TripOS

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© 1997-2006

Gareth Knight

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TripOS/68k

Developer: Cambridge University/MetaComCo

Year of Development: 1983/4

Few people have heard of TripOS outside the Amiga market. As a<br>standalone operating system it is unremarkable, however its<br>relation to the AmigaOS makes it interesting. TripOS was developed<br>at Cambridge University on an IBM 3081 (or an earlier IBM<br>mainframe) running a locally-written OS called Phoenix during the<br>late 1970s and early 1980s. The name is derived from the course<br>description at the university. For example, it is possible to read<br>for the mathematics tripos. It is also possible that the 'pos'<br>suffix stood for Portable Operating System.

At some point during the early 1980s Dr. Tim King ported the OS<br>to the Motorola 68k. The operating system exists on a range of<br>platform during this period, including the PDP11, DG Nova, 68000 (a<br>homebrew 68k machine?), and the GA-16/220.

The story continues at Commodore in 1984. They had recently<br>bought the Amiga technology and were preparing it for a mainstream<br>market. Development had fallen behind schedule, particularly in the<br>development of the original operating system, dubbed CAOS. This prompted fears that Atari would beat<br>them to the 16-bit market with their off-the-shelf ST range. In a<br>series of meetings it was decided that an outside developer would<br>be contracted to complete the task, abandoning large sections of<br>the existing OS. MetaComCo were chosen<br>as the contractor, as a result of their existing TripOS 68k port.<br>It was a minor task to get the operating system to work on the<br>Amiga prototypes, but required some time to get it to interact with<br>Intuition.

Reports of the time period indicate that the Los Gatos team, led<br>by Jay Miner, were unhappy with the decision and openly criticised<br>the end result. In particular, the TripOS/Intuition hybrid lacked<br>many of the features they had planned (resource-tracking,<br>etc.).

A large portion of the TripOS code continued to exist in<br>the Dos.Library, until it was replaced in v36 by a combination of<br>assembler & C. However, the ghost of TripOS could not be<br>exorcised and a small amount of the code lives on in the later<br>AmigaOS releases to ensure compatibility.

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