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From: ln63fkn@sdcc7.UUCP (Paul van de Graaf)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: Architecture, or Coincidence?
Message-ID: <120@sdcc7.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 12-Oct-85 01:12:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcc7.120
Posted: Sat Oct 12 01:12:23 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 14-Oct-85 04:58:12 EDT
References: <482@ihwpt.UUCP> <> <792@nmtvax.UUCP> <373@wlbr.UUCP> <667@hou2g.UUCP>
Reply-To: ln63fkn@sdcc7.UUCP (Paul van de Graaf)
Organization: U.C. San Diego, Academic Computer Center
Lines: 30

In article <667@hou2g.UUCP> stekas@hou2g.UUCP (J.STEKAS) writes:
>... only has 64K to play with.  Atari's 8K OS includes disk,
>cassette, printer, keyboard and screen handlers, a simple screen editor,
>transcendental math functions for Basic (or whatever), and the usual
>boot and initialization stuff.
>                                           Jim

	The original Atari OS is 12K, ~8K if you leave out the floating point
package.  The XL series have 16K of OS, due to 2 character sets, diagnostics,
and other cruft.  Also included is a graphics handler which draws lines, fills
regions etc.  The main reason the OS is so small is that it has a centralized
i/o subsystem.  A device driver need only supply open, close, put, get, and
status routines to hook into the OS.  All the intelligent controllers bought
you was a little convience.  The drive drives can format themselves, and 
read and write a given sector, but not much else.  In fact many devices have
to load in their own device drivers into RAM over the serial line during
boot-up.  These drivers were either too big to fit in ROM, or developed after
the OS was frozen in ROM.

	In all I'd say smart devices are a good idea if the peripheral bus has
sufficient bandwidth and the "smarts" come relatively cheap.  Atari met
neither requirement.  I talked to engineer who worked on the 800 just after
it came out.  I was attemping to sell Ataris at a Sears store in Mountain
View at the time.  He said that his managers were scared to death of the FCC
licensing at the time, so they decided to go the serial bus route.
(The Atari machines were the first to come out after the FCC started meddling.)
The marketing people also liked the idea, because it discouraged 3rd party
vendors (big mistake). 

Paul van de Graaf	  sdcsvax!sdcc7!ln63fkn		  U. C. San Diego