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Comment by dang

11 years ago

There's more about this operating system, which apparently was renamed to Elate, and then Intent, at http://mobile.osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=157 and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TaoIntentOs.

19 comments

dang

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david-given  11 years ago

Our naming sucked.

The company was called Tao, which nobody could pronounce.

The first OS was TAOS.

The second OS, which succeeded it, was Elate. Except, when Elate was running hosted on another OS, it was called int<b>e</b>nt. Yes, the bold e was part of the name. Except, when Amiga had it, it was called Amiga Anywhere.

Most comments of the era run along the lines of 'but what the hell is this?'. And for good reason.

  • gp2000  11 years ago

    I worked on the gcc back-end for TAOS. One requirement was a special output format called a "tool" which was like a single subroutine shared library. It was specified with the standard "-f" gcc extension syntax: "-ftaos-tool".

    I heard about the name change to "Elate" second hand. "taos" had to change to "elate" everywhere -- even the options.

    The naming may or may not have sucked, but it definitely did blow having to tell the compiler to "-felate-tool".

  • zerr  11 years ago

    > called Tao, which nobody could pronounce.

    Pronouncing skills (the absent of) of native English speakers constantly surprises me. But this case goes to absurd levels...

vezzy-fnord  11 years ago

And yet they've pretty much evaporated since. References to this system are very rare and it seems like only a small circle of people ever truly experienced it. No public copy from what I can see.