Gene Heskett

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Gene Heskett redid or wrote several of the OS-9/NitrOS-9 utilities from scratch.

• Gsort, for sorting directories alphabeticly. a re-write with improved housekeeping. Get it from RTSI
• Printform, a print formatter for text that worked fairly well, a re-write with lots of new bells and whistles.

On RTSI too.

• Cprep19, a replacement for the Microware c.prep, first offered by Mathew Thompson, and extended enough that it could handle c src files in excess of 32k in size without handling errors. As usual, on RTSI.
• vfy, a from scratch effort, intended to mimic an OSK utility, but ended up being far more capable in terms of what it could do to an executable file. Mark Marlette once referred to it as a swiss army knife for object code modules. Also available from RTSI.
• OS-9/NitrOS-9 was a very educational operating system. Gene even did a couple of releases of the rbf.mn for nitros9, one of which inadvertantly contained a bomb that would wipe out the filesystem. But that was fixed in later patches.

<NOTE: Here's a quote from the source to rbf.asm referring to Gene's contribution: Gene Heskett's STUPID "LDA #$01, STA $00FF,u" CRAP went here. DAMN DAMN DAMN He's NEVER getting the RBF source again! END NOTE>

There are other utilities Gene cleaned up too, like cron. If you need a UNIX-like cron for OS-9, there is a working version of that on RTSI.

Gene no longer runs a CoCo for daily use, as he is running Linux now, but he still has the same CoCo 3 operational on which he did all that work on.

You can email Gene at: gene.heskett@verizon.net