SWTPC 6800 - Comparing FLEX and CP/M

Further demonstration of the FLEX operating system for 6800 and 6809 processors with comparisons to CP/M.

[@ASCIITerminal]

Very interesting - Flex and the SWTPC are completely new to me, as opposed to CP/M. Please keep these fascinating films coming!

[@circuithijacker]

Nice presentation! I loved CP/M but flex was wonderful. My favorite was OS9. I used many OSs but once Xenix was in my greedy little hands, I was hooked but it required much more of a machine. Now I relive some of the great memories with emulators.

[@dathyr1]

Cool, I had and used the SWTPC 6800 system and drives shown in the video back in the old days. Brings back allot of memories.

[@quitethesmattering]

Awesome, a new deramp5113 video! I could watch your videos all day. Been seriously thinking about buying an Altair clone, but the shipping and duties to Canada are making me pause. Nothing you can do about that, of course. I just really want one!

[@tx_1]

Dan Meyer was my uncle. He married my aunt. He had such a great sense of humor and was a lot of fun. Great man and inventor.

[@georgemurdocca4871]

Awesome comprehensive demo, thanks for sharing your expertise and preseving the early days of microcomputer operation. Facinating to learn about the proliferation of 8080 based systems resulting largely from a ~1 year lag in floppy drive support on the 6800 system, especially when FLEX really appeard to be ahead of the OS game realtive to CP/M.

[@radishpineapple74]

It's fun to imagine how computing would have been like up to this day, if FLEX and the 6800 had been the de-facto standard platform. Maybe we'd all be typing 2: and catw today. I wonder how advanced operating systems would have dealt with the legacy micbug memory scheme, though.

[@edgeeffect]

We did the trick to get CP/M 2.2 to do a startup at college.... you know your tech history well!

[@TechNed]

Thanks, that was great. I know it's more a point about the individual commands rather than an operating system feature but the default filetype extension for LIST is .TXT so you could just type "LIST DEMO". Similarly for the source file for ASMB ("ASMB DEMO")

[@TechNed]

At least on my 6809 FLEX.. I don't know if that was the case in the 6800 version here. It's pretty neat how 6800 FLEX dates back to 1976 and disk drives were pretty expensive then.

[@youreale]

amazing content, thanks.

[@edgeeffect]

At college in the early 1980s, we had CP/M in my department but Flex in my flatmate's department.... have wanted to try Flex ever since. Gorgeous Wyse terminal too... back in the early 1990s, I could have got one of those from a skip(dumpster) ... these days they cost £40,000,000 on E. Bay.

[@DiegoCortassa]

As usual very interesting video! It is peculiar how unix got it the other way around with "cat" to print the content of a file and ls to list the content of the disk :-)

[@TechNed]

Yes, catalog vs concatenate.

[@hjalfi]

Was the FLEX source code ever released, or has it been lost with time?

[@rog2224]

Looking on Google, there seems to be resources, and people have adapted it to work on Acorn 6809 coprocessors on BBC Micro hardware.

[@ericsills6484]

I guess this channel has covered everything it can cover. What a pity :-(