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.
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.
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...
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.
Open source was basically the default in the beginning, then declined in the 80s and 90s which prompted FSF and GNU to emerge, finally picking back up quickly in the 21st century.
This sounds like a massive case of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
> Open source was basically the default in the beginning,
Prior to the rise of the GPL and other formal F/OSS licensing models, there was some explicitly-dedicated-to-the-public-domain software, and lots of lax enforcement of copyrights in software, and, especially prior to 1974, some doubt about the copyright status of software. Before automatic copyright in 1978, and especially before 1974, lots of software was probably not copyrighted (because it took an active step to do so and because there was doubt about whether doing so would have any legal effect.)
But I don't think open source was ever the norm for software once it was clear that copyright protection was available, and certainly not once it became automatic.
I'm afraid it really is gone :( Rusting on a shelf somewhere never to see the light of day again.
However I did start an experimental project a while back to do a simple Taos like kernel over BSD/Linux in x86_64, VP macros and process load balancing, point to point link network simulation and function level dynamic binding ?
Look for the Asm-Kernel project amongst my other stuff.
Was just starting to work on a GUI, AVE MK 6 :) But then got into a new job and it's currently sat at that stage till I go back to it.
Regards to all, was great to read this and bring back such wonderful memories of the great team we had at Tao, some of the brightest tech people I have ever had the pleasure to learn from.
