15 ms·

Taos Operating System (1995)

84 points by xyzzy3000 3y ago

actionfromafar 3y ago
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?
- TeaDude 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
- fidotron 3y ago
  It became “Intent” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Group 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.
  - xyzzy3000 3y ago
    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-System-Developers-Edition/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/20622/Taos-Operating...
  - pm215 3y ago
    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).
    - sillywalk 3y ago
      Interesting. Also just checking, but do you mean PS3 devkit?
      - pm215 3y ago
        At this late date most of the details have fallen out of my memory, but checking PS3 and PS4 release dates, yes, it must have been PS3. I remember now that it was the PPC one, which also indicates the PS3. IIRC we had to change our codegen to avoid the "sets flags" versions of instructions because on that CPU they were all microcoded and took an immediate 20 cycle penalty or something...
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    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/AmigaPartyPack https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection
laxd 3y ago
Earlier discussion, different article, same OS. Interesting top comment by one of the devs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607
- xyzzy3000 3y ago
  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.
taylorius 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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
    - fidotron 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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.
rbanffy 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Here you go... https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection
  - lproven 3y ago
    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 https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19943
- afr0ck 3y ago
  Amoeba OS, Plan9 and Inferno OS explored the same stuff.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    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.
  - lproven 3y ago
    Only very very loosely, so on balance, I would have to say "no". The point of Taos was not network transparency, or clusters, or any of that. The USP of Taos was platform-neutral binaries, translated on the fly to native format as they were loaded from disk. Full native performance on every platform from a single binary file, with the loader/translator embedded into the OS itself. [Aside: It ended up very small compared to native OSes so it could be used as a runtime as well. It was so efficient that it could convert Java bytecode to its own format and convert that to native code and still outperform the JVM... for a while. ] Something akin to Java, but the JVM is an addon that you install on a different OS, and there's no "native" OS*. Apps aren't native and don't look or feel like native. Plan 9 has nothing like this; Plan 9 is UNIX 2.0 with networking and GUI right there in the kernel. Binaries are written in C and compiled to the native CPU; no portability. Amoeba OS I've never seen but I think it was much the same. Inferno is Plan 9 2.0, which is to say, it is UNIX 3.0. C is banished, native binaries are banished. A runtime VM, Dis, is embedded in the kernel. Binaries are written in Limbo and compiled to Dis. The same binary runs everywhere, like Taos, but it's not translated as such: there is a bytecode interpreter at a low level. [Aside #2: It ended up very small compared to native OSes so it could be used as a runtime as well. It was so efficient that it was competitive with the JVM, and so was offered as a rival, but still with its own format that could outperform the JVM... for a while. ] [Aside #3: Note the very similar asides 1 & 2. That's deliberate. Both fell into the same trap. Both failed and I think this was a contributing factor. ] [Aside #4: Java fell into the same trap and failed to compete with Javascript embedded right into the HTML renderer itself. ] ----- * Yes I know about SavaJE etc. Not directly relevant, and all flopped.
paulusthe 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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_Heuristic_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Another_Completely_Heurist... https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tom/nachos/ https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tom/nachos/ (Not sure what the possible relation to Taos would be, to make this OT. ;-)
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Fedora had a "Beefy Miracle" way back in the day...
  - ddalcino 3y ago
    Thanks for that; this was a bit before my time. Here’s the link, if anyone wants to be entertained: https://opensource.com/life/12/5/whats-beefy-miracle-anyway-story-fedora-17-release-name https://opensource.com/life/12/5/whats-beefy-miracle-anyway-...
haspok 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    And Android, Windows Phone 7-10, IBM i, Burroughs/Unisys ClearPath MCP, UCSD Pascal, Modula-2 Lillith, Oberon, Xerox PARC...
    - lproven 3y ago
      Android is a Linux. Native binaries are definitely possible. Windows Phone 7.x was CE, 8.x was NT. Native binaries are the default. IBM i: the OS isn't native on the hardware, but the abstraction layer is below the OS. (Taos made it part of the file loader, roughly.) MCP: I don't know enough to judge. I believe that they run on x86 today via a mainframe CPU emulator, though. UCSD p-System: contained a bytecode interpreter; no native compilation possible, but of course every other version of the language did, leading to the p-System's extinction. Modula-2, Oberon: by default, compile to native executable binaries. A cross-platform format, SLIM, was proposed for Oberon but I am not sure it was ever implemented, let alone included as standard. https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Slim+Binaries https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Slim+Binaries Or are you thinking of ORP, the Oberon-to-RISC Parser? Is that not just part of the compiler? Xerox PARC: what did you have in mind? AFAIK, Alto, Star, Dandelion, etc. all had native binary formats -- more than one for each model, in fact, depending on the OS loaded onto it.
      - 3y ago
danhon 3y ago
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/ https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/edge/edge-issue-9/
- Findecanor 3y ago
  It can be read here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3NnrPPNPKBPY09jZ2dLUHZ0Njg https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3NnrPPNPKBPY09jZ2dLUHZ0Njg
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Yes, that's the article I remember!
- qubex 3y ago
  I actually own a copy of that magazine — I have the full first two years in holding cases. I feel so amazingly old.
mike_hearn 3y ago
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.
lsllc 3y ago
Many moons ago, I remember reading the Byte Magazine article about TAOS and being totally enthused: https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byte-articles/the-taos-operating-system-1991 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 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).
- lsllc 3y ago
  I meant to say "I asked" not "I emailed" vygr!
Angostura 3y ago
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 3y ago
  A Cixen on HN. Well I never. Yes, Taos was discussed there quite a lot.
  - Angostura 3y ago
    Weirdly enough, I visited it a couple of month ago and yes - my account is still active. It was a complementary one.
    - lproven 3y ago
      Which was?
dang 3y ago
Related: The Taos Operating System (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727565 - April 2018 (9 comments) TAOS Operating System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527936 - Oct 2017 (21 comments) The Taos Operating System (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607 - June 2015 (93 comments) Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vygr https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vygr ChrysaLisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34415936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34415936 - Jan 2023 (16 comments) ChrysaLisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779930 - Jan 2021 (6 comments) ChrysaLisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019594 - Jan 2020 (61 comments) ChrysaLisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18897817 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15466124 - Oct 2017 (121 comments)
andrea76 3y ago
Is there any video or screenshot?
- lproven 3y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-12-red-vs-blue/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-ami...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lproven 3y ago
It nearly became the next AmigaOS: https://web.archive.org/web/20170108073531/http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/deplayer/august2001.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170108073531/http://www.amigah...
- sillywalk 3y ago
  I'm still not clear, so please correct me if I'm wrong. I thought that it wasn't really going to be the new OS, it was just taking the Tao elate and putting Amiga branding on it - ie. it couldn't run any existing Amiga software. It existed, you could buy games to run on it but it wasn't anything to do with the existing Amiga OS. There was supposed to (eventually) be some way to run Amiga software emulated or something. AmigaDE was the 'full developer' thing that you used to develop tao/intent apps. And AmigaEverywhere was the sort of portable runtime. "Amiga DE is an updated version of Tao Group's Elate operating system. As part of the agreement, Tao Group provided the embedded OS, while Amiga Inc. develop the 'Usability Layer', drivers, and codecs required for a consumer market. "[0] [0] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/amigade.html http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/amigade.html
  - lproven 3y ago
    Disclaimer: while I was an admirer of Taos' tech from when it was new, I very rarely actually touched it myself. I played with a demo RiscPC at a show in Wembley, and that's about it. My understanding (much of it from prior HN threads -- go back and read all the earlier discussions; someone posted links, and it's totally worth it!) * Taos 1.x was a very basic, almost skeletal. This ran natively on some Acorn ARM kit, and via a DOS loader on x86-32, and some other CPUs. * Taos 2.x was a much more complete OS and was renamed. Confusingly, to 2 different names; and more confusingly, with embedded formatting. >_< Int_e_nt was on, El_a_te was the other, I think. Life is too short. Elate was the bare-metal version. Intent ran under other OSes, but not as a guest or VM, because x86 couldn't do that yet. (As I wrote: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/07/11/a_brief_history_of_virtualisation_part_one/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/07/11/a_brief_history... ) My understanding is that Amiga wanted both, and would run one on bare metal on its own kit, but that the other, runtime version would be made available for other platforms. So, Amiga games authors could write once and run anywhere. Amiga's own version would have an Amiga-like desktop UI which Amiga Inc. would write. The runtime wouldn't have a UI, and would just launch apps. It was, in its way, a good plan, and they should have pressed ahead with it. I think QNX stole the thunder, and that never went anywhere. Result: well, AmigaOS 4.x is slowly limping along, and there's MorphOS, which was promising, but both are tied to elderly PowerPC kit. And there's AROS which seems to be faltering.

84 points by xyzzy3000 3y ago

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?

TeaDude 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
fidotron 3y ago
It became “Intent” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Group 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.
- xyzzy3000 3y ago
  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-System-Developers-Edition/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/20622/Taos-Operating...
- pm215 3y ago
  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).
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    Interesting. Also just checking, but do you mean PS3 devkit?
    - pm215 3y ago
      At this late date most of the details have fallen out of my memory, but checking PS3 and PS4 release dates, yes, it must have been PS3. I remember now that it was the PPC one, which also indicates the PS3. IIRC we had to change our codegen to avoid the "sets flags" versions of instructions because on that CPU they were all microcoded and took an immediate 20 cycle penalty or something...
- sillywalk 3y ago
  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/AmigaPartyPack https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection

laxd 3y ago

Earlier discussion, different article, same OS. Interesting top comment by one of the devs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607

xyzzy3000 3y ago
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.

taylorius 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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
  - fidotron 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.

rbanffy 3y ago

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 3y ago
Here you go... https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection https://archive.org/details/taos_intent_collection
- lproven 3y ago
  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 https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19943
afr0ck 3y ago
Amoeba OS, Plan9 and Inferno OS explored the same stuff.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  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.
- lproven 3y ago
  Only very very loosely, so on balance, I would have to say "no". The point of Taos was not network transparency, or clusters, or any of that. The USP of Taos was platform-neutral binaries, translated on the fly to native format as they were loaded from disk. Full native performance on every platform from a single binary file, with the loader/translator embedded into the OS itself. [Aside: It ended up very small compared to native OSes so it could be used as a runtime as well. It was so efficient that it could convert Java bytecode to its own format and convert that to native code and still outperform the JVM... for a while. ] Something akin to Java, but the JVM is an addon that you install on a different OS, and there's no "native" OS*. Apps aren't native and don't look or feel like native. Plan 9 has nothing like this; Plan 9 is UNIX 2.0 with networking and GUI right there in the kernel. Binaries are written in C and compiled to the native CPU; no portability. Amoeba OS I've never seen but I think it was much the same. Inferno is Plan 9 2.0, which is to say, it is UNIX 3.0. C is banished, native binaries are banished. A runtime VM, Dis, is embedded in the kernel. Binaries are written in Limbo and compiled to Dis. The same binary runs everywhere, like Taos, but it's not translated as such: there is a bytecode interpreter at a low level. [Aside #2: It ended up very small compared to native OSes so it could be used as a runtime as well. It was so efficient that it was competitive with the JVM, and so was offered as a rival, but still with its own format that could outperform the JVM... for a while. ] [Aside #3: Note the very similar asides 1 & 2. That's deliberate. Both fell into the same trap. Both failed and I think this was a contributing factor. ] [Aside #4: Java fell into the same trap and failed to compete with Javascript embedded right into the HTML renderer itself. ] ----- * Yes I know about SavaJE etc. Not directly relevant, and all flopped.

paulusthe 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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_Heuristic_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Another_Completely_Heurist... https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tom/nachos/ https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tom/nachos/ (Not sure what the possible relation to Taos would be, to make this OT. ;-)
sillywalk 3y ago
Fedora had a "Beefy Miracle" way back in the day...
- ddalcino 3y ago
  Thanks for that; this was a bit before my time. Here’s the link, if anyone wants to be entertained: https://opensource.com/life/12/5/whats-beefy-miracle-anyway-story-fedora-17-release-name https://opensource.com/life/12/5/whats-beefy-miracle-anyway-...

haspok 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  And Android, Windows Phone 7-10, IBM i, Burroughs/Unisys ClearPath MCP, UCSD Pascal, Modula-2 Lillith, Oberon, Xerox PARC...
  - lproven 3y ago
    Android is a Linux. Native binaries are definitely possible. Windows Phone 7.x was CE, 8.x was NT. Native binaries are the default. IBM i: the OS isn't native on the hardware, but the abstraction layer is below the OS. (Taos made it part of the file loader, roughly.) MCP: I don't know enough to judge. I believe that they run on x86 today via a mainframe CPU emulator, though. UCSD p-System: contained a bytecode interpreter; no native compilation possible, but of course every other version of the language did, leading to the p-System's extinction. Modula-2, Oberon: by default, compile to native executable binaries. A cross-platform format, SLIM, was proposed for Oberon but I am not sure it was ever implemented, let alone included as standard. https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Slim+Binaries https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Slim+Binaries Or are you thinking of ORP, the Oberon-to-RISC Parser? Is that not just part of the compiler? Xerox PARC: what did you have in mind? AFAIK, Alto, Star, Dandelion, etc. all had native binary formats -- more than one for each model, in fact, depending on the OS loaded onto it.
    - 3y ago

danhon 3y ago

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/ https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/edge/edge-issue-9/

Findecanor 3y ago
It can be read here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3NnrPPNPKBPY09jZ2dLUHZ0Njg https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3NnrPPNPKBPY09jZ2dLUHZ0Njg
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Yes, that's the article I remember!
qubex 3y ago
I actually own a copy of that magazine — I have the full first two years in holding cases. I feel so amazingly old.

mike_hearn 3y ago

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.

lsllc 3y ago

Many moons ago, I remember reading the Byte Magazine article about TAOS and being totally enthused: https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byte-articles/the-taos-operating-system-1991 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 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).

lsllc 3y ago
I meant to say "I asked" not "I emailed" vygr!

Angostura 3y ago

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 3y ago
A Cixen on HN. Well I never. Yes, Taos was discussed there quite a lot.
- Angostura 3y ago
  Weirdly enough, I visited it a couple of month ago and yes - my account is still active. It was a complementary one.
  - lproven 3y ago
    Which was?

dang 3y ago

Related: The Taos Operating System (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727565 - April 2018 (9 comments) TAOS Operating System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527936 - Oct 2017 (21 comments) The Taos Operating System (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607 - June 2015 (93 comments) Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vygr https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vygr ChrysaLisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34415936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34415936 - Jan 2023 (16 comments) ChrysaLisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779930 - Jan 2021 (6 comments) ChrysaLisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019594 - Jan 2020 (61 comments) ChrysaLisp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18897817 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15466124 - Oct 2017 (121 comments)

andrea76 3y ago

Is there any video or screenshot?

lproven 3y ago
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-12-red-vs-blue/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-ami...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lproven 3y ago

It nearly became the next AmigaOS: https://web.archive.org/web/20170108073531/http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/deplayer/august2001.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170108073531/http://www.amigah...

sillywalk 3y ago
I'm still not clear, so please correct me if I'm wrong. I thought that it wasn't really going to be the new OS, it was just taking the Tao elate and putting Amiga branding on it - ie. it couldn't run any existing Amiga software. It existed, you could buy games to run on it but it wasn't anything to do with the existing Amiga OS. There was supposed to (eventually) be some way to run Amiga software emulated or something. AmigaDE was the 'full developer' thing that you used to develop tao/intent apps. And AmigaEverywhere was the sort of portable runtime. "Amiga DE is an updated version of Tao Group's Elate operating system. As part of the agreement, Tao Group provided the embedded OS, while Amiga Inc. develop the 'Usability Layer', drivers, and codecs required for a consumer market. "[0] [0] http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/amigade.html http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/amigade.html
- lproven 3y ago
  Disclaimer: while I was an admirer of Taos' tech from when it was new, I very rarely actually touched it myself. I played with a demo RiscPC at a show in Wembley, and that's about it. My understanding (much of it from prior HN threads -- go back and read all the earlier discussions; someone posted links, and it's totally worth it!) * Taos 1.x was a very basic, almost skeletal. This ran natively on some Acorn ARM kit, and via a DOS loader on x86-32, and some other CPUs. * Taos 2.x was a much more complete OS and was renamed. Confusingly, to 2 different names; and more confusingly, with embedded formatting. >_< Int_e_nt was on, El_a_te was the other, I think. Life is too short. Elate was the bare-metal version. Intent ran under other OSes, but not as a guest or VM, because x86 couldn't do that yet. (As I wrote: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/07/11/a_brief_history_of_virtualisation_part_one/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/07/11/a_brief_history... ) My understanding is that Amiga wanted both, and would run one on bare metal on its own kit, but that the other, runtime version would be made available for other platforms. So, Amiga games authors could write once and run anywhere. Amiga's own version would have an Amiga-like desktop UI which Amiga Inc. would write. The runtime wouldn't have a UI, and would just launch apps. It was, in its way, a good plan, and they should have pressed ahead with it. I think QNX stole the thunder, and that never went anywhere. Result: well, AmigaOS 4.x is slowly limping along, and there's MorphOS, which was promising, but both are tied to elderly PowerPC kit. And there's AROS which seems to be faltering.