[TUHS] Microware's OS-9 (was: Clever code)

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2022-12-14T06:54:04-0500, Brad Spencer wrote:
> arnold at skeeve.com writes:
> > I suspect because Mach was available if you had the right Unix
> > licenses and because it was hot in the research world in the mid
> > 80s. Researchy types tend to look at what other researchers are
> > doing / using, it seems to me often without knowledge of or caring
> > about what people are using in industry.  (My two cents, from having
> > worked at universities.)

The UNSW CSE department seemed to be a bit more outward facing than
that, at least in my brief exposure to it, long after the 1980s.

> In that time frame there was a number of microkernel designs.  One
> that has not been mentioned was OS-9 for the 6809/68000 processor.  I
> used it pretty extensively.  OS-9 was very unix like from the userland
> POV, when you consider something like V5 unix, however it didn't share
> any of the same command names, just many of the same concepts.

This is emphatically true.  I used this system as a kid on a 64KiB
machine, and I don't remember even a mention of Unix in the doorstop of
a manual by Dale Puckett and Peter Dibble (who gave you something like 6
chapters of architectural background before introducing the shell
prompt).  Maybe they did mention Unix , but since it had no meaning to
me at the time, it didn't sink in.  I think it is also possible they
avoided any names that they thought might draw legal ire from AT&T.

> It was close enough that if you had the C compiler, a very basic K&R
> compiler, you could get some of the unix command to compile without
> too much trouble.

Years later I went to college, landed on Sun IPC workstations, and
quickly recognized OS-9's "T/S Edit" as a vi clone, and its "T/S Word"
as a version of nroff.  There was also a "T/S Spell" product but I don't
recall it clearly enough to venture whether it was a clone of ispell.

> OS-9 was very microkernel

In that deployment environment, it had to be.

> and nothing like Mach or even Minix.

With the source of all three available, a technical paper analyzing and
contrasting them would be a worthwhile thing to have.  (It's unclear to
me if even a historical version of QNX is available for study.)

> It was also very much positioned to real time OS needs of the time and
> was not really marketed generally and unless you happened to have a
> Color Computer from Radio Shack

Lucky me!  How I yearned for a 128KiB Color Computer 3 so I could
upgrade to OS-9 Level 2 and the windowing system.  (512KiB was
preferred, but there had been a spike in RAM prices right about the time
the machine was released.  Not that greater market success would have
kept Tandy from under-promoting and eventually killing the machine.[1])

> It was very clean, but you needed to know 6809 or 68000 assembly to
> create anything new for the OS itself,

The 6809 was my first exposure to a (relatively) clean ISA design,
having come from the Z80.  It probably helped that I was born with a
big-endian head and thus had an instinctive revulsion to Intel byte
order at an extremely young age.

In the late 1990s, Apple decided they wanted to rebrand their operating
system (still "MacOS [Classic]" at the time), looked at Microware's
name for its system, and said, "right, we'll be having that".
Microware, having apparently so carefully followed the letter of
trademark law with respect to AT&T Unix, sued Apple for peddling "OS/9"
in the operating system market, and promptly got their asses handed to
them by the federal district court, which dutifully honored the foremost
principle of law: big people get to stomp smaller people as often, and
as hard, as they would like.[2]

(Later, apparently, Apple pointed out this precedent to Cisco with a
shark-toothed grin when Apple decided they wanted the name "iOS" for yet
another revitalizing rebrand of familiar technology.  Cisco rolled over
and took some undisclosed amount of money, which they promptly spent on
acquisitions--they then were suddenly startled by the proportion of op
ex going to salaries, and initiated layoffs.)

Apple's never changed its stripes, but OS-9 lives on, as Free Software,
under the name NitrOS-9.[4]

Regards,
Branden

[1] Here's a story you may have to sit down for from Frank Durda IV (now
    deceased) about how the same company knifed their m68k-based
    line--which ran XENIX--in the gut repeatedly.  It's hard to find
    this story via Web search so I've made a Facebook post
    temporarily(?) public.  I'd simply include it, but it's pretty long.

    https://www.facebook.com/g.branden.robinson/posts/pfbid0F8MrvauQ6KPQ1tytme9uDiWGvprXft5dsxUzABYtdTKA9viZhB6Q2nadvtP1aDNQl

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/21/os9.suit.idg/index.html
[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/08/cisco_licenses_ios_name_to_apple_screenshot_shows_iwork_on_iphone
[4] https://sourceforge.net/projects/nitros9/
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