On Tue, Jan 06, 2015 at 08:26:04AM -0500, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
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.)
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.
In fact early A3000 machines also used a kickstart image, although what they did was run a modified rom image called 1.4, which would know how to read the HD and was able to read the kickstart image for 2.0 from the HD or a floppy into ram, them use the MMU to remap it and reset from the ram image. Once 2.04 was finished, they usually got the rom replaced by a real one to save the 512KB of ram.
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 …
Nothing quite like the real hardware, and you can do so much crazy stuff with it now that was way to expensive in the past. Emulating the amiga hardware has ben quite hard. -- Len Sorensen