EmuTOS - History
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- The BIOS, which is the basic input output system
- The XBIOS, which provides the interface to the hardware
- The BDOS, which are the high level OS routines, what you know as GEMDOS
- The shell command.prg we use as an alternative to GEM
- The VDI, which provides an abstracted device interface
- The AES, which does all the higher level graphics stuff and
- The Desktop - the program you see immediately after boot
GEMDOS was first used in Apple's Lisa computer, and later, as homecomputers came up, in Atari ST series. In both GEMDOS were the base for Digital Research's GEM graphicle user interface, which became very popular with the introduction of the Atari ST.
In 1999 Caldera bought all the GEM and GEMDOS stuff from DRI and thought of using it as a base for some thinclients. But this never happened and they decided to release GEMDOS together with GEM under the GPL (General Public License).
In spring of 2001 we began to work on these old sources and had some good progress till today.
The BIOS and XBIOS code is our own developement. It is really written from scratch and implements nearly all of the TOS 1.0 BIOS functionality, and a bit more, like e.g. harddisk access and STE sampled sound. A few things like printing, midi and serial stuff is missing for now, but may be implemented somewhen in the future.
The GEMDOS part is based on Digital Research's GEMDOS sources, which were made available under GPL licence in 1999 by Caldera. Also all of the graphical parts, the VDI, AES and desktop, which are now nearly completely implemented. Though, many parts of these subsystems have been changed or rewritten to be more compatible and conformant with modern TOS developments.
All this stuff is very outdated today. All of GEMDOS has been replaced by a superior operating system called MiNT (MiNT Is Now TOS). This is widely used in the Atari ST and TT series computers today, because is is more posix like and provides most modern concepts, like a multiuser environment, symmetric multitasking, memory protection and so on.