Comment by 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.

13 comments

vezzy-fnord

Reply
keithpeter  11 years ago

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/20622/Taos-Operating-...

A photo of a package for Acorn Archimedes refers to a 'developer edition'. Archimedes computers could host transputers.

http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/AcornOS.html

Right at the bottom - labelled as 'never released'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_%28computer%29

Looks like Acorn were considering TAOS OS just before retiring from the general computer business.

EDIT: A later development after they went into embedded with some kind of java based runtime

http://www.osnews.com/story/157/Tao_Group_on_ElateOS_AmigaDE...

dang  11 years ago

Here's some more info: http://www.uruk.org/emu/Taos.html, via https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.forth/Cj_6....

According to Wikipedia the company was sold in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Group). That's a pretty long run from the early 90s.

I've tried emailing Chris Hinsley to see if he wants to answer questions on HN. An old email address, but maybe he'll see it at some point.

  • vezzy-fnord  11 years ago

    The uruk.org opinion article was the one I encountered first, though the BYTE mag one is of higher quality.

    The wiki article lists quite a convoluted history, not to mention all the rebrandings. It seems like they never really focused on attracting researchers or considering any FOSS presence, which is a shame because it's now practically lost by this point.

    If Hinsley answers, that'd be great.

    • david-given  11 years ago

      I wasn't a founder, but I spent ages campaigning for a free development kit to try and get homebrew momentum. Management was rigidly against it. The reasons basically boiled down to (a) our APIs were trade secrets; (b) support costs would be way too high.

      (a) was obviously dumb, but (b) had a point. We would have gotten people asking us questions. With a tiny staff we'd have had to blow off anyone who weren't paying for a support contract, which would have gotten us bad press; and given how weird intent was, we would have got questions. Part of the reason for the Amiga deal was that they'd do this for us. Well, that went well...

      1 reply →

    • dang  11 years ago

      I agree. Heaps of experimentation and first-class work were lost because they happened before open source became mainstream. Especially in industry, where licensing models sealed work off from community adoption.

      3 replies →

lsllc  11 years ago

I was very interested in this way back when BYTE ran it's article on it.

Would love to see it (what's left of it!) open sourced.