6 ms·

Commodore 900

102 points by derriz 7y ago

Jerry2 7y ago
This page has a lot more photos including manuals: https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Commodore/CBM900 https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Commodore/CBM900 The part about the OS caught my eye: >Commodore chose the Mark-Williams "Coherent" clone for the CBM900 which is roughly UNIX System 7, but with a few twists and less features. >The operating system is delivered on four floopy disks: Low-res and Hi-res boot, and common volume 2 & 3 with more programs. All four floppies contain a filesystem. We have made bit-for-bit images of these floppies, both on the CBM900 harddisk and offline.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  If you’re interested in Coherent, you can get some background on it and even download the source code here: http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/ http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/ And here’s a 1998 thread from the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers where Dennis Ritchie (!) recounts his experience of being sent by AT&T to evaluate whether Coherent violated their Unix copyrights: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/_ZaYeY46eb4/5B41Uym6d4QJ https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.compute...
  - jcims 7y ago
    Wow never thought I'd hear about this OS again. I still have the original manual and discs in the basement. My dad bought it and tinkered with it on a this huge Epson 386 back in the day...I got to the point of X without a window manager and gave up lol.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Some fun facts to get your head wrapped around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company That's Aaron's dad.
  - icedchai 7y ago
    In the early 90's I used to run Coherent on a 386SX. It was my first exposure to a "Unix clones." It had one of the better Unix manuals for the time... very comprehensive. I later moved to Linux probably 1993-ish.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    Almost bought it to operate a multiline BBS. The $99 price for a Unix like OS was astonishing. IIRC, my fellow SysOps and I ended up not going that route after contacting the company about the possibility of Coherent running PicoSpan and were told it likely wouldn't fit into the memory space. So we ended up using MajorBBS instead, which worked out fine.
- williesleg 7y ago
  Aah yes, I remember the days when our hard drives had hand-written defect maps on them. We keyed that into our Unix partitioner so it ignored those bad blocks. So much fun!
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  Funny, I just realized something. Remember the Commodore 64? My brother used to call it CBM64, and his initials are BM, so I thought it was C for Commodore + his initials + 64. And now, looking at CBM900, I got a hint that CBM could have been something else. Quick google search, and I see that it's "Commodore Business Machines", probably inspired by IBM (International Business Machines).
masswerk 7y ago
From floodgap.com: > The Commodore 900 (…) was intended as a mainframe-class machine with multitasking, timesharing, virtual memory, multi-user capabilities — what you would expect from a Typical Un#x Mainframe. System adminstration was accomplished through an X-Windows-like GUI on the workstation version of the 900; the text-only server flavour could be used as a workstation but was intended to be a standalone host. > project officially discontinued in favour of the newly-acquired Lorraine, later becoming the Amiga. When Commodore refrained from becoming an actual computer manufacturer…
- protomyth 7y ago
  They acquired a machine that quite a few people consider an actual computer http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/lorraine.html http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/lorraine.html
  - masswerk 7y ago
    But, again, Commodore refused to market it is a "serious" computer (while the platform may have arguably been superior to the IBM PC.) Edit: The sad story being that Commodore marketing apparently was happy with merely selling in the home computer market, where Commodore machines sold seemingly by them selves, and didn't bother to bare the hassles of the competition of the business market. – Which eventually resulted in the end of the company.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      It found a niche in a serious industry (video). Commodore simply got ran over by WinTel. They forgot one big part of their success was low cost and being available in a large number of outlets. They didn’t have a cost successor to the C64. The 900 was not that either.
    - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
      Even when Commodore and Atari attempted to market their 68000 machines as serious machines they were given no respect by the press. Both made a concerted effort in the late 80s early 90s to make workstation class machines and sell them into the expanding Unix workstation market, and had no success. I distinctly remember picking up a copy of UnixWorld in about 1990 or so and seeing an Atari TT030 in it, with the caption "up from toyland" and a couple paragraphs describing the specs of the machine as being workstation class and it shipping with AT&T Unix and it being cost effective but how could anyone take it seriously coming from a home computer and games maker? That was the start of the last couple years for Atari and Commodore, they were both done soon after. Apple barely survived.
reaperducer 7y ago
I noticed that the 900 had the ability to be used as a timeshare machine. I wonder if this was one of the last timeshare machines. Or maybe the concept continues in the supercomputing realm.
- rjsw 7y ago
  Any Linux system is a timeshare machine.
  - myrandomcomment 7y ago
    The context of the question was this the last machine designed to be a time sharing machine, ie it had hardware directly on it for the express purpose in design to be used for terminals. I do not think so but the meat memory storage is not working fully right now. I do know that things (not a PC type) like the AS/400 had physical terminal connectors well after this.
CmdrKrool 7y ago
Coincidentally this video just popped up in my Youtube feed: "Before Amiga: The Story of the 16-bit Commodore 900" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OpI87v6OqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OpI87v6OqA It asserts that the 900 was an initiative by the German wing of the company, and that the Zilog CPU was considered a strange choice, in the circumstances.
- walshemj 7y ago
  Commodore had done other Z80 products I seem to recall some expansions that allowed running CP/M as well as that native PET OS Apple Had a z80 card for the Apple ][ as well I rembered
  - markrages 7y ago
    The C128 had a z80 and could run CP/M.
- phkamp 7y ago
  I was employed by Commodore Denmark in 1984 to become their UNIX wizard for the CBM900, and I'm part of datamuseum.dk. The 900 was very much a US project, Germany wanted the PCs. The C900 prototypes were manufactured in Germany however, but that was simply because they had the facilities for the large PCB's from the 8xxx series.
  - phkamp 7y ago
    Come to think of it, I was employed by Commodore (Danmark) A/S precisely 35 years ago this week.
  - walkingolof 7y ago
    So the Germans took the case and created the Amiga 2000 (?)
    - phkamp 7y ago
      To be totally honest, I have no idea what order things happened in there, but it would be very Commodore like to reuse the molds for the plastic that way. We have never compared the C900 physically to the A2000 in datamuseum.dk, we should do that some day.
jacquesm 7y ago
When reading these kind of articles it always strikes me as odd that we had such a huge problem to stabilize systems running on as little as a few MHz and now we have GHz machines that are relatively solid performers. The first time I built a system with a base clock above 16MHz it took all kinds of rituals to keep the system running good enough to get some use out of it.
- rasz 7y ago
  If you put a scope on old commodore computer buses you will quickly realize the reason. You might expect digital signals with somewhat clean edges, in reality its all barely working analog mess with tons of "maybe if I put a resistor/cap/inductor here" hacks and production fixes. Bil Herd talks about it sometimes when reviewing his old designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPD5N43VIsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPD5N43VIsk
mjg59 7y ago
There's a bunch of coverage of the C900 and the historical context of Commodore at the time in Commodore: The Amiga Years. Amazon has it in hardcopy, or you can get the ebook version at http://variantpress.com/the-amiga-years-kickstarter/ http://variantpress.com/the-amiga-years-kickstarter/. I literally finished reading it last night, and there's an amazing amount of detail I've never seen anywhere else.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

102 points by derriz 7y ago

This page has a lot more photos including manuals: https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Commodore/CBM900 https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Commodore/CBM900 The part about the OS caught my eye: >Commodore chose the Mark-Williams "Coherent" clone for the CBM900 which is roughly UNIX System 7, but with a few twists and less features. >The operating system is delivered on four floopy disks: Low-res and Hi-res boot, and common volume 2 & 3 with more programs. All four floppies contain a filesystem. We have made bit-for-bit images of these floppies, both on the CBM900 harddisk and offline.

smacktoward 7y ago
If you’re interested in Coherent, you can get some background on it and even download the source code here: http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/ http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/ And here’s a 1998 thread from the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers where Dennis Ritchie (!) recounts his experience of being sent by AT&T to evaluate whether Coherent violated their Unix copyrights: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/_ZaYeY46eb4/5B41Uym6d4QJ https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.compute...
- jcims 7y ago
  Wow never thought I'd hear about this OS again. I still have the original manual and discs in the basement. My dad bought it and tinkered with it on a this huge Epson 386 back in the day...I got to the point of X without a window manager and gave up lol.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Some fun facts to get your head wrapped around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company That's Aaron's dad.
- icedchai 7y ago
  In the early 90's I used to run Coherent on a 386SX. It was my first exposure to a "Unix clones." It had one of the better Unix manuals for the time... very comprehensive. I later moved to Linux probably 1993-ish.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Almost bought it to operate a multiline BBS. The $99 price for a Unix like OS was astonishing. IIRC, my fellow SysOps and I ended up not going that route after contacting the company about the possibility of Coherent running PicoSpan and were told it likely wouldn't fit into the memory space. So we ended up using MajorBBS instead, which worked out fine.
williesleg 7y ago
Aah yes, I remember the days when our hard drives had hand-written defect maps on them. We keyed that into our Unix partitioner so it ignored those bad blocks. So much fun!
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Funny, I just realized something. Remember the Commodore 64? My brother used to call it CBM64, and his initials are BM, so I thought it was C for Commodore + his initials + 64. And now, looking at CBM900, I got a hint that CBM could have been something else. Quick google search, and I see that it's "Commodore Business Machines", probably inspired by IBM (International Business Machines).

masswerk 7y ago

From floodgap.com: > The Commodore 900 (…) was intended as a mainframe-class machine with multitasking, timesharing, virtual memory, multi-user capabilities — what you would expect from a Typical Un#x Mainframe. System adminstration was accomplished through an X-Windows-like GUI on the workstation version of the 900; the text-only server flavour could be used as a workstation but was intended to be a standalone host. > project officially discontinued in favour of the newly-acquired Lorraine, later becoming the Amiga. When Commodore refrained from becoming an actual computer manufacturer…

protomyth 7y ago
They acquired a machine that quite a few people consider an actual computer http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/lorraine.html http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/lorraine.html
- masswerk 7y ago
  But, again, Commodore refused to market it is a "serious" computer (while the platform may have arguably been superior to the IBM PC.) Edit: The sad story being that Commodore marketing apparently was happy with merely selling in the home computer market, where Commodore machines sold seemingly by them selves, and didn't bother to bare the hassles of the competition of the business market. – Which eventually resulted in the end of the company.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    It found a niche in a serious industry (video). Commodore simply got ran over by WinTel. They forgot one big part of their success was low cost and being available in a large number of outlets. They didn’t have a cost successor to the C64. The 900 was not that either.
  - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
    Even when Commodore and Atari attempted to market their 68000 machines as serious machines they were given no respect by the press. Both made a concerted effort in the late 80s early 90s to make workstation class machines and sell them into the expanding Unix workstation market, and had no success. I distinctly remember picking up a copy of UnixWorld in about 1990 or so and seeing an Atari TT030 in it, with the caption "up from toyland" and a couple paragraphs describing the specs of the machine as being workstation class and it shipping with AT&T Unix and it being cost effective but how could anyone take it seriously coming from a home computer and games maker? That was the start of the last couple years for Atari and Commodore, they were both done soon after. Apple barely survived.

reaperducer 7y ago

I noticed that the 900 had the ability to be used as a timeshare machine. I wonder if this was one of the last timeshare machines. Or maybe the concept continues in the supercomputing realm.

rjsw 7y ago
Any Linux system is a timeshare machine.
- myrandomcomment 7y ago
  The context of the question was this the last machine designed to be a time sharing machine, ie it had hardware directly on it for the express purpose in design to be used for terminals. I do not think so but the meat memory storage is not working fully right now. I do know that things (not a PC type) like the AS/400 had physical terminal connectors well after this.

CmdrKrool 7y ago

Coincidentally this video just popped up in my Youtube feed: "Before Amiga: The Story of the 16-bit Commodore 900" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OpI87v6OqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OpI87v6OqA It asserts that the 900 was an initiative by the German wing of the company, and that the Zilog CPU was considered a strange choice, in the circumstances.

walshemj 7y ago
Commodore had done other Z80 products I seem to recall some expansions that allowed running CP/M as well as that native PET OS Apple Had a z80 card for the Apple ][ as well I rembered
- markrages 7y ago
  The C128 had a z80 and could run CP/M.
phkamp 7y ago
I was employed by Commodore Denmark in 1984 to become their UNIX wizard for the CBM900, and I'm part of datamuseum.dk. The 900 was very much a US project, Germany wanted the PCs. The C900 prototypes were manufactured in Germany however, but that was simply because they had the facilities for the large PCB's from the 8xxx series.
- phkamp 7y ago
  Come to think of it, I was employed by Commodore (Danmark) A/S precisely 35 years ago this week.
- walkingolof 7y ago
  So the Germans took the case and created the Amiga 2000 (?)
  - phkamp 7y ago
    To be totally honest, I have no idea what order things happened in there, but it would be very Commodore like to reuse the molds for the plastic that way. We have never compared the C900 physically to the A2000 in datamuseum.dk, we should do that some day.

jacquesm 7y ago

When reading these kind of articles it always strikes me as odd that we had such a huge problem to stabilize systems running on as little as a few MHz and now we have GHz machines that are relatively solid performers. The first time I built a system with a base clock above 16MHz it took all kinds of rituals to keep the system running good enough to get some use out of it.

rasz 7y ago
If you put a scope on old commodore computer buses you will quickly realize the reason. You might expect digital signals with somewhat clean edges, in reality its all barely working analog mess with tons of "maybe if I put a resistor/cap/inductor here" hacks and production fixes. Bil Herd talks about it sometimes when reviewing his old designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPD5N43VIsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPD5N43VIsk

mjg59 7y ago

There's a bunch of coverage of the C900 and the historical context of Commodore at the time in Commodore: The Amiga Years. Amazon has it in hardcopy, or you can get the ebook version at http://variantpress.com/the-amiga-years-kickstarter/ http://variantpress.com/the-amiga-years-kickstarter/. I literally finished reading it last night, and there's an amazing amount of detail I've never seen anywhere else.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]