For those that haven't seen this, a very interesting perspective on what the Amiga 1000 was suppose to be, via the canceled "CAOS" Amiga OS:

In the beginning, there was CAOS
Why CAOS was abandoned

Probably old news to most of you.. but I was not aware (before finding these article) that Amiga OS is actually greatly different versus what the creators intended. What a shame Carl's CAOS was never given time to mature - would have made the A1000 even years more ahead of its time, perhaps avoided the need for the kickstart disk, and potentially changed the entire outcome I think. I just find it interesting that as far ahead of its time as the Amiga was, Commodore still forced the team to compromise on something so fundamental and game changing as the target OS, as to guide Amiga toward the cliff at the very outset.

So, what ever became of the CAOS code? CAOS was well underway when cancelled, so was the original code of CAOS included in the source code repository, such that its fundamentals were eventually incorporated into AmigaOS 4.x? For example, CAOS had early versions of resource tracking, safer memory management, better integration with EXEC, so are the same advances on AOS 4 influenced by CAOS design at all?

TripOS was eventually replaced with assembly (not sure when), so I suppose Amiga OS eventually got away from those roots, but how much of the Amiga experience was redirected by it? For example, apparently TripOS gave us the AmigaDOS command set. It seems Carl envisioned a more Unix like shell, but friendlier. Did the CAOS version of Amiga Shell exist in some beta form? How did it compare to TripOS AmigaDOS shell, environment etc.?

Last edited by jingof on 04-Apr-2012 at 11:00 AM.

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@jingof

Personally I am happier with the way the Amiga OS turned out for the initial 2nd release and also the 3rd releases that I worked and played with.

Had I met the AmigaOS as similar to the BSD/Linux/Unix world, my own enjoyment would not have been as it is now.

Ive dealt with Linux for some years now and the experience is in some ways similar and in other ways very jarringly different enough ...

I know I am a picky ba*d about how I use computers and I know I will be happier with an Amiga styled system how the OS has become now rather than the existing "Windows/Linux" majority of systems I have had to deal with.

@jingof

This PDF about TripOS is interesting if you missed it last time:
http://www.pagetable.com/docs/amigados_tripos/tripos_manuals.pdf
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=32788&forum=2

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@Belxjander

Well, CAOS intended safer memory and resource management so that the GURU would have shown up much less often. So, that's not really making it Unix like, necessarily.

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@jingof

True, the Resource Tracking parts I can understand being integrated into the OS,

However the "Memory protection"... completely isolated Applications on AmigaOS...
makes some things difficult and other things slowed down more than currently implimented.

I'm going to check things out asap myself anyway.

the ISI and DSI error alerts on the AOS4.x seem to be a step in this direction from what I have read on this and other forums.

@Chris_Y

Thanks Chris. That TripOS manual is a great resource. Seems you can get a deeper understanding of Amiga through exploring its TripOS roots.

Also, your link lead me to this related resource:

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=193

Last edited by jingof on 04-Apr-2012 at 11:33 AM.

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@Belxjander

The ISI is just common illegal instruction interrupt, the DSI is how ever triggered when your program writes in to memory marked as unsafe, the zero page, or unallocated memory, its possible to attach your own expectation handlers to this interrupts.

AmigaOS programs do use shared memory as main form of communication, unlike Linux where pipes and sockets are used the most, linux programs can do nothing but request or ask the linux kernel to do the work, shared memory does exist in Linux too but its not a kernel thing like whit AmigaOS.

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@jingof

Quote:

jingof wrote: For those that haven't seen this, a very interesting perspective on what the Amiga 1000 was suppose to be, via the canceled "CAOS" Amiga OS:

TripOS is only the DOS on Amiga, the Kernel and the rest was not taken from TripOS IMR they called it Kickstart at least it was in the Kickstart.

And don't forget:
Quote:

What would CAOS itself have given? How about multiprocessing, a file system, memory management, and commands? Basically, the same things that AmigaDOS gives us - not surprisingly, as AmigaDOS had to step into the shoes of CAOS. Both CAOS and AmigaDOS have their own special strengths, though. For instance, CAOS also did memory management to a greater extent than AmigaDOS, and would have had resource tracking.

So AmigaOS became AmigaOS and used an alien DOS (and dos tools) I bet they would not had time doing ressource tracking with or without TripOS. And they added it later with Kickstart 2.x.

Last edited by Arko on 04-Apr-2012 at 02:15 PM.

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AmigaONE. Haha. Just because you can put label on it does not make it Amiga.

I borrowed this comments from here (#27 & #28):
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=38873&forum=2&start=20&order=0

@jingof

I doubt it would have made difference. Although buggyness of AmigaOS was great problem in the start the biggest problem for Amiga 1000 was its high price. Amiga didnt start thriving until Amiga 500 price cut model. And almost nobody who bought Amiga 500 cared about the OS.

Simple as that.

Last edited by itix on 04-Apr-2012 at 03:42 PM.

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Yes I am aware of these differences... I try not to be too technical without need

@Arko

Quote:

TripOS is only the DOS on Amiga, the Kernel and the rest was not taken from TripOS IMR they called it Kickstart at least it was in the Kickstart.

Quote:

So AmigaOS became AmigaOS and used an alien DOS (and dos tools)

No, TripOS is much more than just the DOS. In fact, the last two letters of CAOS is "Operating System". So, CAOS was to be the full OS. Everything in between Intuition and EXEC, including implementation of Process, stack, context switching, multi-tasking, resource tracking and freeing after app-crash, file system, commands etc. So, that is the core functionality of AmigaOS that was replaced by TripOS. Definitely much more than a DOS.

So, the original AmigaOS (CAOS) was (by all accounts) expected to be significantly more advanced, high performance and stable, but obstacles and delivery dates intervened. So, Commodore forced the team to replace CAOS with TripOS at the last minute to meet the ship date. By some reports, to cut the lead the Atari ST had. Unfortunately, Commodore set their sights on Atari as their competitor, when they should have identified PC's and Mac's as their true competition. As a result, the Amiga did not ship with the OS it was originally designed for, which apparently was a big disappointment for Jay and crew, who fought to retain CAOS.

All in the history books... Just a particular interesting chapter I think.

Last edited by jingof on 04-Apr-2012 at 10:06 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 04-Apr-2012 at 09:53 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 04-Apr-2012 at 09:51 PM.

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@jingof

Quote:

jingof wrote: @Arko [quote] So, the original AmigaOS (CAOS) was (by all accounts) expected to be significantly more advanced, high performance and stable, ..

According to the documents you linked CAOS was far from being ready and because of this far from being stable. The term "stable" or "stability" is not used on the documents you linked.

Performance of CAOS is not discused in this documents, performance is only mentioned as "goal: reliability performance" none of the documents stated the performance would have been higher with CAOS. And I'm doubting an additional layer around exec woul have resulted in better performance.

And according to the text, the Exec (that's the name of the kernel and the kernel is the part some people would call the "OS") is absolutely the same like it was developed for CAOS, memory allocation would have relied on Execs memory allocation functions with an additional layer by CAOS, something most application programmes would not have used. Most applications where games and early programmers did not use any system routines except forbid().

Last edited by Arko on 04-Apr-2012 at 10:23 PM.

_________________
AmigaONE. Haha. Just because you can put label on it does not make it Amiga.

I borrowed this comments from here (#27 & #28):
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=38873&forum=2&start=20&order=0

@jingof

Quote:

So, the original AmigaOS (CAOS) was (by all accounts) expected to be significantly more advanced, high performance and stable, but obstacles and delivery dates intervened. So, Commodore forced the team to replace CAOS with TripOS at the last minute to meet the ship date. By some reports, to cut the lead the Atari ST had. Unfortunately, Commodore set their sights on Atari as their competitor, when they should have identified PC's and Mac's as their true competition. As a result, the Amiga did not ship with the OS it was originally designed for, which apparently was a big disappointment for Jay and crew, who fought to retain CAOS.

FWIW Commodore chose a good alternative. TripOS brought us the dynamic RAM disk, ReadArgs-style command line arguments, the dual device/handler system and mountlists (which together allow nicely modular and extensible filesystem and device support), CLI windows you can stop by pressing a key and perform type-ahead before the previous command has returned, and countless other things I'm sure most Amiga users take for granted.

AmigaOS would have been very different with CAOS. Would it have been better? Possibly, but perhaps at the expense of some nice things TripOS gave us. TripOS at least was a good modern, well designed OS which, even if it didn't reflect Amiga principles at the time, certainly influenced them later.

Unfortunately we are still stuck with no automatic stack enlargement, one remaining legacy I'd be glad to see the back of.

Last edited by Chris_Y on 04-Apr-2012 at 10:48 PM.

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@Chris_Y

Stack enlargement will break some things.

Stack enlargement is really stack relocation its done by putting the stack into virtual memory that’s private to a program, program that distribute address of local variables into kernels or other applications will break and possible trigger instability.

Also a child process has to have the same address space as main process as it is today.

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@jingof

Quote:

For example, apparently TripOS gave us the AmigaDOS command set.

Indeed, reading the original TRIPOS manuals, most of its commands are very familiar!

http://www.pagetable.com/docs/amigados_tripos/tripos_manuals.pdf

In fact, most of the original AmigaDOS manuals were exact reprints:

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=193