CoCo 3: OS-9 Level II Multi-User and Security Overview
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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2019
- Here's an overview of the multi-user capabilities available in OS-9 Level II on the Color Computer 3, as well as OS-9's basic security mechanisms. I use my Apple IIe as a terminal to the CoCo 3 in order to better demonstrate how the system behaves in a multi-user setting.
To duplicate what's seen here, you'll need either NitrOS-9 or the original OS-9 Level II distribution from Tandy as well as the OS-9 Level II Development System, which includes login and tsmon. - Наука та технологія
It blows my mind that that tiny 8-bit micro had a multi-tasking, multi-user Unix-like operating system back when most computers like it just had a BASIC prompt, or if you were lucky, a primitive bootloader/file manager they called a DOS.
Honestly, I kind of took it for granted back in its day. But looking back, it’s quite a marvel to think of the power I had available to me on a computer that was often written off as nothing more than a game machine (even by it’s manufacturer at times). When I “graduated to MS-DOS, it felt like a downgrade. Thanks for watching!
I wrote much productivity software and minor games in Basic09 and assembly back in the day. While my friends had to dedicate an entire IBM machine to running their BBS's, I ran my BBS as just another background process on my CoCo 3 while I worked and played games. The IBM crew I hung out with were initially incredulous at the notion, and I had to demonstrate it first hand to some of them. The CoCo 3 was an amazing beast of a machine for its time.
@@anthonyobryan3485 Basic09 had a "just in time compiler" too. It wouldn't be until years later that I saw those used elsewhere.
I had the CoCo3 w/ OS-9 in 1990. OS-9 was extremely efficient for its time.
This brings back a lot of memories from 1985-1990. Those were fantastic computing years. Sadly, that was when I realized that my beloved CoCo 3 was a commercial dead end, and I had to move to the IBM Compatible hell hole. It was such a culture shock to see all the things those Wintel computer couldn't do compared to the CoCo 3.
Fortunately, I had to put up with Wintel for only a few years until I discovered Linux.
That's virtually the same as my experience. After moving off the CoCo3 and OS-9 Level 2 I persisted with Windows for a couple of years and then installed Linux in 94. I haven't looked back.
@@roberttbrockway ms dos was a step backward compared to what you were used to. PC world didn’t really catch up until os/2 windows nt and Linux. Then it was good.
This again is so cool! I wrote 37 video games for Tandy Corporation from StarBlaze through Robocop, Predator and Tetris in the 80's and early 90's. I recently donated all of my Color Computers and accessories to the Oklahoma Historical Society / OKPOP museum as I've been inducted into the museum for the video games i wrote.
This brings back so many wonderful memories of working with Mark Seigel and Srini Vasan of Tandy Corporation in developing these game during the 80's and early 90's!
Many, many thanks!
Greg
Thanks for the wonderful comment, Greg! One of my favorite things about working with the CoCo and the CoCo Community is hearing from people who wrote the software I used on my childhood computer. I have a number of your games and have always enjoyed your work! Congrats on the OKPOP museum induction, and thanks for watching my channel!
Loved some of your games. Spent hours upon hours with StarBlaze.
I still have a working CoCo3 and Tetris3! Thank you for your work!
@@gregspot Hi gsurplus,
I only have one Coco3 and one Tetris remaining in my possession. The Oklahoma Pop Museum inducted me into the museum for my video game work, and they hauled three truckloads of my equipment, games, posters, etc. out of my house for the display!
You are very welcome, and thank you!
Greg
I loved StarBlaze as a kid. Well done!
I had a CoCo3 (512K) & OS-9 Level 2. I wanted to set up another system as a dumb term but it was beyond my means as a teenager. I ended up setting up terminals on Linux a few years later though.
Back in the early 90s, I used my Model 4 (purchased for $25) as a terminal connected to the CoCo 3’s bit banger serial port via a cable I hacked together. It wasn’t ideal, but it did let me play with tsmon, login, and the password file and it fit my budget.
It's wild to see such a Unix-like multiuser operating system running on an 8-bit processor with only a 16-bit address space
It’s one of the coolest things about the CoCo, honestly, and I credit OS-9 with introducing me to Unix-like concepts long before I had the opportunity to touch “bigger” systems. Even the CoCo 1 and 2 could run OS-9 Level 1 and do the multi-user thing, but with 64K of RAM, it couldn’t do much.
When PCs became powerful to be able to multitask real software, instead of those 8-bit toys, UNIX has already became obsolete.
@@IkarusKommt I don't understand what you mean by 'UNIX has already become obsolete' - it's the foundation of all of the most used operating systems in the world, except for Windows, but even for Windows it was a major inspiration and guiding influence.
@@DevynCairns Exactly. Usage of Linux dwarfs Windows. Android devices outnumber Windows systems by more than order of magnitude. And that's before you get to all the embedded devices, servers, cloud and super computers.
@@TJBChris Yep. When I first tried Unix at university it was immediately familiar to me thanks to years of OS-9.
Wow I had a coco3 in the 80s but never had any accessories and only a couple games on tape. Mostly I had to write my own basic programs for it. I never knew it had such a powerful OS available - much better than Ms dos and kind of reminds me of minix
Thanks for watching! When I “graduated” from my CoCo to MS-DOS, I was underwhelmed since I had OS-9 first and was used to it’s UNIX-like power. I didn’t have a Multi-Pak until a few years ago, but did have the floppy drives and 512K upgrade back in the day. My system was definitely upgraded in a piecemeal fashion back then.
@@TJBChris lucky!! I will say my coco got me started on programming and I did eventually become a c++ developer and even ran a c++ consulting company. Though now I run an art reproduction print shop - I still do a bit of development on open source tools we use in the shop.
@@TJBChris my experience was similar. Within 18 months of trying MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 I had moved on to Linux. I never looked back.
@@roberttbrockway I took a swing by OS/2 on the way to Linux, which was a decent middle ground.
I wrote a Bingo programme for the CoCo2 in the 90's for the Dalgety Bowling Club, in Tandy Basic. It took random events from the space bar to be truly random in selecting the numbers.
Wrote a bbs back in the day for coco in assembler and ran two telco lines on it plus console. Funniest bbs I ever wrote was dor the pocket computer 2. It logged you on and you could type a 250 char message. It stored 10 messages FIFO.
just so you know, in the 80's you could build card for the multi pack plug in and re address mfm drive control (from ibm) and up to 80 meg hd's where possible. you did have to create /h0 and /h1 and if you wanted change /dd to the correcvt address to access the hard drive.
I always wanted one of Tandy’s MFM hard disk controllers for the CoCo back in the day. Fortunately now with things like the CoCoSDC we get the hard disk experience with native support in NitrOS-9. 😀. Thanks for watching
@@TJBChris yeah built my own burke and burke card basically to plug in the mfm control. i personally wish i had the money down days so i could build a complete 63b093 coco 3 with 2048k of ram and some hard drives. i miss writing os9 level 2 asm lang. programs
Very useful and well organized video; answered questions that I have. Looking forward to running Nitros9 on a 'new-retro' platform (it's being ported by one of the CoCo community members now). As a Commodore 'person' back in the 80s, it looks like I missed a bunch in this space. Will check out your other videos, thanks!
Glad you liked it! OS-9 was amazing for its day, and really higjlighted the CoCo’s strengths. To the port, I think you’re talking about Boisy Pitre’s NitrOS-9 port to the Foenix F256 Jr. Am I right? If so, that is a great project and I’ve been watching it closely. It’s very exciting! I hope you like my other videos - the older they are, the rougher they are haha. But still, lots of fun was had.
@@TJBChris indeed, Foenix is the platform and Mr Pitre is doing the heavy lifting. I didn’t want to shamelessly plug as I’m quite active in the 6592/65816 side of that community but yes. It should be a great combination; I gave the FNX6809 CPU and am eager to jump in as soon as it’s more stable (albeit, L1). The way he is going, that will be tomorrow.
Great. I loved my CoCo
One of the best things about the CoCo was that it felt like it had more than one personality. BASIC and cartridges/cassettes felt like a completely different world from OS-9, and yet both were powerful and gave you plenty to explore. Thanks for watching!
I miss having the COCO2 and the COCO3, I even had a subscription to Rainbow magazine, And brought the 5 1/4 floppy disc programs from T&D software in Michigan, And had a star micronics dot matrix printer, and 10 rom paks
They're great machines, no doubt. I'm glad I held onto mine...there were a few years where I didn't touch them much aside from playing the occasional game. I'm glad the bug bit me before prices got to be out of control! Thanks for watching!
@@TJBChris I wish i still had mine, but unfortunately, it was lost when i had a storage locker, and moved to another state, and forgot about the locker, and it was auctioned off
@@jimjay848 Oh, sorry to hear that! On the plus side, if you want to relive the CoCo experience, you can through emulation. Check out the VCC emulator and the Color Computer Archive - there’s a trove of software out there.
colorcomputerarchive.com
github.com/VCCE/VCC
@@TJBChris That's what i do with windows 10, I run an coco3 emulator
One thing I miss from OS9 is that cd .. cd ... will bring your down 2 steps... well each dot added is one more step down
I remember that! I miss it, too.
Very nice. It wasn't a good idea to let a possible attacker know whether or not he'd typed a valid user name; I always wondered why login did that. BTW, like Unix, login looks for an motd file (/dd/sys/motd?) and lists it if it's there, so an administrator can put useful messages there (e.g. "The system will be down this afternoon for installation of NitrOS-9 EOU 1.0").
Thanks for the compliements! Any system that identifies the validity of a user ID to an unauthenticated user is crazy to me, but there were a few that did. MUSIC/SP on the mainframe did as well...I guess times were different then, hah! I haven't tried to use motd-like functionality in NitrOS-9...will have to try that! Thanks for watching!
So stinkin' cool... I just got a CoCo3 for Christmas. I grew up with a CoCo2 when I was little, but this is my first CoCo3. I'm very excited. In order to accomplish something like this, I am assuming that it has to have a floppy (or floppy emulator) attached to the serial I/O port and then the RS232 card in the expansion slot? I'm asking because I'm curious (I'm guessing "no" since there is a selector on your multi-pak) because I have the CoCoSDC and wondering if there's a way to do this using it.
Congrats on your CoCo 3! I grew up on one (it was a Christmas present when I was in elementary school). I use the CoCo SDC for everything now, though I did this video with a floppy emulator just to show the experience of a multi-tasking CoCo back when I first did it. The floppy emulator is attached to a real FD-502 controller in the Multi-Pak, though you could use DriveWire on the serial port. :) If you use a real floppy controller and real disks/floppy drive emulator, you can use either the built-in bit-banger port (device /T1) or a RS-232 Pak in the Multi-Pak Inteface (device /T2) for remote terminals. The bit-banger slows the CoCo down considerably when tsmon or a shell is running on it; with the RS-232 Pak both are much faster. You can order a reproduction of the RS-232 Pak and the FD-502 disk controller from Ian Mavric members.iinet.net.au/~ianmav/trs80/ and you can order modern Multi-Pak replacements from the Zippster Zone thezippsterzone.com/mpis-coco-sdc-etc/ The MPI has software-selectable slots, so OS-9 will switch between the disk controller and RS-232 Pak as-needed. Thanks so much for watching, and enjoy your CoCo 3.
@@TJBChris Oh, wow! It CAN automatically select among the devices? That's so freakin' cool! Thanks for taking the time to answer and for providing so much information. Hopefully one day I can recreate my peripherals I had as a child. I need a Tandy DMP-133 printer, a Direct Connect Modem Pak, and the speech synthesizer ;)
@@TJBChris I had a Multi-Pak but I also had the switchless six-port cartridge interface whose name escapes me. It only worked in applications and OS-9 where it didn't rely on whatever slot it was switched to (because it had no switch).
Coco3 with os-9 was the best 8 bit computer. I know arguments can be made for other 8 bit machines. However, none of the others ran anything like os-9.
@@IcyTorment impressive. Especially on an 8 bit computer. It is a wonder that such a machine can ran such a capable operating system with limited processing power and memory.
@@jkeelsnc Yes. Remember that the PDP-11, which Unix was popular on, also just had a 16-bit address (though it had separate spaces for instructions and data; I wish the 6809 could have done that.)
@@JamesJones-zt2yx when I was in technical school about 30 years ago I was trained on VMS on a Vax 11/750 with tape drives and disk packs. I think those were also a popular platform for Unix either BSD or Ultrix.
@@jkeelsnc Indeed they were.
You could run a POKE command and gain super-user or "root" access.
My friend demonstrated this on my BBS back in the 1980s.
Neat, that wouldn't surprise me. The MC6809 processor definitely predates memory protection features found in later processors. Generally by default, OS-9 defaulted to the "super user" equivalent (UID 0) if you didn't log on through tsmon/login. Thanks for watching.
@@TJBChris I'm fairly certain this BBS used a non-privileged user. It had shell access (we used to call this "doors"). He was the same nonprivileged user until he poked that memory location and became super user.
I loved OS-9 but it had its serious faults.
While it is multi-user and multi-tasking (even "realtime"), the hardware has no MMU, so there's no way to protect memory between processes. Just like in MS-DOS, anything can read/write anywhere. So, if you know where your process descriptor is, you can change anything about it. That's why anything other than "0" was rarely used.
OS-9/68k / OS-9000 ran on better hardware, so memory protection was possible, but everything still tended to run as "0". In a world without the internet, distinct users weren't really necessary.
What is your other drive beside the 5.25" drive?
The other drive is a Lotharek HxC floppy emulator. I use them on most of my non-MS-DOS systems and a couple of the 8” Tandy systems. They’re very handy. Thanks for watching!
Did somebody ever played Bouncing Boulder ? I'm stock in level 35 and I want help !!! :-)
Can you use a Teac 3.5" floppy with OS-9 LV 2
You can use double-density 3.5” drives with OS-9/NitrOS-9, though it takes creating a boot disk with a device descriptor configured for 80 track 720K drives. High-density (1.44 MB drives) aren’t recommended for OS-9; it can’t support higher bit rate of those drives and the thinner heads make using them with 720K media problematic.
The Tandy 1000... it was, in my opinion as a programmer at the time, the best clone.
pity, these old machines would get overloaded trying to handle a single Unicode font
Did this in 1992.