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Comment Microware OS-9 (Score 2) 221

Also interesting to ponder is what would the Amiga be like if the Microware company (famous in some niche circles for the 6809 OS-9 version for the Tandy Color Computer) had come to licensing terms with Amiga during development and similarly released the 68000 version of OS-9 for the Amiga. OS-9 for those not in the know is a now defunct multi-user multi-tasking operating system built on lego-block style modules. Not a monolithic kernel like Linux, and not a message passing microkernel like QNX, the OS-9 operating system allowed the user to cobbler (the name of the tool used) together a new combination of modules to recreate the boot image file and restart on it. Modules could even be loaded or replaced on the fly (within certain limitations), and included different types for functional layers including descriptor (device name pointing to other modules used), block driver, filesystem code, etc. Even the memory management module containing the allocation algorithm could be replaced, which was a powerful feature to reduce fragmentation and allocation speed based on the needs of the system.

Comment Yes, it was called Gello (Score 1) 264

I once worked on a project that did exactly that - you drew a flow chart by dragging flowchart elements into a grid, and then connecting arrows between them to indicate flow. A rounded start bar was required to indicate the beginning of the program, and after that it could go through any number of rectangular or diamond blocks. You can give each block a name, then double click it to "zoom in" to that block and develop the code within it. Once drilled in a new blank grid would appear, and you could drag in different operations -- read a value, write a value, add, subtract, etc. So for example you could read a counter value, send that the a plus operation along with a constant of 1, and send the output of that to a write counter value. The contents of a diamond block used a special return operation that would set the true/false direction of the program. You could even do parallel programming, after a fashion, by using a double horizontal line to spawn multiple "threads" that would execute simultaneously (actually cooperatively). It was actually a fully featured language, and except for setting labels you didn't even need to use the keyboard at all to code. The target of this was embedded controllers like PLC's, and this was back in. And this was back in the early 90s.

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