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According to their own site, the kernel is not a microkernel.

http://www.microware.com/index...

We're getting off topic here, but I couldn't resist a Google search for OS 9. It turns out that the old CoCos are still out there kicking:

http://www.coco3.com/

There's even a company still making a living off of OS9:

http://www.microware.com/

And a wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

(Yeah, I know I should've made working links. I'm feeling lazy today. :) )

OS-9 was a cute little real-time operating system for Motorola chips. Apparently they're still around, though Microware has been bought out by Radisys. They've ported it to half a dozen chips (mainly ARM/MIPS/etc but also x86) and it's got a lot more development environment with it than it had 15 years ago.

"Windows" is such a ubiquitous name

If you've been in computing you'd know that Mirosoft copied the name Windows from the windows metaphore for the GUI in OS-9 Level II that was available in 1982. See Microware.com for details.

"Windows" is a generic term for computing sonftware - just like "Office" is. Hell, there have been scores of vensors of the "X Widnows System" over the years.

After graduating from Computer Science at Vanier College (Montreal, QC, Canada), I had a job offer from Microware in Des Moines, Iowa and I accepted it.

I shipped my stuff via UPS ground. The total shipment was 20 boxes (lots of computer books!). After one week, I had received 18 of those boxes. Two other were missing. Guess where my Linux box was? Yep, in one of those two boxes.

Using UPS tracking on the Web, I found out the box ended up in Tennessee. How could a shipment from Montreal to Des Moines end up in Tennesse? I bitched and complained to UPS, and the two remaining boxes were finally delivered. I got no pictures of the damage (hey, this was 1996 and digital cameras weren't cheap back then) but let me tell you that the controller card (ide, serial, floppy, parellel, this was a ISA 486 after all, not any onboard fancy stuff), both hard drives, and the floppy were fubared. The motherboard was also disconnected from the tower.

I called UPS USA, they told me to call UPS Canada. I called them up, they said call UPS USA. After getting bounced around a few times, I mentionned to UPS USA that I would be talking to lawyer about all this.

Bingo! They dispatched a representative to my workplace, brought the box to a local computer store for damage assesment, and two days later, they dropped by again with the box with all the defective parts replaced!


SOLUTION:

As one canuck to another, my best advice is to say the word LAWYER. The US being what is is (litigation-happy), you will obtain service in no time!

Dreamcasts are powered by Hitachi's SuperH 4 CPU. This is a plain, run-of-the-mill 32-bit processor. It's got a 32-bit address bus too, just like your PC. I don't know who started the rumor that it's a 128-bit system, but it seems to stick. Maybe because it was released after the N64, they assumed that the size of the words had double for the next generation? Or maybe because it has a "128-bit wide vector FPU" engine. If this is so, then your Pentium MMX is also 128-bit with it's MMX instruction support (can do among other things 128-bit quadword operations).

If you can think of a reason why a video game console would need a number greater than 4x1024^3 to represent some integer quantity, I'd like to hear it.
Check this out while you're at it:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~ngoldber/chip_truth.html

There's a small company named Microware based in Des Moines that's been producing a small Real time operating system for at least 10 years. The OS is named "OS/9". It was popular for use in set top boxes. The interesting thing about it was that any component of the OS could be turned on/off while it was running; it used a dynamic lookup table to be able to reconfigure itself on the fly. Microsoft never would dream of a no-reboot-necessary-ever Op system! (or could it?) Microware used to have their OS in a lot of cable TV set top boxes. They've been purchased recently, and I don't know how widely they're used, but it was a pretty cool OS for a while!

Actually, there are.

Actually, OS-9 multi-tasks very well.

MacOS 9, on the other hand, I dunno.

How can an old 6809 based machine like the Amiga possibly compete with modern multi-tasking architectures like the PC?

Don't dis my Color Computer and call it an Amiga! But seriously, I know this is OT, but the CoCo with OS-9 Level II could do things that Winderz on 386's could not do at the time. OS-9 is a Multitasking RTOS by Microware.

OS-9 from miroware used to do CRC16 on code before it would load or run a module on the 6809 (8 bit cpu).

This concept could be extended today but would require a bit more work becuase modern programs don't load in the whole bit of code before running. How would this work? You could add a crypto key to the file header that had a signing key and then MD5 each block but how would the VM system deal with extra data in the blocks? For code blocks you can tell GCC to waste the last 4 bytes of a vm block (as done on the 32016) but it involes a bunch of jumps that new CPUs don't do so well. The other choice is to simply make the VM system load the needed block plus the next bytes off the disk and do an MD5 like thing with the block and signing key and then throw away the block that has the key in it but that blows away any one to one relationship between disk images and memory.

Alright, I've seen enough of this... "OS-9" is an operating system designed by Microware in the early 80's. It's an extremely good, small, fast RTOS. It's also Microware's registered trademark -- hell, it's the product's name! It ticks me off to see people automatically associate "OS-9" as MacOS 9.

I'm now taking bets on how long before Microware wakes up it's lawyers.

Alright, I've seen enough of this... "OS-9" is an operating system designed by Microware in the early 80's. It's an extremely good, small, fast RTOS. It's also Microware's registered trademark -- hell, it's the product's name! It ticks me off to see people automatically associate "OS-9" as MacOS 9.

I'm now taking bets on how long before Microware wakes up it's lawyers.

Hello? Can you say VxWorks? pSOS? OS-9? VRTX? There is more to operating systems than just the behemoths used on peoples desktops...

Looking at the Microware website, it looks popular for embedded devices. I seem to remember some fairly recent video game system ran off OS-9 as well...?

Microkernels still probably makes some sense for realtime OSes. Maximum speed efficiency doesn't seem to be the primary goal on those platforms, but rather consistency and being generally lean.

Um, he said OS-9. http://www.microware.com

First of all, there's more than a single embedded systems market. There are truly low-end systems (think toaster thermocontrols) where a Unix-like OS is certainly overkill. On t he other hand, there's a very large market segment where a Unix-like OS is not overkill. Telecom switching equipment and industrial control panels fit into this category. In these segments, it's not unusual at all for your "small" computer to be a m68k, PPC, SPARC, or Pentium running at a respectable speed and having 4, 8, or even 32+ Mb of memory. This is the market space currently occupied by VxWorks ( Wind River Systems), pSOS ( ISI), LynxOS ( Lynx Real-Time Systems), VRTX ( Mentor Graphics), Chorus ( Sun), QNX ( QNX Software Systems), OS-9 ( Microware), and a whole bunch of others that I can't think of off the top of my head. Oh, yeah, and Windows CE.

I even know of folks who are using Solaris or AIX in this type of application. Not to mention the poor fools who are stuck with Windows NT for control and monitoring applications (don't laugh, it happens!).

Now, the majority of these real-time operating systems (RTOS) are POSIX-compliant, at least to some degree. Usually, this means that they implement the POSIX.1 APIs. So, except for the tasking and memory models, they look a heck of a lot like Unix/Linux. Some of them (LynxOS, QNX) are downright Unix clones (like Linux). All of them have TCP/IP networking available, all of them either already have Java support or have promised it Real Soon Now, lots of them even use gcc/gdb as their toolchain.

Given that, why not Linux? Margins tend to be sensitive here, so you'd really like to eliminate those per-cpu royalties that the commercial (I should say "proprietary", since MontaVista is obviously commerical) vendors charge. And (contrary to what some /.'ers have posted) uptime is critical in many of these applications. Long-term supportability and credibility is also critical, as many of these systems may have production lifetimes of years, and field lifetimes of decades. Customers already recognize the value of having access to the source code in these circumstances, and they tend to demand it from their software vendors (it is usually provided under NDA or escrowed).

Now, check out the founders of MontaVista. Jim Ready helped put together VRTX, one of the first commerically-successful RTOS's. Jerry Kirk founded Microtec, which is the dominant vendor of compilers and debuggers for embedded systems (the XRAY debugger is the most-used debugger in the embedded world). So I would guess these two ought to have a good understanding of how to put together a OS + development enviroment that would appeal to the RTOS market.

It looks to me like, between this and eCos, we're about to see The Cathedral and the Bazaar dynamic in yet another OS market.

While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it needs to be. -- Linus Torvalds