ericco@ssl.berkeley.edu (Eric C. Olson) (10/20/90)
It interesting to me that the Amiga TOS emulator should arrive on the net at the same time as Eric Smith's MiNT. I think that Atari is entirely within their rights in preventing the distribution of TOS to the public. (One might even suggest that they are a social responible company for preventing its spread ;^). On the other hand, Eric Smith says that he is interested in having MiNT become a replacement for TOS, not just an extension. Assuming that MiNT progresses in this direction in a completely legal manner (like the IBM PC OS emulators), then what will Atari do? Surely, MiNT will be distributed on disk (not in ROM). Then the Amiga people will be able to emulate MiNT legally -- which will be better than TOS IMHO. I hope I haven't put any words into Eric Smith's mouth. The point is, which operating systems have the most support from the computing community -- a closely guarded OS, or a public OS? Developers who work on Mac are relatively isolated from the rest of the world. They have specialize knowledge about the Mac which will never be useful on other machines. Conversely, Un*x and IBM PC programmers have a huge community. In fact, many applications programmers can write code that lives in both worlds (mainly because PC C compilers make up the difference between Un*x and DOS). Public OS like OS-9 and Minix also have bigger communities because the same OS is available on several machines. Just think how nice it would be for *developers* if there was a TOS emulator for DOS machines (or TOS to DOS cross compiling environment, or some such). People like David Beckmeyer would be big winners, as their products would reach much larger markets. But the fact is the Atari sells hardware not software. They don't want an Amiga TOS emulator, because they don't want a consumer to think "hey, I'll buy Amiga hardware and a TOS emulator for it, and get the best of both computer's software." Sometimes I think Atari sees software as a necessary evil. Eric Olson -- Eric ericco@ssl.berkeley.edu
n160ao@tamuts.tamu.edu (Mark Lehmann) (10/27/90)
I seemed to have missed out on the whole Mint topic. Could some kind soul please send me a short message about Mint. I thought it was just an MT-C shell tool, but I think I was mistaken. Please send me mail, don't clutter up the net for my embarassing ignorance of this software. Thank you. Mark Lehmann tamuts.tamu.edu