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OS/A WASP was allegedly developed by Kamnev, one of the creators of ANDOS and maybe others, but any information about this operating system is scarce. I heard rumors that it had windowing interface "like in Windows".

Is there a way to find any info about it online?

UPDATE

I found a file by AltPro firm where they refer to 3(!) different windowing systems for BK: LIS-WINDOWS, OS/A WASP and AltPro Windows. It is unclear if they are completely different or different versions of one development. The text says, OS/A WASP includes "additional features", but has "different ideology, that differs not necessarily in the bad direction". Regarding OS/A WASP the text says it supports parallel processes and batch files, it also allows to switch between ANDOS and MKDOS operating systems without rebooting.

The disk image (BKMANIA972) also includes the demo version of AltPro Windows, although I was unsuccessful to make it work on an emulator.

Here is a screenshot of the claims made: enter image description here

Particularly, it says it would work under all the BK series computers with AltPro disk controllers. It claims AltPro Windows as of the moment supports only ANDOS operating system. It also says the AltPro Windows system loads before an operating system, such as ANDOS.

Splash screen of the demo version:

enter image description here

The screen suggests pressing a key to chose a drive letter. After pressing any key though the program exits to the file manager.

I also was able to find an HDD image which should include OS/A WASP but the image is intended for a real BK computer with flash drive and I was not able to mount it under an emulator: http://files.pk-fpga.ru/storage/bk-software/hdd_images/1Gb_CF_dump_2022_11_14.rar

UPDATE2

Lis corp. seems to be a pseudonym of A.V. Grishin.

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1 Answer 1

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A HD controller for the BK series I used to have was "optimized" by omitting port inverters. Therefore, every byte of data on the physical disk images needed "XOR 0xFF" to arrive at its actual value to be used in an emulator.

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  • Tis should be a comment. I have never heard about need to invert data for a BK disk, the FAT12 floppies from MS-DOS were read by ANDOS just well.
    – Anixx
    Nov 14 at 0:00
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    This does not seem to address the question, which was about the OS/A WASP operating system.
    – another-dave
    Nov 14 at 2:58
  • Agreed, not exactly a spot on answer,but still illustrating an important point about Sowjet computers of that time: Due a very limited resource of official products an almost innumerable number of individual products were made - software and hardware.
    – Raffzahn
    Nov 14 at 3:04
  • @Anixx Floppies are different. The low-level interface to a floppy drive was implemented by an OEM extension, so it was done faithfully.
    – Leo B.
    Nov 15 at 3:55
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    @Raffzahn A handmade HDD interface board that I had was mounted inside the FDD extension box. It had to have a bare minimum of components to fit, so the inverters were omitted. The driver must have taken care to issue inverted IDE commands and to invert the response codes, but the data was sent as is for speed. As one of the first designers had used this convention, and his design got popular, other designers would have followed suit for compatibility.
    – Leo B.
    Nov 15 at 4:03

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