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From: mwm@eris.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: CBM and upgrade paths
Message-ID: <5941@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Tue, 17-Nov-87 01:52:34 EST
Article-I.D.: jade.5941
Posted: Tue Nov 17 01:52:34 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Nov-87 04:38:20 EST
References: <8711040542.AA29099@violet.berkeley.edu> <992@sugar.UUCP> <5838@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> <1054@sugar.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer)
Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica
Lines: 58

In article <1054@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
<I know about OS/9. Now then, what was the first machine that supported OS/9
<for the home computer market. Not the personal computer market or the
<business computer market, but the home computer market. That means: a
<home computer (one that costs much less than a small car) with a 6809
<or a 68000, and a manufacturer willing to support it. The Radio Shack Color
<Computer is all I can think of.

Smoke Signal Broadcasting, among others. There were various people
pushing SS-50 boxes that ran OS/9 in the $1000-$2000 range.

<> Yeah, I'm talking about the CoCo. It may be a dead puppy, but people
<> are still starting new hardware expansion products for it.
<
<Like what?

1 Megabyte memory cards. Detachable keyboards. Frank Hoggs Labs even
got back into the CoCo market after the III came out, to market a hard
disk subsystem for it.

<Any decent Amiga 2000 peripherals will fit in a Zorro box.

Odd - most of them don't fit in mine in any reasonable way. But you
mean Zorro ][, don't you? Oh well.

<The Amiga 2000 is 100% software compatible with the 500 and 2000. 100%.
<Remember that number.

CBM didn't promise 100% software compatability. They didn't deliver
it. I know of products that suffer from the SLOW/FAST ram in the
boxes. Still run, but not nearly as nicely.

<> In fact, the new one can have more memory than the A500 comes with,
<> and has an MMU.
<
<But it doesn't come with more memory, does it? You can't put 9.5 megabytes
<of RAM on it, no?  And you can't address all that memory directly. That
<wipes it out for me. If I wanted to fiddle with mapped memory I'd get an
<IBM-PC. The hardware's cheaper.

Correct, and correct again. I didn't claim those were true things.

And you're wrong about the hardware being cheaper. Minimum for a
starting IBM-PC is about $400. Minimum for a CoCo is less than $200.

Finally, why do you keep asking for VM and memory protection (with
their implied mapping) if you don't want mapped memory? OS/9-6809 does
it right - each process gets most of the 6809 address space all it's
own, other processes and the OS are protected from it, and that space
looks flat to the user.  It looks much more like a PDP-11 than an
8088. But I suspect you know that.

	<mike
--
Take a magic carpet to the olden days			Mike Meyer
To a mythical land where everybody lays			mwm@berkeley.edu
Around in the clouds in a happy daze			ucbvax!mwm
In Kizmiaz ... Kizmiaz					mwm@ucbjade.BITNET