Fairlight-CMI

Hi everyone,

I'd be grateful if you would not email me directly - thanks (see below).

Re: QDOS

 From what I've read on the web (and seen, from some of the Fairlight 
screen
displays and commands pictured), it *may* be possible that QDOS is 
based on 6800
(or 6809) MDOS. Some of the information available on the web states 
that the 6809
disk operating system is actually OS-9 (the company that marketed this 
OS is
Microware, and they still market this OS on more recent embedded 
processor targets).


MDOS was the Disk Operating System used on the Motorola EXORciser 
Microprocessor
Development System (for 6800 software development). There are lots of 
EXORciser
manuals and books covering the operation of the EXORbug firmware (upon 
which the
Disk OS runs), the Hardware Architecture requirements (to support 
MDOS), and the
various tools (Assemblers, Linking Loaders, Utilities etc). Frankly, 
this is
possibly too much information to be of much relevance for QDOS 
Fairlight users. It
is certainly possible that QDOS could be a very small cut-down version 
of MDOS
(such that QDOS has certain restrictions).

At some point, I will need to catalogue my MDOS books and manuals in my 
collection.

Meanwhile, the QDOS Fairlight users (as a group) need to decide what 
their exact
requirements are. For example, this may be just for information on what 
your QDOS
is capable of (including how to use the full command set). At the other 
end of the
requirement spectrum however, is whether full MDOS can operate on your 
Fairlights
(you may be lucky, but personally, I'd doubt that this would be 
possible due to
Firmware and Hardware Memory Map differences alone).

Hence, I propose the following:

1) Decide amongst yourselves, who the point of contact is to be (this 
person to
solely communicate with me on behalf of all QDOS Fairlight Users).

2) This contact person should then collate all user's 
requirements/wishes into a
prioritised list and send them to me.

Meanwhile, I will contact Motorola to determine if the MDOS information 
is still
available, or can be copied, or placed on the web (there are copyright 
issues here).


That is all for now.

Depending upon (2) and (3) you may then need to appoint a test contact 
among
yourselves (e.g. to try things out). This person would be responsible 
for
coordinating the testing of all MDOS commands on all Fairlight QDOS 
machine
baselines and reporting to the User Group (and myself). For example, 
MDOS commands
may work on some machines but not others (it may depend upon the QDOS 
release
version and the underlying hardware and firmware configuration).

If the MDOS information is not compatible, then this will become 
obvious very soon.
But if the MDOS information is useful, then you will need to agree on 
how and where
any relevant information is to be published for the benefit of the 
community.

I do not have a lot of time to spend on this, but I could drip-feed 
information
when I can (considering copyright issues). I do not have OCR 
capability, but I
could scan a few pages of the various manuals for someone else to do 
this
(copyright issues permitting).

Bye for now

Richard