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Microware released the versions of the OS-9 DOS for the CoCo. A few years later, former employees (I believe) released NitrOS-9. Both appear to be multiuser/multi-tasking OS's.

What are the advantages to using NitrOS-9 instead of OS-9? Does the documentation for OS-9 apply to NitrOS-9?

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  • I think we can avoid most of the problems with opinion based answers by rephrasing this question a little. The primary question at hand is "how was NitrOS-9 an improvement over OS-9?" This is not necessarily all opinion, as a question could talk about what the designers saw as limitations in OS-9 which they improved. Or someone with experience with both could talk about what they or others saw as limitations or improvements in both. I don't see this question being Primarily opinion based. Informed and reasonable opinion is actually good for SE.
    – user12
    May 20, 2016 at 16:09

1 Answer 1

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The documentation generally does apply correctly between OS-9 and NitrOS-9.

To understand the advantages over OS-9, it is good to look back that the different eras of the project.

In the beginning, Bill Nobel, Curtis Boyle, and Wes Gale decided to rewrite parts of the operating system to support to newly discovered features of the 6309 microprocessor. OS-9 is very modular and this kind of updating is possible even without the original source code.

Then Alan Dekok added to the project to use better, smaller algorithms in other parts of the OS (speciffically: GrfDrv).

Later still, Boisy Pitre bought the project online with source code control and added more features.

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