liam_on_linux | Entries tagged with st

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

I have an ST, and an Amiga, but I didn't use either back in the day. But I think this is amazing work and really impressive.

So I stuck in on HN and some pillock went "yah boo TOS sucks Amiga is better" like it was 1986. I paraphrase. I am unimpressed.

In fact, while I don't want to be mean, you're missing two or possibly three different points... among which are the reasons I posted this link.

[1] It's not that TOS is less advanced than AmigaOS. Yes it is, and anyone who knows them realises that, but that's not the issue here. The issue is that this FOSS project has brought these two platforms together after about 35 years, and that's both really technologically impressive and also just plain fun.

[2] It means in principle that Amiga owners can run Atari apps, and the ST had some impressive apps.

[3] AROS is great but it's an x86 OS. It doesn't readily run on classic Amigas, or even especially well on the handful of later PowerPC Amigas, AFAIK. It also doesn't run natively on modern RISC hardware, like say the Raspberry Pi.

[4] But because it doesn't, that's prompted the creation of another really cool FOSS project, Emu68 -- a native 68K emulation environment for Arm, something comparable to Apple's nanokernel for running Classic MacOS on PowerMacs.

https://github.com/michalsc/Emu68

[5] Creating an OS that's as good or even better than the original while running on original hardware is impressive. Improved localisation opens it up to more people. That's good. It enables reviving vintage kit more easily, and expanding it. That's great.

You were so busy mocking something that you didn't stop to consider all the good sides.

[6] We know TOS was limited. We all know that. OTOH its simplicity enabled this. Its simplicity also was part of why the ST survived as a musicians' tool of choice for decades after it went out of production: super low latencies for music, and so on.

But others knew that TOS was limited, which drove a 3rd party OS market, with products such as MagiC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagiC

And MagiC is now FOSS:

https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources

Which is good, but OTOH, it's not attracted much interest or development, AFAICS...

Whereas EmuTOS is now on v 1.21 and is seeing new releases several times a year. This is great, and is one reason I posted it.

[7] The limitations of TOS are also what prompted the development of MINT, and that's FOSS too, and it's quite mature:

https://github.com/totalspectrum/atari-mint

And it has distros, such as AFROS:

https://aranym.github.io/afros.html

Which you can run on x86 kit:

https://aranym.github.io/

All of which is amazing work.

So, yes, while you just wanted to do some advocacy, you missed a huge amount of great work by a committed community.

Not cool, dude.

Leave the Amiga-v-ST hate in the 1980s where it belonged. It wasn't very welcome then. They're both great computers. But hey, then the fans were children, so they can be excused.

In 2022, they can't.

Current Location: Kobylisy
Current Music: 6music

I was a huge Archimedes fan and still have an A310, an A5000, a RiscPC and a RasPi running RISC OS.

But no, I have to disagree. RISC OS was a hastily-done rescue effort after Acorn PARC failed to make ARX work well enough. I helped to arrange this talk by the project lead a few years ago.

RISC OS is a lovely little OS and a joy to use, but it's not very stable. It has no worthwhile memory protection, no virtual memory, no multi-processor support, and true preemptive multitasking is a sort of bolted-on extra (the Task Window). When someone tried to add pre-emption, it broke a lot of existing apps.

It was not some industry-changing work of excellence that would have disrupted everything. It was just barely good enough. Even after 33 years, it doesn't have wifi or bluetooth support, for instance, and although efforts are going on to add multi-processor support, it's a huge amount of work for little gain. There are a whole bunch of memory size limits in RISC OS as it is -- apps using >512MB RAM are very difficult and that requires hackery.

IMHO what Acorn should have done is refocus on laptops for a while -- they could have made world-beating thin, light, long-life, passively-cooled laptops in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, worked with Be on BeOS for a multiprocessor Risc PC 2. I elaborated on that here on this blog.

But RISC OS was already a limitation by 1996 when NT4 came out.

I've learned from Reddit that David Braben (author of Elite and the Archimedes' stunning "Lander" demo and Zarch game) offered to add enhancements to BBC BASIC to make it easier to write games. Acorn declined. Apparently, Sony was also interested in licensing the ARM and RISC OS for a games console -- probably the PS1 -- but Acorn declined. I had no idea. I thought the only 3rd party uses of RISC OS were NCs and STBs. Acorn's platform was, at the time, almost uniquely suitable for this -- a useful Internet client on a diskless machine.

The interesting question, perhaps, is the balance between pragmatic minimalism as opposed to wilful small-mindedness.

I really recommend the Chaos Computer Congress Ultimate Archimedes talk on this subject.

There's a bunch of stuff in the original ARM2/IOC/VIDC/MEMC design (e.g. no DMA, e.g. the 26-bit Program Counter register) that looks odd but reflects pragmatic decisions about simplicity and cost above all else... but a bit like the Amiga design, one year's inspired design decision may turn out, a few years later, to be a horrible millstone around the team's neck. Even the cacheless design which was carefully tuned to the access speeds of mid-1990s FP-mode DRAM.

They achieved greatness by leaving a lot out -- but not just from some sense of conceptual purity. Acorn's Steve Furber said it best: "Acorn gave us two things that nobody else had. No people and no money."

Acorn implemented their new computer on four small, super-simple, chips and a minimalist design, not because they wanted to, but because it was a design team of about a dozen people and almost no budget. They found elegant work-arounds and came up with a clever design because that's all they could do.

I think it may not be a coincidence that a design that was based on COTS parts and components, assembled into an expensive, limited whole eventually evolved into the backbone of the entire computer industry. It was poorly integrated but that meant that parts could be removed and replaced without breaking the whole: the CPU, the display, the storage subsystems, the memory subsystem, in the end the entire motherboard logic and expansion bus.

I refer, of course, to the IBM PC design. It was poor then, but now it's the state of the art. All the better-integrated designs with better CPUs are gone, all the tiny OSes with amazing performance and abilities in a tiny space are gone.

When someone added proper pre-emptive multitasking to RISC OS, it could no longer run most existing apps. If CBM had added 68030 memory management to AmigaOS, it would have broken inter-app communication.

Actually, the much-maligned Atari ST's TOS got further, with each module re-implemented by different teams in order to give it better display support, multitasking etc. while remaining compatible. TOS became MINT -- Mint Is Not TOS -- and then MINT became TOS 4. It also became the proprietary MaGiC OS-in-a-VM for Mac and PC, and later, volunteers integrated 3rd party modules to create a fully GPL edition, AFROS.

But it doesn't take full advantage of later CPUs and so on -- partly because Atari didn't.

Apple famously tried to improve MacOS into something with proper multitasking, nearly went bankrupt doing so, bought their co-founder's company NeXT and ended up totally dumping their own OS, frameworks, APIs and tooling -- and most of the developers -- and switching to a UNIX.

Sony could doubtless have done wonderful stuff with RISC OS on a games console -- but note that the Playstation 4 runs Orbis, which is based on FreeBSD 9, but none of Sony's improvements have made it back to FreeBSD.

Apple macOS is also in part based on FreeBSD, and none of its improvements have made it back upstream. macOS has a better init system, launchd, and a networked metadata directory, netinfo, and a fantastic PDF-based display server, Quartz, as well as some radical filesystem tech.

You won't find any of that in FreeBSD. It may have some driver stuff but the PC version is the same ugly old UNIX OS.

If Acorn made its BASIC into a games engine, that would have reduced its legitimacy in the sciences market. Gamers don't buy expensive kit, universities and laboratories do. Games consoles sell at a loss, like inkjet printers -- the makers earn a profit on the games or ink cartridges. It's called the Gilette razors model.

As a keen user, it greatly saddened me when Acorn closed down its workstations division, but the OS was by then a huge handicap, and there simply wasn't an available replacement by then. As I noted in that blog post I linked to, they could have done attractive laptops, but it wouldn't have helped workstation sales, not back then.

The Phoebe, the cancelled RISC PC 2, had PCI and dual-processor support. Acorn could have sold SMP PCs way cheaper than any x86 vendor, for most of whom the CPU was the single most expensive component. But it wasn't an option, because RISC OS couldn't use 2 CPUs and still can't. If they'd licensed BeOS, and maybe saved Be, who knows -- a decade as the world's leading vendor of inexpensive multiprocessor workstations doesn't sound so bad -- well, the resultant machines would have been very nice, but they wouldn't be RISC PCs because they wouldn't run Archimedes apps, and in 1998 the overheads of running RISC OS in a VM would have been prohibitive. Apple made it work, but some 5 years later, when it was normal for a desktop Mac to come with 128MB or 256MB of RAM and a few gigs of disk, and it was doable to load a 32-64MB VM with another few hundred megs of legacy OS in it. That was rather less true in 1997 or 1998, when a high-end PC had 32 or 64MB of RAM, a gig of disk, and could only take a single CPU running at a couple of hundred megahertz.

I reckon Acorn and Be could have done it -- BeOS was tiny and fast, RISC OS was positively minute and blisteringly fast -- but whether they could have done it in time to save them both is much more doubtful.

I'd love to have seen it. I think there was a niche there. I'm a huge admirer of Neal Stephenson and his seminal essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line is essential reading. It dissects some of the reasons Unix is the way it is and accurately depicts Linux as the marvel it was around the turn of the century. He lauds BeOS, and rightly so. Few ever saw it but it was breathtaking at the time.

Amiga fans loved their machine, not only for its graphics and sound, but multitasking too. This rather cheesy 1987 video does show why...

Just a couple of years later, the Archimedes did pretty much all that and more and it did it with raw CPU grunt, not fancy chips. There are reasons its OS is still alive and still in use. Now, it runs on a mass-market £25 computer. AmigaOS is still around, but all the old apps only run under emulation and it runs on niche kit that costs 5-10x more than a PC of comparable spec.

A decade later, PCs had taken over and were stale and boring. Sluggish and unresponsive despite their immense power. Acorn computers weren't, but x86 PCs were by then significantly more powerful, had true preemptive multitasking, built-in networking and WWW capabilities and so on. But no pizazz. They chugged. They were boring office kit, and they felt like it.

But take a vanilla PC and put BeOS on it, and suddenly, it booted in seconds, ran dozens of apps with ease without flicker or hesitation, played back multiple video streams while rendering them onto OpenGL 3D solids. And, like the Archimedes did a decade before, all in software, without hardware acceleration. All the Amiga's "wow factor" long after we'd given up ever seeing it again.

This, at the time when Linux hadn't even got a free desktop GUI yet, required hand-tuning thousands of lines of config files like OS/2 at its worst, and had no productivity apps.

But would this have been enough to keep A&B going until mass-market multi-core x86 chips came along and stomped them? Honestly, I really doubt it. If Apple had bought Be, it would have got a lovely next-gen OS, but it wouldn't have got Steve Jobs, and it wouldn't have been able to tempt classic MacOS devs to the new OS with amazing next-gen dev tools. I reckon it would have died not long after.

If Acorn and Be had done a deal, or merged or whatever, would there have been enough appeal in the cheapest dual-processor RISC workstation, with amazing media abilities, in the industry? (Presumably, soon after, quad-CPU and even 6- or 8- CPU boxes.)

I hate to admit it, but I really doubt it.

More retrocomputing meanderings -- whatever became of the ST, Amiga and Acorn operating systems?

The Atari ST's GEM desktop also ran on MS-DOS, DR's own DOS+ (a forerunner of the later DR-DOS) and today is included with FreeDOS. In fact the first time I installed FreeDOS I was *very* surprised to find my name in the credits. I debugged some batch files used in installing the GEM component.

The ST's GEM was the same environment. ST GEM was derived from GEM 1; PC GEM from GEM 2, crippled after an Apple lawsuit. Then they diverged. FreeGEM attempted to merge them again.

But the ST's branch prospered, before the rise of the PC killed off all the alternative platforms. Actual STs can be quite cheap now, or you can even buy a modern clone:

http://harbaum.org/till/mist/index.shtml

If you don't want to lash out but have a PC, the Aranym environment gives you something of the feel of the later versions. It's not exactly an emulator, more a sort of compatibility environment that enhances the "emulated" machine as much as it can using modern PC hardware.

http://aranym.org/

And the ST GEM OS was so modular, different 3rd parties cloned every components, separately. Some commercially, some as FOSS. The Aranym team basically put together a sort of "distribution" of as many FOSS components as they could, to assemble a nearly-complete OS, then wrote the few remaining bits to glue it together into a functional whole.

So, finally, after the death of the ST and its clones, there was an all-FOSS OS for it. It's pretty good, too. It's called AFROS, Atari Free OS, and it's included as part of Aranym.

I longed to see a merger of FreeGEM and Aranym, but it was never to be.

The history of GEM and TOS is complex.

Official Atari TOS+GEM evolved into TOS 4, which included the FOSS Mint multitasking later, which isn't much like the original ROM version of the first STs.

The underlying TOS OS is not quite like anything else.

AIUI, CP/M-68K was a real, if rarely-seen, OS.

However, it proved inadequate to support GEM, so it was discarded. A new kernel was written using some of the tech from what was later to become DR-DOS on the PC -- something less like CP/M and more like MS-DOS: directories, separated with backslashes; FAT format disks; multiple executable types, 8.3 filenames, all that stuff.

None of the command-line elements of CP/M or any DR DOS-like OS were retained -- the kernel booted the GUI directly and there was no command line, like on the Mac.

This is called GEMDOS and AIUI it inherits from both the CP/M-68K heritage and from DR's x86 DOS-compatible OSes.

The PC version of GEM also ran on Acorn's BBC Master 512 which had an Intel 80186 coprocessor. It was a very clever machine, in a limited way.

Acorn's series of machines are not well-known in the US, AFAICT, and that's a shame. They were technically interesting, more so IMHO than the Apple II and III, TRS-80 series etc.

The original Acorns were 6502-based, but with good graphics and sound, a plethora of ports, a clear separation between OS, BASIC and add-on ROMs such as the various DOSes, etc. The BASIC was, I'd argue strongly, *the* best 8-bit BASIC ever: named procedures, local variables, recursion, inline assembler, etc. Also the fastest BASIC interpreter ever, and quicker than some compiled BASICs.

Acorn built for quality, not price; the machines were aimed at the educational market, which wasn't so price-sensitive, a model that NeXT emulated. Home users were welcome to buy them & there was one (unsuccessful) home model, but they were unashamedly expensive and thus uncompromised.

The only conceptual compromise in the original BBC Micro was that there was provision for ROM bank switching, but not RAM. The 64kB memory map was 50:50 split ROM and RAM. You could switch ROMs, or put RAM in their place, but not have more than 64kB. This meant that the high-end machine had only 32kB RAM, and high-res graphics modes could take 21kB or so, leaving little space for code -- unless it was in ROM, of course.

The later BBC+ and BBC Master series fixed that. They also allowed ROM cartridges, rather than bare chips inserted in sockets on the main board, and a numeric keypad.

Acorn looked at the 16-bit machines in the mid-80s, mostly powered by Motorola 68000s of course, and decided they weren't good enough and that the tiny UK company could do better. So it did.

But in the meantime, it kept the 6502-based, resolutely-8-bit BBC Micro line alive with updates and new models, including ROM-based terminals and machines with a range of built-in coprocessors: faster 6502-family chips for power users, Z80s for CP/M, Intel's 80186 for kinda-sorta PC compatibility, the NatSemi 32016 with PANOS for ill-defined scientific computing, and finally, an ARM copro before the new ARM-based machines were ready.

Acorn designed the ARM RISC chip in-house, then launched its own range of ARM-powered machines, with an OS based on the 6502 range's. Although limited, this OS is still around today and can be run natively on a Raspberry Pi:

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

It's very idiosyncratic -- both the filesystem, the command line and the default editor are totally unlike anything else. The file-listing command is CAT, the directory separator is a full stop (i.e. a period), while the root directory is called $. The editor is a very odd dual-cursor thing. It's fascinating, totally unrelated to the entire DEC/MS-DOS family and to the entire Unix family. There is literally and exactly nothing else even slightly like it.

It was the first GUI OS to implement features that are now universal across GUIs: anti-aliased font rendering, full-window dragging and resizing (as opposed to an outline), and significantly, the first graphical desktop to implement a taskbar, before NeXTstep and long before Windows 95.

It supports USB, can access the Internet and WWW. There are free clients for chat, email, FTP, the WWW etc. and a modest range of free productivity tools, although most things are commercial.

But there's no proper inter-process memory protection, GUI multitasking is cooperative, and consequently it's not amazingly stable in use. It does support pre-emptive multitasking, but via the text editor, bizarrely enough, and only of text-mode apps. There was also a pre-emptive multitasking version of the desktop, but it wasn't very compatible, didn't catch on and is not included in current versions.

But saying all that, it's very interesting, influential, shared-source, entirely usable today, and it runs superbly on the £25 Raspberry Pi, so there is little excuse not to try it. There's also a FOSS emulator which can run the modern freeware version:

http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/

For users of the old hardware, there's a much more polished commercial emulator for Windows and Mac which has its own, proprietary fork of the OS:

http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/index2.htm

There's an interesting parallel with the Amiga. Both Acorn and Commodore had ambitious plans for a modern multitasking OS which they both referred to as Unix-like. In both cases, the project didn't deliver and the ground-breaking, industry-redefiningly capable hardware was instead shipped with much less ambitious OSes, both of which nonetheless were widely-loved and both of which still survive in the form of multiple, actively-maintained forks, today, 30 years later -- even though Unix in fact caught up and long surpassed these 1980s oddballs.

AmigaOS, based in part on the academic research OS Tripos, has 3 modern forks: the FOSS AROS, on x86, and the proprietary MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 on PowerPC.

Acorn RISC OS, based in part on Acorn MOS for the 8-bit BBC Micro, has 2 contemporary forks: RISC OS 5, owned by Castle Technology but developed by RISC OS Open, shared source rather than FOSS, running on Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard and some other ARM boards, plus some old hardware and RPC Emu; and RISC OS 4, now owned by the company behind VirtualAcorn, run by an ARM engineer who apparently made good money selling software ARM emulators for x86 to ARM holdings.

Commodore and the Amiga are both long dead and gone, but the name periodically changes hands and reappears on various bits of modern hardware.

Acorn is also long dead, but its scion ARM Holdings designs the world's most popular series of CPUs, totally dominates the handheld sector, and outsells Intel, AMD & all other x86 vendors put together something like tenfold.

Funny how things turn out.

A friend of mine who is a Commodore enthusiast commented that if the company had handled it better, the Amiga would have killed the Apple Mac off.

But I wonder. I mean, the $10K Lisa ('83) and the $2.5K Mac ('84) may only have been a year or two before the $1.3K Amiga 1000 ('85), but in those years, chip prices were plummeting -- maybe rapidly enough to account for the discrepancy.

The 256kB Amiga 1000 was half the price of the original 128kB Mac a year earlier.

Could Tramiel's Commodore have sold Macs at a profit for much less? I'm not sure. Later, yes, but then, Mac prices fell, and anyway, Apple has long been a premium-products-only sort of company. But the R&D process behind the Lisa & the Mac was long, complex & expensive. (Yes, true, it was behind the Amiga chipset, too, but less so on the OS -- the original CAOS got axed, remember. The TRIPOS thing was a last-minute stand-in, as was Arthur/RISC OS on the Acorn Archimedes.)

The existence of the Amiga also pushed development of the Mac II, the first colour model. (Although I think it probably more directly prompted the Apple ][GS.)

It's much easier to copy something that someone else has already done. Without the precedent of the Lisa, the Mac would have been a much more limited 8-bit machine with a 6809. Without the precedent of the Mac, the Amiga would have been a games console.

I think the contrast between the Atari ST and the Sinclair QL, in terms of business decisions, product focus and so on, is more instructive.

The QL could have been one of the imporant 2nd-generation home computers. It was launched a couple of weeks before the Mac.

But Sinclair went too far with its hallmark cost-cutting on the project, and the launch date was too ambitious. The result was a 16-bit machine that was barely more capable than an 8-bit one from the previous generation. Most of the later 8-bit machines had better graphics and sound; some (Memotech, Elan Enterprise) as much RAM, and some (e.g. the SAM Coupé) also supported built-in mass storage.

But Sinclair's OS, QDOS, was impressive. An excellent BASIC, front & centre like an 8-bit machine, but also full multitasking, modularity so it readily handled new peripherals -- but no GUI by default.

The Mac, similarly RAM deprived and with even poorer graphics, blew it away. Also, with the Lisa and the Mac, Apple had spotted that the future lay in GUIs, which Sinclair had missed -- the QL didn't get its "pointer environment" until later, and when it did, it was primitive-looking. Even the modern version is:

Atari, entering the game a year or so later, had a much better idea where to spend the money. The ST was an excellent demonstration of cost-cutting. Unlike the bespoke custom chipsets of the Mac and the Amiga, or Sinclair's manic focus on cheapness, Atari took off-the-shelf hardware and off-the-shelf software and assembled something that was good enough. A decent GUI, an OS that worked well in 512kB, graphics and sound that were good enough. Marginally faster CPU than an Amiga, and a floppy format interchangeable with PCs.

Yes, the Amiga was a better machine in almost every way, but the ST was good enough, and at first, significantly cheaper. Commodore had to cost-trim the Amiga to match, and the first result, the Amiga 500, was a good games machine but too compromised for much else.

The QL was built down to a price, and suffered for it. Later replacement motherboards and third-party clones such as the Thor fixed much of this, but it was no match for the GUI-based machines.

The Mac was in some ways a sort of cut-down Lisa, trying to get that ten-thousand-dollar machine down to a more affordable quarter of the price. Sadly, this meant losing the hard disk and the innovative multitasking OS, which were added back later in compromised form -- the latter cursed the classic MacOS until it was replaced with Mac OS X at the turn of the century.

The Amiga was a no-compromise games machine, later cleverly shoehorned into the role of a very capable multimedia GUI coomputer.

The ST was also built down to a price, but learned from the lessons of the Mac. Its spec wasn't as good as the Amiga, its OS wasn't as elegant as the Mac, but it was good enough.

The result was that games developers aimed at both, limiting the quality of Amiga games to the capabilities of the ST. The Amiga wasn't differentiated enough -- yes, Commodore did high-end three-box versions, but the basic machines remained too low-spec. The third-generation Amiga 1200 had a faster 68020 chip which the OS didn't really utilise, it had provision for a built-in hard disk which was an optional extra. AmigaOS was a pain to use with only floppies, like the Mac -- whereas the ST's ROM-based OS was fairly usable with a single drive. A dual-floppy-drive Amiga was the minimum usable spec, really, and it benefited hugely from a hard disk -- but Commodore didn't fit one.

The ST killed the Amiga, in effect. By providing an experience that was nearly as good in the important, visible ways, Commodore had to price-cut the Amiga to keep it competitive, hobbling the lower-end models. And as games were written to be portable between them both without too much work, they mostly didn't exploit the Amiga's superior abilities.

Acorn went its own way with the Archimedes -- it shared almost no apps or games with the mainstream machines, and while its OS is still around, it hasn't kept up with the times and is mainly a curiosity. Acorn kept its machines a bit higher-end, having affordable three-box models with hard disks right from the start, and focused on the educational niche where it was strong.

But Acorn's decision to go its own way was entirely vindicated -- its ARM chip is now the world's best-selling CPU. Both Microsoft and Apple OSes run on ARMs now. In a way, it won.

The poor Sinclair QL, of course, failed in the market and Amstrad killed it off when it was still young. But even so, it inspired a whole line of successors -- the CST Thor, the ICL One-Per-Desk (AKA Merlin Tonto, AKA Telecom Australia ComputerPhone), the Qubbesoft Aurora replacement main board and later the Q40 and Q60 QL-compatible PC-style motherboards. It had the first ever multitasking OS for a home computer, QDOS, which evolved into SMSQ/e and moved over to the ST platform instead. It's now open source, too.

And Linus Torvalds owned a QL, giving him a taste for multitasking so that he wrote his own multitasking OS when he got a PC. That, of course, was Linux.

The Amiga OS is still limping along, now running on a CPU line -- PowerPC -- that is also all but dead. The open-source version, AROS, is working on an ARM port, which might make it slightly more relevant, but it's hard to see a future or purpose for the two PowerPC versions, MorphOS and AmigaOS 4.

The ST OS also evolved, into a rich multitasking app environment for PCs and Macs (MagiC) and into a rich multitasking FOSS version, AFROS, running on an emulator on the PC, Aranym. A great and very clever little project but which went nowhere, as did PC GEM, sadly.

All of these clever OSes -- AROS, AFROS, QDOS AKA SMSQ/E. All went FOSS too late and are forgotten. Me, I'd love Raspberry Pi versions of any and all of them to play with!

In its final death throes, a flailing Atari even embraced the Transputer. The Atari ABAQ could run Parhelion's HELIOS, another interesting long-dead OS. Acorn's machines ran one of the most amazing OSes I've ever seen, TAOS, which nearly became the next-generation Amiga OS. That could have shaken up the industry -- it was truly radical.

And in a funny little side-note, the next next-gen Amiga OS after TAOS was to be QNX. It didn't happen, but QNX added a GUI and rich multimedia support to its embedded microkernel OS for the deal. That OS is now what powers my Blackberry Passport smartphone. Blackberry 10 is now all but dead -- Blackberry has conceded the inevitable and gone Android -- but BB10 is a beautiful piece of work, way better than its rivals.

But all the successful machines that sold well? The ST and Amiga lines are effectively dead. The Motorola 68K processor line they used is all but dead, too. So is its successor, PowerPC.

So it's the two niche machines that left the real legacy. In a way, Sinclair Research did have the right idea after all -- but prematurely. It thought that the justification for 16-bit home/business computers was multitasking. In the end, it was, but only in the later 32-bit era: the defining characteristic of the 16-bit era was bringing the GUI to the masses. True robust multitasking for all followed later. Sinclair picked the wrong feature to emphasise -- even though the QL post-dated the Apple Lisa, so the writing was there on the wall for all to see.

But in the end, the QL inspired Linux and the Archimedes gave us the ARM chip, the most successful RISC chip ever and the one that could still conceivably drive the last great CISC architecture, x86, into extinction.

Funny how things turn out.

The other day, I linked to an amusing Miggy-versus-Jackintosh page I'd found.

This led to a fairly well-mannered reignition of the old argument. (Ta for the repost, Peter!)

I though my comment might be worth a post, since I don't post here as often as I'd like...

I think the Amiga was by far the better machine, yes, in hardware and in software. In raw CPU speed the ST had an edge and in a way I admire the simplicity of the ST's design: the Amiga was expensive and stuffed with custom chips and a custom OS unlike anything else, albeit based in small part on TRIPOS. (And the OS, like the Archimedes', was a last-minute stand-in for a failed project anyway.)

The ST was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the 16-bit era:
* the same COTS CPU as everyone non-PC-compatible used
* a bog-standard Yamaha sound chip
* bog-standard graphics derived from inexpensive chips from the x86 side of the fence - it was somewhere between EGA and VGA, basically, at CGA scan rates to work with TV sets.
* an OS kernel derived from CP/M-68K with some of the later semi-MS-DOS-compatible bits
* a GUI that was a straight port of DR-GEM from the PC, but not the version crippled by Apple's lawsuit.
* the PC/MS-DOS floppy disk format, basically
* standard joystick ports, serial/parallel IIRC, and MIDI, which was a stroke of genius, in hindsight.

The Lorraine, later the Amiga, later the Commodore Amiga - not a CBM product at all, originally - was a design tour-de-force from a bunch of ex-Atari people.

The QL was Sinclair's too-crippled take on a cheap 68K machine.

The Mac was a dramatically-cut-down but also simplified and less-weird Lisa, and it was still vastly expensive.

And off to one side, the Archimedes: proprietary from top to toe, although the result was stunning. No acceleration anywhere, very RISC, very stripped-down-and-simple, and as a result, as fast as feck - and quite expensive at first, albeit awesome in bang-for-buck.

Atari, having lots its chip gurus, said screw that, we can do a 68K box and we can do it faster and cheaper. It designed very little, almost nothing in-house: it was a COTS GUI on a the tweaked kernel of a COTS OS running on a COTS CPU with a COTS chipset.

And the result was a very good machine indeed for the money. No, not as fast as an Archie, but much cheaper. As fast as a Mac but about a sixth or an eighth of the price. Not as whizzy and cool as an Amiga, but cheaper and actually a very cool toy. Way more usable with a single floppy, too!

So don't diss the ST. I think it hit a sweet spot: not as constrained as the QL, not as elaborate & expensive as the Amiga, nowhere near as clever as the Archie, but simple, quick, cheap, solid, and stunning compared to the 8-bits that people were coming from.

The ST showed, for example, how past-it all the 8-bits were. I had a SAM Coupé, one of the latest and greatest 8-bit micros ever - stomped on MSX2 for spec - but the ST was a far better computer all round.

The ST may have paled next to the Miggy, but it made the Mac look very silly indeed.

And of course its media abilities stomped all over the PCs of the time, at a quarter of the price of a tricked-out PC.

As for their survival:

Well, there's no new Amiga H/W, but there is a current OS. 2 or 3 in fact.

The Acorn kit is dead but the chip and arguably elements of the chipset live on, are massively successful, and the OS - another stopgap - is still alive too.

The ST OS has been completely re-implemented as FOSS and it's alive too, just mostly on emulators.

The QL - well, that really is dead, but 2 forks of its OS are out there, one GPL, one with free source but not Free.

But the weird one in the corner, the Archimedes, that is the one that spawned an entire industry, even though the parent company withered and died.

Odd, that.

Probably the greatest British industry success story in many decades and almost nobody in Britain knows about it.

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Page Summary

EmuTOS and its relatives: a free ST-compatible OS based on DR's GPL code
Was Acorn's RISC OS an under-appreciated pearl of OS design?
Acorn: from niche to forgotten obscurity and total industry dominance at the same time
Fallen giants - comparing the '80s second-generation home computers
Do not forget your old gods. The Amiga-versus-ST flamewar lives on.

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Liam on Linux

Liam Proven's thoughts on IT, especially FOSS

Entries tagged with st

EmuTOS and its relatives: a free ST-compatible OS based on DR's GPL code

Was Acorn's RISC OS an under-appreciated pearl of OS design?

Acorn: from niche to forgotten obscurity and total industry dominance at the same time

Fallen giants - comparing the '80s second-generation home computers

Do not forget your old gods. The Amiga-versus-ST flamewar lives on.