
TAOS Operating System - fanf2
http://www.uruk.org/emu/Taos.html
======
rwmj
TAOS was peculiarly crazy and brilliant. It was written in a sort of macro
assembler, essentially a form of assembler with a large number of registers,
which was "compiled" to the target platform on demand. It was network
transparent so nodes on the network could use devices from other nodes.
There's a lot more from an ex-employee here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607)

I wish one day that it gets open sourced (but I'd settle for a non-open read-
only license) because it's unlike anything else.

~~~
wila
The IP is gone apparently.

Seems that Chris Hinsley (inventor of TAOS) is working on a modern day version
of TAOS. [0]

[0] [https://github.com/vygr/ChrysaLisp](https://github.com/vygr/ChrysaLisp)

~~~
dang
There are comments by Chris (vygr) in the 2015 discussion rwmj already linked
to:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607).

A big thread about his current project happened last week:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15466124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15466124).

~~~
wila
Yes that's correct, only found it because of rwmj's reference, figured that
adding a direct link might help.

Missed last weeks thread about ChrysaLisp, will read.

Thanks!

------
eesmith
Usenet post from 1995.

TAOS is/was a "mixed-processor parallel operating system from Tao Systems Ltd
of Belsize Park, London" says
[http://www.cbronline.com/news/tantric_has_taos_developers_ki...](http://www.cbronline.com/news/tantric_has_taos_developers_kits/)
. It was for iAPX-86 machines.

I don't believe it's related to Taos, "the operating system for the DEC SRC
Firefly multiprocessor workstation" mentioned in
[https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bershad/Papers/p37-bershad....](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bershad/Papers/p37-bershad.pdf)
and [http://hpl.americas.hp.net/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-
RR-63....](http://hpl.americas.hp.net/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-63.pdf) .

FWIW, this Usenet post is cited in several patents:
[https://www.google.com.au/patents/US7836292](https://www.google.com.au/patents/US7836292)
.

Submitter? Why is this link interesting?

~~~
lproven
It wasn't for x86 only. It ran on almost anything: ARM, SPARC, PowerPC, you
name it.

In its more mature form, as Intent/Elate, it is _the_ single most radical OS
there's ever been, pretty much. It makes Inferno look conservative & staid,
Plan 9 no more than a tweaked Linux distro, and Minix 3 a tweak of NetBSD.

It's also been on HN before:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9802379](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9802379)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15470338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15470338)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527936](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15527936)

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> Minix 3 a tweak of NetBSD.

I mean, now that minix uses the netbsd userland I'm pretty sure this really is
true.

~~~
oneweekwonder
So using the same userland but different kernels is now considered a tweak?

I always though the hard part was in the kernel design and not the userland.

Otherwise it would have been the gnu os and not gnu/linux.

And if it was not for a book license there was a good chance it would have
been gnu/minix. But meh I'm not in that universe.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
But we are in a universe where GNU/NT is a real thing :)

And to your point: I'm not sure which of kernel or userland is harder.
Userland is the part I actually interact with most of the time, so I tend to
think of that as the main part of the OS. But it may be fair to say that both
halves count.

------
c3d
I remember reading about Taos in Byte and thinking this was brilliant. It
later turned into something called Elate, which in turn morphed into a semi-
boring JVM for small systems. I wish we had the source code of the original,
though.

------
LeoPanthera
Amazingly this doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia entry. Perhaps someone with
some historical knowledge could put one together.

------
bensummers
This was interesting to program. Apart from having to use assembler (which was
no big deal in '95), you had to structure your program as lots of tiny objects
which communicated through messages.

There was no obvious way of running a program which was not designed for this
architecture on the OS, except for making one massive object, which then lost
all the other benefits.

Pity it didn't go further. :-(

------
danellis
I remember TAOS having some buzz in the RISC OS community in the early 90s.
ARM must have been one of its original targets.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Interesting. There was some minor buzz about it in the Amiga community as
well, as the basis for a new Amiga OS.

[http://www.vincentperkins.com/AmigaNG/anywhere.php](http://www.vincentperkins.com/AmigaNG/anywhere.php)

~~~
fractallyte
There was major coverage of it in Amiga Active magazine
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Active](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Active)),
over a number of issues. Sounded really exciting at the time!

------
tech2
Was this the OS that they were planning on replacing segments of AmigaDOS with
to avoid needing to rewrite a modern kernel?

~~~
csixty4
Yes. It was going to be on desktops and laptops and even little handheld
devices.

------
Beltiras
Maybe put 1995 in the title?

------
qznc
Sounds a lot like Java.

