was simply a program loaded and run from the execution directory, 
> it could be called anything.

Unbelievably, I've found Cumana's advertising flyer about the board - I got 
hold of that sometime last year in a totally separate pile of stuff. They seem 
to keep very quiet about the fact that it's a 68008 CPU rather than a 68000 :)

It does, however, list all the supported commands inside.

Oh, and even stranger than Cumana (the disk drive people) making a BBC 
coprocessor that ran OS-9, is that Cumana also made a version for the Sinclair 
QL (which I don't fully understand as the QL's already a 68008, right? Maybe 
that version was just the extra RAM, floppy and SASI interface...)

According to the flyer, both Acorn and QL versions should come with a word 
processor, spreadsheet, database, BASIC compiler, C compiler, Pascal compiler, 
assembler, and graphics kernel.

I can only assume they're on the hard drive (which I can't access at present) 
- but having said that, the flyer talks as though a hard disk was totally 
optional. Wish I had all the install floppies!

cheers

Jules