TRIPOS and memory protection

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 08:56:13AM +0200, Eric J Korpela wrote: Oh... I should probably point out that AmigaDOS was pretty much always tied to its TRIPOS roots, but that the DOS was only part of the software running on the system - the underlying message-passing layer was "Exec", then "Intuition" was the window manager. AmigaDOS was the part worried about loading code segments and the filesystem and system directory structure (where to put scripts and binaries and icons and such). Device drivers and libraries (quite similar internally) and processes and so on, was part of Exec. It's quite a complex system, one reason for the multiple phonebooks for a reference guide - very little of that, though, is AmigaDOS. I think I was an Amiga developer for four or five years before I ever saw the AmigaDOS manual. From day one, though, I had the RKMs (ROM Kernel Manuals) and used them *lots*. You pretty much needed them for any code that had to open a screen or a window, or that would work with disks below the file layer (block access and such) or that fiddled with audio. You could get away from that level of involvement if you just did things with standard sorts of C functions, curses, file I/O, etc., but not for anything deeper. So while AmigaDOS may have been what you saw when you interacted with a CLI window, and it certainly got invoked if you did stdio- sorts of things, as a part of the whole, it wasn't a very big chunk of "The Amiga". I still hate BCPL and BPTRs, though. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 24-Jun-2008 at 07:30 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -79.4 F (-61.9 C) Windchill -113.8 F (-81.0 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 8.4 kts Grid 21 Barometer 676.1 mb (10776 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html