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From: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Amiga OS *IS* state of the art
Keywords: Amiga OS
Message-ID: <1003@cbmger.UUCP>
Date: 25 Mar 91 09:28:35 GMT
Organization: Commodore Bueromaschinen GmbH, West Germany
Lines: 62


Just having scanned through the latest BYTE issue (March issue,
they seem to use rowing boats to ship here to Europe), I gathered
more confirmation for the fact that our Amiga OS really is state
of the art in OSes: There is an article describing a new operating
system named TAOS that will run on many platforms. When I read
about some of the details - object-oriented, message passing,
windowing GUI, etc. - all sounded very familiar to me. And when
reading that the creator of this OS is known as an expert Amiga
game programmer (well, also ST, etc.), then I can't avoid the
impression that this at least got some vital inspirations from
Amiga OS. But why not? Computer science is evolving, and no one
is to blame when he profits from ideas that have turned out as
efficient.
(BTW: Anyone still to blame those nasty game programmers? :-)
The way that the TAOS system achieves multi-platform compatibility
is very interesting: It uses the old concept of a virtual machine
(now of course a virtual *RISC* machine :-). But you need not fear
the slowness of old-days P-code systems, in contrast to them,
TAOS translates every code at *load* time into native processor
code, not at *run* time. I think this won't slow down a loader
more than today's scatter loader or any packer loader. Perhaps
it will be even faster because of compact code size.

And talking about such similar operating systems, another parallel
comes to my mind: Geoworks Ensemble for PCs. You know, this stems
from the people who made GEOS for the C64 which already in those
times provided tremendous performance when considering the
underlying platform. Now the same has obviously happened to the
PCs: Ensemble is *much* faster than Windows (it's even said to
run conveniently on a simple XT!), and does this with magically
compact code, again making it possible to run also on old PCs.
Now compare that to memory hogs like Windows or PM.
But what has this all to do with Amiga OS? Well, once I scanned
through the programming manual of C64 GEOS (back in 86 or so),
and I was immediately caught by the impression that they used
similar principles as the Amiga OS, mainly the object-oriented
data structures and system calls. As GEOS is of nearly the same
age as Amiga OS, you cannot say they took ideas from Amiga OS,
but they followed the same ideas as our guys.

Now, if Geoworks wouldn't already have done this, how about
someone porting the Amiga OS to the PC hardware platform???
Ok, it wouldn't be SO useful, because you couldn't provide
compatibility to run old MS-DOS programs and thus would have
to compete directly with UNIX on PCs. But as long as Microsoft
officially talks about porting their Windows (or was it OS/2?)
system to quite different platforms, I think also this idea
appears legal :-).

This all leads me to the conclusion that examples of this kind
demonstrate that Amiga OS is well up with the current state of
the art in OS design. Ok, there also exist newer developments,
like the mentioned TAOS being aimed from scratch also towards
multiprocessor platforms (a thought which was well beyond spec
in the first Amiga OS days), but I'm confident that the open
design will leave enough room for further development and
keeping track with new ideas.

-- 
Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel  // E-Mail to  \\  Only my personal opinions... 
Commodore Frankfurt, Germany  \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk