FLEX User Group - Newsletter V1 N01
Date:    97/03/25  10:40 PM
Hello to all,

My name is Ian Blythe and I am already known to several of you
with some private messages, however to those who have not heard
from me, I have picked your names from DejaNews as having 
a continuing interest in the TSC 6809 FLEX operating System.
As this year appears to be the 20th Birthday of Flex (1977-1997 - 
can anyone confirm this?) I thought that we could join together
and share our knowledge and enthusiasm for Flex.

If you do not wish to be emailed in the future on this subject,
please let me know, otherwise I welcome your thoughts on this.

We have learnt that TSC no longer retains any rights to TSC Flex,
Frank Hogg has said that he no longer has any interest, Charles
Eaker (FORTH for Flex) has released this program to the public 
domain. As their programs are no longer being supported, there
is a danger that they may disappear for ever. I want to avoid this
as Flex is part of the computing heritage, coming from the time of
CP/M and later OS/9. I am proposing to collect all public domain
software, and other programs written by you (if you wish) with the
ultimate objective of writing a CD-ROM of only Flex software.

Note that Flex is still living today with the help of Ben Williams
(Windows95 and Amiga) and Wolfgang Schwotzer (Linux) and their
emulators (alas nothing for Win3.1 or OS/2 - yet?). We owe them our
thanks for throwing a lifeline to Flex.

If you are aware of any other producers of software for Flex, and you
can get a statement from them concerning the legal status of their 
products (i.e. if they no longer have any interest and are prepared
to release the programs to the public domain), please send me a copy.
I will give a summary of this in each following newsletter.

So if you have source files (in ASCII) that you would like to share
please send them to me. I will be setting up a site on the internet
for further distribution, and assemble the files for a CDROM.
We are still looking for a reliable way to get binary files to a PC,
does anyone have an idea or program for this? I am going to try to 
get Kermit to work.

Many of our systems are homebrew, and have unique extensions, such as
Prom Floppys, Hard disk interfaces, RAM disks and so on. If you are
interested, then we can publish to the group, or just have a "my system"
description in the newsletter. If we start to include drawings, then
perhaps we could move the newsletter to the Adobe PDF format. Any 
comments?

Another objective is to get all the documentation into an electronic
form (I recommend PDF), but the first step is to get it in! I am
going to try some OCR stuff, more news in the next edition. Again
any comments? volunteers? Wolfgang Schwotzer has already started by
providing the basic Flex manuals in Unix MAN format.

So, to end this first edition, are you interested in this newsletter
continuing? if so, please start indexing all the programs you have
and send the list to me, also if you would like to describe your
system, or even can provide some historical insight into the origins
and life of Flex, SWTPC and anything else of interest, again please
send it to me.

If you know of any other Flex enthusiast, please invite them to send
a mail to me, the more the merrier! If there is good interest from
you 'charter' members, then I will issue a posting to the 6809 news-
group.

Best regards to all,

Ian Blythe      100116.3072@compuserve.com
  Flex'09 Newsletter (c) 1997 Ian Blythe
   This edition is Volume 1 Number 01
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