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From: west@cs.reading.UUCP (Jerry West)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: The word 'TRIPOS'
Message-ID: <1068@cs.reading.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 25-Sep-85 07:35:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: cs.1068
Posted: Wed Sep 25 07:35:48 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 1-Oct-85 07:55:08 EDT
References: <339@wcwvax.UUCP> <1624@islenet.UUCP>
Reply-To: west@reading.UUCP (Jerry West)
Organization: Comp. Sci. Dept., Reading Univ., UK.
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In article <1624@islenet.UUCP> jons@islenet.UUCP (Jonathan Spangler) writes:
>What the heck does 'TRIPOS' have do with the Amiga?

AmigaDOS = TRIPOS + some

Tripos was developed at Cambridge University, and designed
to work with the 'Cambridge Ring' Network. It was originally a
research project to investigate 'portability' of operating
systems by writing them in a high level language whilst still
fitting onto mini-computers (as then was). The original
implementation (in BCPL with a machine code kernal) found
the 28k words of a PDP-11 'distinctly cramping' but ran 'in
considerable luxury' on a 64k word addressed mini (the
LSI-4).

The original implementation is detailed in
        "TRIPOS - A Portable Operating System for Mini-computers"
        by Richards, Aylward, Bond, Evans and Knight
        in Software - Practice and Experience, Vol 9, No 7,
        pp 513-526 (1979).

A tripos is (was) a three-legged stool on which the Cambridge
undergrads used to perch whilst taking exams. This was then
used to refer to the (two-part) exams themselves and later
filched as a suitable name for an Operating System.

TRIPOS was ported to the 68000 (and rewritten in
C, I believe) by Metacomco, a UK s/w house. Commodore
filled it in for the Amiga.

I don't know how much AmigaDOS differs from TRIPOS, the use
of the CLI etc suggests very little,  so the article may be
of some interest still. It gives a brief overview of the
filing system and the task handler. It mentions that all
tasks run in the same address space, and that there are 4
standard tasks - the CLI, a debugger, the console handler
and the file handler. Presumably, it would be very little
work to replace the console handler by your favourite
shell. The article also demonstrates the ease with which
inter-process communication is accomplished and goes on to
say that memory mapping facilities are being accomodated.

If the Amiga uses the raw CLI in 'line mode' then the
sooner someone adapts one of the pd shells the better! The
CLI appears to be 1970's syntax at its worst!

In its favour, however, is the fact that TRIPOS is (or
should be) an extensively tested and debugged system,
capable of linking into a local area (ring) network without
major change.

Jerry
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