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.