very brief drunken look at TOS - for atari st

Atari ST built in GUI - TOS - very brief look at it done it when i had some to drink

Category:

Comedy

Tags:

• paulisthebest3uk
• tos
• atari
• st
• gui
• os
• drink
• drunk

[paulisthebest3uk]

this was actually a modified version of the PC version of GEM, the GUI for IBM based machines

[lunaticrik]

fancy calling an operating system "tos" (toss) lol - everyone knows workbench is where its at!

[paulisthebest3uk]

couldnt agree more, the amiga and its os certainly made ataris counterpart look and sound pretty inferior

[NotATube]

Thing is, although the Amiga was technically superior in terms of support chips, that wasn't what made the OS more powerful. Since the base ST and Amiga have the same CPU running at similar speeds (the ST is actually slightly faster), there's no reason the ST couldn't theoretically have run an Amiga-type OS.

[xenepp]

Bah, heathens! Back in the day it was top dog. Simple, straight forward and got the job done. Bill Gates owes everything to TOS. ;-)

[rocksoliddude1]

Paul I always end up on one of your videoswhen looking at spectrum, atari, c64, etc, lol.

[kebmann]

Ah, the memories...

[VincedupAcounts]

immature :

in the floper

lol

[hamster700]

used it on a pc it was good

[karadok666]

@NotATube No, the really powerful OS for TOS computers was MagicOS. Mint was a verry slow MultiTOS OS

[Hulsie]

It looks extra goofy when you look at it on an emulator. It looks almost widescreen.

[NotATube]

IIRC that's because the medium-res 640 x 240 pixels were tall and thin (half the width of the square ones in the low res 320 x 240 mode), but the same graphics/icons were used.

I remember that the ST had a hi-res 640x480 mono mode that was only available using the hi-res monitor. The Amiga let you use 640x480 on a normal TV, but because of the interlace the flicker was horrible and it didn't even support the hi-res flicker free monitors without additional "flicker fixer" kludge hardware.

[NotATube]

Bill Gates is a tosser, not a TOSser ;)

[NotATube]

(continued)

The question is how extensive the enhancements you had to load were. If they were essentially using TOS as a loader for more powerful operating system utilities, then does TOS deserve the credit?

As I said, this isn't an ST criticism. It had the same CPU at the same speed and similar RAM capacity to the Amiga, so it should have been capable of running an OS just as powerful. But I don't think that the "classic" versions of TOS were that OS.

[NotATube]

Multitasking is one obvious advantage of AmigaDOS, but the Amiga OS as it was supplied seemed more powerful and flexible.

The Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking; even Windows pre-95 only had inferior co-operative multitasking. IIRC TOS didn't have general-purpose multitasking at all.

I know that the ST got a more powerful OS later on (apparently it was called Mint), but TOS *as supplied with most of the original STs* seemed pretty basic.