On 2015-01-05 05:49 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote: > (The Atari ST was a lot faster booting because more of its OS was in > ROM. On the other hand, the OS didn't advance very quickly or very > much.
The Atari ST was a bit of a disappointment in that it needed a disk to boot. It didn't do much with that disk: just checked to see if it had a boot sector, and if not, started vanilla DR GEM on top of TOS. If it hadn't had that requirement, the OS would've booted instantly. (I still have a tiny soft spot for Atari STs, because of the University of Strathclyde's rather quirky approach to computer acquistion. All of the Mechanical Engineering department ran Atari STs/ATWs* when I was there, so much of my early lab work was done on a crisp B&W Atari display and horrid squodgy keyboard. Hey, it was better than the CompSci group who decided that everyone should have a Sinclair QL [68008, multitasking, weird Microdrive floppy tape drives, hugely buggy] a few years before. I'm sure they are still finding store rooms full of ancient QLs in Glasgow.) > The original Amiga had almost all the OS in RAM because they > knew it wasn't yet mature.) > Everything after the A1000 had most of the OS in ROM, though the system got a bit sprawling with AmigaDOS 2.0 and later. The A1000 had a separate RAM page for the Kickstart "WOM" information, since early versions were quite buggy. I was rather fond of the old Tripos-based AmigaDOS, which did pretty nifty multitasking in a system with no MMU. Since I spent so much time writing about Amigas, I sometimes toy with getting some vintage hardware — but then I realise I can emulate it perfectly in my browser … cheers, Stewart *: Yes, we had a couple of Atari Transputer Workstations. They were very cool, but almost impossible to program applications for. --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
