Fair enough. But even with assembler, you have several...
PAL8, MACREL, SABR, RALF...
Not that I'd recommend any of the last two... ;-)
> While the device drivers did provide some level of device independent programming capability, the console was usually driven directly using IOT instructions in a program in OS/8.
Yeah. Much simpler than using the device driver, and allow for better
control. There were very few occasions where I used the TTY driver if I
just wanted to talk to the terminal.
> TECO is a very good editor, after all I was one of the two people who originally ported it to (then) PS/8 (later OS/8). And in the process sped up Russ Hamm's original implementation by a factor of three by rewriting the memory management part of the code. But the standard editor might be more approachable for those not familiar with TECO. I dunno ...
As far as I can remember, the standard editor wasn't much fun. But I
know what you mean with TECO. :-)
But there are other alternatives as well. VISTA is a very nice screen
oriented editor, if someone is more into that.
I wrote an Emacs implementation in TECO-8 as well. Pretty easy, actually.
And thanks for all the improvements to TECO-8. :-)
> After OS/8 was out and established, I don't really know of any serious development that was done under the old Disk Monitor. There were the time sharing systems mostly for educational use (TSS/8 and EduComp), speciality systems like Dibol, etc, but for people writing code for embedded applications or to write more generalized stuff OS/8 was where it was at. And Educomp's software was developed under OS/8 though it was its own enclosed world (IIRC) when running.
I don't think I ever even saw the disk monitor. Really looks like a
primitive grandfather of OS/8.
I used MULTOS-8 some as well, which was pretty cool. Multiuser PDP-8
system, where each user got his own virtual PDP-8 running OS/8. Require
no special hardware either (apart from the timeshare option and a
realtime clock).
And I know of Etos8, but I never used it.
Johnny