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From: arsen@milkfs.itstd.sri.com (Tom Arseneault)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: ST/Amiga Blitter & ST OS (CP/M/GEM?)
Message-ID: <32397@sparkyfs.istc.sri.com>
Date: 5 Jul 90 18:18:03 GMT
References: <746.2691bf77@desire.wright.edu>
Sender: news@sparkyfs.istc.sri.com
Reply-To: arsen@milkfs.itstd.sri.com.UUCP (Tom Arseneault)
Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park CA
Lines: 28

In article <746.2691bf77@desire.wright.edu> arc@desire.wright.edu writes:
>
> 
   [Stuff about Blitter deleted as I Don't know the answer]
>THIS!  OH, ONE MORE important question.  A programmer friend of mine told me
>that ST's OS (1.4 in the 520/1040?) is/was CP/M with a GEM overlay?  Is that
>true?  And, if you DON'T know what the heck you're talking about, PLEASE DON'T
>REPLY, I'm sick of stupid people.
> 
> 
>                                    THANK YOU,
>                                     Jim...

Jim, The underlying OS for the ST is TOS it stands for Traimel
Operating System (if I spelled his name wrong forgive me) it is its
own entity but from looking at the bios and xbios calls it seems to be
losely based on MSDOS, probably due to GEM being a MSDOS application
ported over to the Atari (and it also explains the compatabilties
between disk formats). But it is not a MSDOS clone as a lot of the
underlying structures (interupts and memory addressing) and it does
not use loadable device drivers (all device drivers are loaded as
TSR's). CP/M was used in the prototype of the ST but it was found to
slow the machine too much so it was scraped.


			Thomas J. Arseneault
                        INTERNET: arsen@itstd.sri.com
                        SRI International