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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