Oz DOS v1.0 release 8

This archive contains release 8 of Oz DOS 1.0, the last version which was officially distributed. There are other copies of Oz DOS floating around, that do not contain this documentation, or the information included with the original Genie upload, which is the only place it has been available, until now.

Included with the disk, IÕve included for the first time the original manual which Applix used to distribute with the product, and an advertisement that I used at some stage, which I for some reason have no memory of.

Applix went on to design and sell a 68000 kit computer, highly modular, and then went under a few years later.

The founders were a couple of university students, who had designed an 800K MFM drive for the Apple II. TheyÕd written drivers for Pascal and CP/M, but not DOS 3.3. Co-incidentally, Apple had just released the UniDisk 3.5, which cut into their market, and used GCR encoding, making the disks incompatable with the Applix drive.

Oz DOS started off as an accident, due to a lucky break at a local warehouse sale. A local chain of computer stores was selling off a heap of old equipment, and somehow a couple of new UniDisk 3.5 drives found their way into the warehouse. A friend (Alan Woods) and I grabbed them as soon as we saw them. It wasnÕt until thirty minutes later that we figured we needed an interface card as well, so we ran back to grab one each. I started writing Oz DOS the next day, and had a prototype written for Alan to test the next day at work. I was messing around with Saturn 128K and Extended Apple //e cards at that stage, hence the RAM disk driver which was included with Oz DOS.

So, all around the same time, there was the UniDisk 3.5, the Applix drive, and Oz DOS. Applix gave a demo at our local user group (Apple UsersÕ Group Sydney), and when questioned about DOS 3.3 support, were quite vague as to release dates etc. I confronted them after the meeting, saying that IÕd just written one, and we struck a deal. The contract said that I would get 15% of the retail cost of every copy sold, which I then claimed as software and hardware. Applix then started selling two versions of Oz DOS, one for the Applix drive, and one for AppleÕs drive. It was about a year later they released their 68000 based kit computer, and it was downhill from there.

It was a shame really, the Applix drive was faster, smaller and quieter than the UniDisk 3.5. Only the MFM encoding killed it.

In 1992, I re-released Oz DOS as freeware, and uploaded it to the Apple II community via GEnie. This was three or four years after Applix went under. Unfortunately I couldnÕt find the manual at that time, so the archive contained only the software. However there was a brief introduction and additional information on the GEnie file description, which explained why the re-release etc. Again, unfortunately, some scumbag downloaded the software and released it on the Internet without including the documentation.

This is now the complete and official Oz DOS archive.

Oz DOS is copyright (c) 1986-1992, Oz Data
Oz DOS is copyright (c) 1996, Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett
30th November 1996