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DR FlexOS? (Miscellaneous)

posted by bocke, 17.03.2021, 11:14
(edited by bocke on 17.03.2021, 17:37)

Heh. Sorry, I didn't see this at the time. It took me "only" a decade. But better ever than never: thank you very much for the additional information. :-)

Edit:

I just browsed through some of the docs from BitSavers.

Funnily enough, Flexos doesn't use CP/M syntax, but DOS syntax. With unixlike '/' as a directory separator.

Although there are also some differences. DEFINE is cross between SUBST and ALIAS (FREEDOS, on MS DOS you can use DOSKEY for this). ERASE instead of DEL (like in CP/M). Reserved logical names is kinda like special devices under DOS (LPT, AUX, CON, NUL), but it's not limited only to devices. Flexos shell also supports redirection and it seems to also support more thorough redirection similar to Unix. It also supports command chaining, but uses '!' instead of ';' in Unix.

It includes a visual editor (full screen editor), not CP/M ed or DOS edwin. It uses bindings similar to Wordstar. It's name is DR Edix and it supports up to 4 buffers (simultanous files)

Flexos Windows are kinda like GNU Screen, but for local processes. You get one virtual screen per process. And it seems fairly simpler.

Per docs, it needs a 286 CPU, 1,1 MiB RAM and CGA or EGA.

But Diasan's response mentions some other stuff like 386 and VGA, so the docs don't seem to cover the later versions. Also, Diasan said that a lot of stuff are optional, so it was probably pretty modular depending on specific needs.

Anyways, that was some great info. :)

I didn't find any info about X/GEM in user manual. But I've seen some other info out there in the web. X/GEM was supposed to be cross-platform. Beside Flexos, they also planned X11 (Unix) and VMS ports.

Although, it did mention VDI, which is an element of GEM. But here it seems to be used separetly. Kinda like GSX on CP/M (which it succedded).

Edit:

More info...

As Diasan mentioned it was indeed derived from Concurrent DOS 286. There is a bit more here (Retro Technology) and here (Beta Archive). Also this thread on VCEF contains a bit of info.

There is a tiny bit of GEM/X info in Atari pages. Like here (TOS.HYP) and here (GEM-DEV).

Edit:

More info on GEM/X from Dr. Dobbs Magazine archive at Archive.org:
Writing portable applications with X/GEM

More info on FLexos from Byte Magazine archive at Archive.org:
FlexOS's Muscle

Also, a version of FlexOS is used by Siemens in some of their industrial products: https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/4...n-for-the-year-2000-update-?dti=0&lc=en-US.

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