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From: pariseau@well.UUCP (Robert S. Pariseau)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Convenient Kickstart (taxonomy!)
Message-ID: <1267@well.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 12-Jun-86 21:51:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: well.1267
Posted: Thu Jun 12 21:51:12 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Jun-86 07:58:34 EDT
References: <1241@well.UUCP> <1247@well.UUCP> <1253@well.UUCP> <538@3comvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: pariseau@well.UUCP (Robert S. Pariseau)
Organization: Whole Earth Lectronic Link, Sausalito CA
Lines: 34

mike --
  Deep Sigh....
The contents of the Kickstart Disk (i.e., the software which is loaded into
the WCS memory) consists of what most people consider "kernel software"
plus additional system software which would have taken up too much RAM in
a 256K machine to safely be loaded into RAM from the Workbench disk.  (We
had made promises to software developers regarding how much RAM they could
depend upon having available in a 256K machine after the DOS was running...)

Thus the Kickstart software includes not only the EXEC Multitasking Kernel,
but also the AmigaDOS Filesystem.  Although this might not be considered
ideal, it DOES leave the maximum possible amount of application RAM
available for program use and there ARE protocols built into the system
to allow people to boot "foreign" DOS'es on the hardware.

System software on the Amiga is broken into "libraries", which are collections
of related routines accessed through a well-defined calling sequence.
The design specs for the Amiga include the ability to dynamically replace
the "library vector" in RAM such that references to the given library will
automagically use new code, loaded into RAM, rather than the original code
in the WCS.  Unfortunately, this doesn't work under V1.1.  Fortunately, this
DOES work under V1.2.

Thus the comment that even if the Kickstart stuff is committed to ROM, it
will be possible to distribute firmware upgrades as, perhaps, small files
on the Workbench disk.

--------

I should also point out that it is highly unlikely that Commodore will
abandon its existing, Kickstart based, Amiga owners.  That is, any software
which gets built into ROMs in new Amigas will almost certainly be offered
to existing owners as new Kickstart software.  Thus, if you are a fan of
Kickstart, just make sure that you buy a Kickstart based Amiga!