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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watcgl!drforsey
From: drforsey@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Forsey)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga OS
Message-ID: <75@watcgl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Jan-86 01:01:05 EST
Article-I.D.: watcgl.75
Posted: Thu Jan 30 01:01:05 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 31-Jan-86 23:47:23 EST
References: <11489@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <17@cbm.UUCP>
Reply-To: drforsey@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Forsey)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 29
Summary: 

>AmigaDos is not itended to be unix.  It is based on a model where relatively
>well behaved processes cooperate to accomplish desired tasks.  I have heard
>second hand that these concepts are expressed in the literature for the 'Thoth'
>operating system from the U of Waterloo.
>
 
Being the last person to maintain a Thoth system at the
University of Waterloo (on a Honeywell Level 6 no less) and now involved with
the step-daughter (son?) of Thoth called Harmony, I would be very interested
if any Amiga developers could elaborate on the message passing structure
of Intuition/AmigaDos.

    - Does it use blocking Sends and Receives with non-blocking Reply? 
    - Are the messages fixed or variable length? If they are fixed is there
	any provision for passing longer messages?
    - What is the timing for a Send/Receive/Reply for a 8-byte message?
    - Does Intuition use the concept of "Administrators" (tasks that are
	continually awaiting messages requesting services)?
    - Thoth had the concept of "teams", groups of tasks which can share
      memory, do teams exist or are all tasks considered co-resident in memory?
    - What is the software interface to the interrupt level of the processor?

(Note that "task" is used instead of "process", this is because Harmony is
a multi-processor OS, and the separate nomenclature is less confusing).

Dave Forsey
Computer Graphics Laboratory,
University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.