Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: A proposal--TOS Replacement Project
Message-ID: <5196@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 8 Nov 88 16:39:27 GMT
References: <700@sdcc15.ucsd.edu>
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 52

in article <700@sdcc15.ucsd.edu>, pa1132@sdcc15.ucsd.edu (pa1132) says:
> Summary:a proposal
> Sender:pa1132@sdcc15.ucsd.edu
> Keywords:TOS, replacement project, STOS

> Well, everybody is tired of waiting for Atari to improve the ST,
> right?  Atari is hopeless.  Then, why not improve it by ourselves?
> In the Amiga world, they have something called "ARP", short for
> "Amiga-DOS Repleacement Project", which some Amiga developers wrote
> to replace the dump Amiga DOS.  Their idea worked.  

But make sure you're talking about the same thing.  ARP on the Amiga does
bascially two different things.  First of all, it provides functional look-alikes
for many of the AmigaDOS shell commands.  The commands supplied by Amiga have a
few faults -- not all handle wildcards where appropriate, they're not perfectly
symmetric in their argument handling, and may of them are written in the BCPL
language, which makes them large.  ARP commands are written in assembly, which
makes them much smaller.  So floppy based users can fit more DOS commands on
a disk, and everyone who uses them gets commands that operate much faster.

The second thing ARP does for you, which is also another reason the ARP commands
are smaller, is provide a toolbox of functions in a shared library called
"arp.library".  As in all Amiga shared libraries, the code for the library exists
only once, no matter how many programs are currently using it, and it generally
only must be loaded into memory the first time an ARP commands is used (it'll
get thrown out if no one's using it and the space it takes up is needed).  Anyway,
the ARP library contains functions useful in writing programs that aren't
provided by the supplies Amiga OS.  Things like a wild card pattern matcher,
a standard file requester, some resource tracking stuff, etc.

So in one sense, ARP replaces part of Amiga DOS in that it replaces the DOS
commands a user normally uses to interact with the machine.  And the user have
the source to these commands available.  In another sense, that of the ARP 
library, ARP is really an addition to the Amiga's operating system.

> So, perhaps it is time for us Atari people to have a TOS Replacement Project--
> to write a new, but compatible operating system to replace the old
> brain-damaged TOS.  The new operating system should be called
> "STOS", short for "SmarTer Operating System", meaning an OS smarter
> then TOS.  Any comments?

I don't know much about TOS, but if you're really planning to actually replace
the ST's operating system, as in the operating kernel, not just a bunch of DOS
commands on disk, you're getting into something that sounds very much more
complicated that what ARP is.  If that's necessary, good luck -- it probably can
be done if you can muster enough support from the ST community.  If it works in
other respects like ARP -- you give it away and it gives you extra functionality
and takes nothing away from what you already have, perhaps it'll work.
-- 
Dave Haynie  "The 32 Bit Guy"     Commodore-Amiga  "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: D-DAVE H     BIX: hazy
              Amiga -- It's not just a job, it's an obsession