Issue 37: Nov 2003
Features
- | Foreword
- | MyAtari Survey Feedback
- | Tip of the day
- | Atari Is Underground Computing!
- | Jaguar Connexion 2003
- | Introduction To The MiNT Operating System
Review
- | Zombie Apocalypse
M@ilbox
News
| Introduction To The MiNT Operating System by Bohdan Milar What is MiNT? I would like to be concise but understandable for common users. I hope that coders won't criticize me for some simplifications and users for the number of technical terms. So I would try to define MiNT as an interesting combination of TOS and Unix. To understand this definition we must say what exactly TOS and Unix are and what sort of combination it is. TOS is The Operating System that most Atari ST and all Falcon and TT computers have burned in their ROMs. It consists of several parts and I will use the Atari Compendium definitions of them: GEMDOS - file system management routines that provide access to all of the basic devices supported by Atari computers. BIOS - system for the lowest level of device communication. It is used by GEMDOS to accomplish many of the file system operations. XBIOS - control of the hardware-specific features such as the floppy drive, video controller, DSP, MFP and sound system. This is the part of TOS which most users do not know very well. They are more familiar with the graphical environment called GEM. I will talk about it later. Now a few words about Unix. It is an operating system developed in the 1960s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The main idea was to write a small and effective operating system kernel. In 1978 Bill Joy and Chuck Haley improved Unix to achieve these attributes: To be expandable by loadable modules (device drivers). To control the access to the computer's resources (CPU, memory, disks...) with user names and passwords (multi-user). To be able to launch and control other programs with the possibility of running more than one program at the same time (multi-tasking). To allow users to select different environments to work. To support networks. To be portable to many types of computers. This system was called BSD and it was later released as open source. The development of TOS was very slow. Functional changes in new versions were rare if one compares TOS 1.0 (1985), 2.06 (1991) and 4.04 (1993). Atari Corporation stopped all work on it in 1993, but the source code was never published so further development was not possible. Most improvements of existing TOS versions were done through software patches (such as FPATCH) or by replacing obsolete parts of it in memory (like Winx). This was the situation when many people thought about the future. Especially GEMDOS needed to be replaced because it did not allow use of long file names and other useful things. Also the multi-tasking through accessories was not sufficient any more. It wouldn't be wise to write a whole new system because hundreds of great programs were already written for TOS. And then Eric R. Smith came with a great idea. He took parts of the BSD source code, modified it and compiled on the Atari ST. He replaced relevant parts of TOS with the result and thus MiNT was born. In 1992 Atari bought MiNT and used it as a part of the MultiTOS project. Nevertheless it was stopped in 1994. Fortunately, unlike TOS, the sources of MiNT were released freely so potential developers could take them and continue. Such people appeared so MiNT has been kept alive. Now Frank Naumann and a group of his colleagues continue the development under a new name: FreeMiNT.
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