[HN Gopher] Taos Operating System (1995)
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Taos Operating System (1995)
Author : xyzzy3000
Score : 79 points
Date : 2023-08-21 13:24 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.uruk.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.uruk.org)
| laxd wrote:
| Earlier discussion, different article, same OS. Interesting top
| comment by one of the devs:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607
| xyzzy3000 wrote:
| The newsgroup posts have an enthusiasm to them that makes them
| enjoyable to read in their own right, especially when they come
| from beleaguered communities such as the Amiga or Acorn ones.
|
| It's a shame that the IP for this OS isn't around to play with
| - the retro community would no doubt have some fun with it,
| even if it has no value as a going concern for serious use on
| modern hardware.
| lsllc wrote:
| Many moons ago, I remember reading the Byte Magazine article
| about TAOS and being totally enthused:
|
| https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byt...
|
| Last time a TAOS discussion came up on HN, I emailed vygr (Chris
| Hinsley, one of the Taos founders) about the state of the Taos
| IP:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811455
|
| Sadly not good news, but I'm still hopeful whomever owns it can
| find it in their heart to release it to the public in some form
| (as Castles did with Acorn's RiscOS).
| lproven wrote:
| It nearly became the next AmigaOS:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170108073531/http://www.amigah...
| paulusthe wrote:
| Read this as "tacos," came expecting some pointlessly quirky OS
| filled with taco references (perhaps arguments are "fillings",
| passed to objects called "shells"), am now very disappointed
| zer8k wrote:
| Tacos are an embarrassingly parallel problem after all. It
| makes sense TacOS would naturally be a thing. It might even
| need to be hard real time because hangry customers can get a
| little cagey.
| JoachimS wrote:
| There is at least an OS like environment called Nachos (Not
| Another Completely Heuristic Operating System) used many moons
| ago in the University OS class.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Another_Completely_Heurist...
|
| https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tom/nachos/
|
| (Not sure what the possible relation to Taos would be, to make
| this OT. ;-)
| sillywalk wrote:
| Fedora had a "Beefy Miracle" way back in the day...
| taylorius wrote:
| I was doing 3d graphics contract work for Acorn in the mid
| nineties, for their RiscPC. I was given an early version of Taos
| to try - it was so early in development as to be essentially
| unusable, but it definitely existed!
| fidotron wrote:
| I am legitimately pleasantly surprised Taos actually existed,
| contrary to my earlier comment.
|
| But can you say what 3D work you were doing with a Risc PC? I
| remember Top Model and so on, but not having floating point was
| bad enough when others had graphics accelerators.
| taylorius wrote:
| Yeah, I wrote a set of 3D demos for Acorn, to showcase the
| new RiscPC at Acorn World '94. There was a landscape flyover
| and a virtual textured talking head. All rendering was done
| entirely in software of course, using integer maths. I
| developed a type of Bresenham's Algorithm to trace the
| hyperbolic curves in texture UV space that translate to
| scanlines, when one is doing perspective correct texture
| mapping.
|
| Subsequently I wrote a sample implementation of the Xerox
| Rooms paradigm for Acorn. It was a 3D office environment,
| with clickable destinations that would "teleport you" into
| new spaces. I'm not sure what became of this though tbh.
|
| Next they wanted me to write a version of SGI's GL API for
| RiscOS, however - for whatever reason that project never
| really got started, so I had to go and get a proper job! :-(
|
| Cheers
| rbirkby wrote:
| I "founded" and ran the acorn computer user www server at
| this time. The remains of the site still have a Taos press
| release on it.
|
| http://www.poppyfields.net/acorn/docs/acorndocs/taos2.shtml
| fidotron wrote:
| Amazing, thanks!
|
| A GL implementation for RiscOS in 1995 (presumably as a
| RM?) would have been curious. My recollection of the Acorn
| Worlds was that a huge proportion of Acorn staff seemed
| more interested in running NetBSD than RiscOS itself, and I
| couldn't help thinking they knew something we didn't.
| taylorius wrote:
| Yeah, the whole idea was a bit nebulous tbh. I remember
| the main guy I was speaking to at Acorn talking about
| creating an ASIC. I believe it was aimed at being some
| sort of early GPU. But the project never really went
| anywhere, anyway.
| xyzzy3000 wrote:
| Steve Turnbull, then-editor of The Micro User gave it an
| interesting and enthusiastic write-up. Beautiful though the
| RISC OS Desktop was, the underlying technology didn't really
| hold up in the long run.
|
| I still use my RiscPC on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis.
| It would have been fun to have a Risc iX or Galileo core (or
| some other technology not bound to the BBC Micro way of doing
| things) that retained the usability and snappiness of the
| Desktop.
|
| What kind of 3D work were you doing?
|
| Edit: It was Acorn User (not The Micro User) which featured the
| write-up on Taos, in 1995. A link to the article can be found
| on the Wikipedia page for 'Virtual Processor'.
|
| Link to the Wikipedia page for Virtual Processor here:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Processor
| andrea76 wrote:
| Is there any video or screenshot?
| lproven wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-ami...
| actionfromafar wrote:
| So many of these ideas have become implemented, in a hodge-podge
| of disparate mechanisms.
|
| Does anyone know how much of TAO really existed and if it can be
| accessed today?
| fidotron wrote:
| It became "Intent" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Group
|
| There was a reasonable amount of noise about this in the Acorn
| and Amiga universes of the mid 90s but I have never encountered
| it actually running despite my later being involved in things
| like interactive tv and mobile games in the appropriate era.
|
| Honestly this is one where I suspect the core OS was vapourware
| while the company really only made media player libraries.
|
| Edit: according to quite a lot of other comments it did exist.
| It sounds like I professionally arrived just as it definitively
| bit the dust.
| sillywalk wrote:
| This is the devkit for the follow up to Taos
|
| "Intent ADK 1.1.1 with some Amiga Anywhere stuff bundled and
| with Amiga branding."
|
| Not sure if it'll run on 64bit windows.
|
| https://archive.org/details/AmigaPartyPack
| https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection
| xyzzy3000 wrote:
| There's a copy held by the Centre for Computing History, at
| least according to this record:
| https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/20622/Taos-
| Operating...
| pm215 wrote:
| It never arrived anywhere from the Acorn and Amiga POV (my
| take on that internally was "we shouldn't be wasting our time
| with these Amiga chancers", not that my opinion mattered),
| but it absolutely shipped. The main driver of sales I think
| was being a JIT Java engine for whatever the mobile-phone-
| Java-flavour of the time was (in that setup the RTOS
| underpinnings were all still there, but it ran "hosted"
| rather than bare-metal, with 'device drivers' that talked to
| the host OS). We also ended up as the RTOS in a JVC video
| camera. And of course it being a startup there was a bunch of
| "have a go at getting into some market/some contract, but it
| doesn't work out" work as well (I think I did a port to a PS4
| devkit at some point, and I still have the Dreamcast devkit
| that somebody else did a port to, for instance).
| TeaDude wrote:
| I looked through the IA but it was all locked behind accounts
| and contacting their sales team.
|
| Presumably one of the many reasons that Tao didn't catch on
| (although it was a common practise back in the dark ages...)
| pm215 wrote:
| That's more I think that the business model was B2B and
| fairly high-touch-per-customer -- "are you a mobile phone
| handset manufacturer who wants to ship a MIDP Java engine for
| it? come talk to us about porting our stuff to whatever
| custom RTOS you're running on it". It was never intended to
| be direct to consumers or to run on hardware that an end-user
| would have the ability to install new code to. The Windows
| and Linux ports were there as the development
| environment/tools.
|
| I think the main reason it didn't work out was that there was
| a brief window of opportunity where mobile was a thing but
| where there was a massively divergent variety of custom
| platforms and OSes, and so "we can port this to anything and
| it will then be a common platform for running games/MIDP
| applications/etc" was a potentially sellable product. But
| then Android and iOS came along and the whole mobile space
| coalesced into "there are only two platforms, plus web apps
| are feasible for a lot of cases, and it's pretty much all
| Arm", and the need for a middleware layer that abstracted
| away CPU and OS differences basically evaporated.
| Angostura wrote:
| I write about this several times as at IT journalist the time. I
| remember interviewing Francis Charig a couple of times, who was -
| ISTR - MD of Tao Systems.
|
| It was a tough one. The demos and the concept was absolutely
| beautiful and the claimed performance astonishing. It was an
| elegant idea. But I had no real, independently verifiable way of
| knowing whether it was bullshit.
|
| I seem to recall it started off being described initially on the
| CIX bulletin board (think dial-up, UK version of Reddit) in
| conference (subreddit) of its own. Initiially it looked like
| philosphical ramblings until several of the conference members
| twiiged 'hang on - youre talking about a real OS!'. Might have
| been Chris Hinsley who posted the text.
| lproven wrote:
| A Cixen on HN. Well I never.
|
| Yes, Taos was discussed there quite a lot.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Sounds somewhat similar to Java combined with an MQ engine, if
| you turned it into an OS (like the jnode guys did) and made it
| load code in response to receiving messages on a queue. Not
| surprising that they ended up doing JVMs as it seems spiritually
| very similar.
| [deleted]
| haspok wrote:
| How does this compare to Erlang? Or, to be precise, and Erlang VM
| running on a contemporary OS.
|
| I always had the feeling that the Erlang VM should have been
| implemented on the OS level from the start, and now it turns out
| some company actually did it (or something very similar)...
| lproven wrote:
| It doesn't compare closely to anything else.
|
| The only related tech I know of is Inferno, the OS developed
| later from Plan 9: binaries are platform-independent and run
| natively on all supported CPU architectures.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Seems very much ahead of its time (and ours as well).
|
| I'd love to see a demo of it running, in particular the network
| transparency part.
| lproven wrote:
| Here you go...
|
| https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection
| lproven wrote:
| Also looks like since I last checked, some disks of v1 of the
| OS has been rediscovered.
|
| https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19943
| afr0ck wrote:
| Amoeba OS, Plan9 and Inferno OS explored the same stuff.
| rbanffy wrote:
| True, but treating a network as a single computer is not
| something we can easily do even now. You can't easily run
| Firefox, Slack, LibreOffice, and Thunderbird on a desktop
| cluster (Think a couple NUC boards tied together) without
| lots of installation and configuration (and network trickery
| to fool X clients).
|
| Having said that, this seems like a natural evolutionary path
| for the Boxes OS.
| danhon wrote:
| Also covered in Edge Magazine issue 9, June 1994, but I can't
| find a PDF of it anymore:
| https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/edge/edge-issue-9/
| Findecanor wrote:
| It can be read here:
| https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3NnrPPNPKBPY09jZ2dLUHZ0Njg
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yes, that's the article I remember!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Taos Operating System (1991)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727565 - April 2018 (9
| comments)
|
| _TAOS Operating System_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527936 - Oct 2017 (21
| comments)
|
| _The Taos Operating System (1991)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607 - June 2015 (93
| comments)
|
| Also related:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vygr
|
| _ChrysaLisp_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34415936 -
| Jan 2023 (16 comments)
|
| _ChrysaLisp_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779930 -
| Jan 2021 (6 comments)
|
| _ChrysaLisp_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019594 -
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|
| _ChrysaLisp_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18897817 -
| Jan 2019 (19 comments)
|
| _ChrysaLisp - A 64-bit Lisp OS with GUI_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15466124 - Oct 2017 (121
| comments)
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