While I was reading the new part 4 ( http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amiga-history-4-commodore-years.ars ) on the history of the Commodore Amiga, it mentions that AmigaDOS was not the original Operating System that they had wanted, but due to difficulties they had to pick a ‘plan b’ as it were.. They went with TripOS a portable OS written in BCPL.

TripOS ran on PDP-11’s, NOVA’s, m68k’s, and probably other machine type… What is also interesting is that BCPL heavily influenced the development of C! Searching about I found this:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/BCPL.html

The homepage of Martin Richards, the author of TripOS & BCPL! What’s even cooler is that he’s cooked up an interpeted version of TripOS that will run on most anything! Downloading http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mr/Cintpos/cintpos.zip I was quickly able to setup the exe’s under Vista, and run TripOS. It’s very cool!

C:\temp\BCPL\cintcode>cintsys.exe -v
Boot tracing level is set to 1
Cintcode memory (upb=4000000) allocated
Boot’s stack allocated at 211
Boot’s global vector allocated at 727
Rootnode allocated at 100
syscin/boot loaded successfully
syscin/blib loaded successfully
syscin/syslib loaded successfully
syscin/dlib loaded successfully
BOOT stack is at 211
BOOT global vector is at 727
CLI stack allocated at 8551
CLI global vector allocated at 9067
BCPL Cintcode System (25 Jan 2007)
boot about to call the interpreter recursively
It should start executing the boot function: startrootboot: about to call sys(Sys_interpret,…)
startroot: can now use normal stream i/o
startroot: trying to load syscin/cli
startroot: loaded syscin/cli successfully
startroot: now entering the cli
cli: now entering the main CLI loop
0>

From here you can build various demonstration BCPL programs, and whatnot. Also looking at the code for TripOS it’s VERY small… But then the same could be said of UnixV6.. Things have gotten VERY complicated over the years..

Anyways, I thought you’d like a glimpse into the basis of AmigaDOS!