Who is the "father" of workbench? (if there is one)

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by Raid27

It's a something I've never really thought about and I do not recall reading about it:

Was there a main designer/visionary behind the Workbench 1.0 in the likes of Linus Torvalds?

From what I can tell the actual implementation work of the Workbench application (the "wb" Kickstart module) fell to Neil Katin. The logs show that the first check-in was performed on July 12, 1985. This made the Workbench application part of the V28 Kickstart. One further change was checked in by Dale Luck, concerning icon drawing, and that's all there is for Kickstart versions 1.2 and 1.3.

The Workbench application in the Kickstart ROM is a part of what makes the disk-based portion of the Amiga operating system work. Somebody had to come up with how the user interface would look like, how it worked, what software would be loaded from disk, and which tools (e.g. DiskCopy, Format, SetMap) would be available.

From what little I know about the early Amiga development days it would not surprise me if all of this were the result of a team effort, and not of just one person leading the design and implementation work. As far as leading the team were concerned, however, Neil Katin was apparently the software lead on the Amiga operating system development effort in 1985. So, maybe Mr. Katin was the guy you had in mind after all

[ImmortalA1000]

All I remember hearing was the only prototype OS was damaged/destroyed and Metacomco (Dr Tim King) were called in to write something, or more accurately implement TriPos 68k OS for Amiga. This is what Guy Kewney, with Dr.T. K. sitting with him, stated when it was shown on the TV program Database where they saw a demo.

What I don't know is what changed by the time of KS and WB 1.1 sold with it (which is what I had with my A1000) i.e. what was put back compared to what is shown as a pre-release demo behind closed doors running on finished NTSC Amiga 1000 hardware on the TV show in Summer 1985. They also had Metacomco's short Amiga Basic listing used to draw small white squares by moving and pressing the mouse button via the blitter.

All I know is by the time of Amiga 4000/040 launch I expected something more like the kind of cutting edge OS that NEXT were working on not what we got with WB 3.x (everyone was clamouring to use text to speech and Commodore lost/dropped it by the time of the Amiga 500plus WB 2.0). The NEXT hardware wasn't that amazing, it was all about the beautiful OS design. The Amiga 1000 had a beautiful hardware design and OS Kernal. I quite liked the KS/WB 1.x look more than the 2.0 boring grey stuff.

I had assumed the multi-tasking part in the Kickstart ROM/boot code is taken directly from TriPOS which is why I presumed it performed better than Windows/Unix/Arthur(Acorn RISC OS forerunner).

What little I remember of the official OS intended for the A1000 was something about task handling/message ports and protected memory implementation and a more efficient file handler possibly. Damn you ageing neurons!

[Raid27]

Many thanks to all for the replies!
Very enlightening.

[ImmortalA1000]

I used to know a lot more about this, there was a magazine article that detailed all of this stuff early on, remember reading page scans. Think in the article it was referred to as AmigaDOS and it explained features that were meant to go in. I think some of this info was from Carl Sassenrath in this article.

We are talking random google finds a decade ago though.

[nogginthenog]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I had assumed the multi-tasking part in the Kickstart ROM/boot code is taken directly from TriPOS which is why I presumed it performed better than Windows/Unix/Arthur(Acorn RISC OS forerunner).

IIRC the only place you will find TriPOS BCPL style pointers is in dos.library.

[Jope]

Exec was Carl Sassenrath's own stuff, only the DOS part of AmigaDOS was Tripos ported to run under Exec and with an Intuition console.

The in-house DOS that Tripos replaced was progressing too slowly, but according to what I read, it wasn't lost/destroyed in any way.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

Wasn't the story that =RJ= locked himself into his office for seven months, coming out only once to ask Sassenrath something about Exec, and then delivered Intuition?

So the legend goes (well, I think it was a few weeks rather than seven months, but still...)

Edit: 3 weeks, apparently, but true. From Carl Sassenrath.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

3 weeks, apparently

Well, I modified it from what it (AFAIR) said in "The Amiga Years" book.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Jope

The in-house DOS that Tripos replaced was progressing too slowly, but according to what I read, it wasn't lost/destroyed in any way.

So where is it now?
(would be quite interesting ...)

As far as I know, the other option for DOS was not really "in-house" either, but outsourced to a different company ... and that team was going in a more unix-like direction and was not really cooperating with the amiga team, hence that cooperation was stopped...

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Gorf

So where is it now?
(would be quite interesting ...)

It wasn't even close to finished, so potentially rotting away on a backup tape / disk set somewhere.

As far as I know, the other option for DOS was not really "in-house" either, but outsourced to a different company ... and that team was going in a more unix-like direction and was not really cooperating with the amiga team, hence that cooperation was stopped...

Yeps, we can read snippets of info about it from various interviews and history websites.

http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/caos.html
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007...odore-years/2/

But it's all just hopes and dreams.

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

From what little I know about the early Amiga development days it would not surprise me if all of this were the result of a team effort, and not of just one person leading the design and implementation work. As far as leading the team were concerned, however, Neil Katin was apparently the software lead on the Amiga operating system development effort in 1985. So, maybe Mr. Katin was the guy you had in mind after all

Thank you for the insight! I think your "team effort" response is probably quite close to the mark when all things are considered. It's interesting to note, though, that Neil Katin is quite inconspicuous in a lot of the articles and other info. sources concerning AmigaOS development. When I dug deeper into the early beginnings of the Amiga in 1984/85, it became apparent that there were two broadly distinct team leaders - Jay Miner for hardware development and Bob Pariseau for AmigaOS development.

Bob Pariseau was hired by Jay Miner and his first order of business was to assemble the software team. The first guys to join the team were RJ Mical, Carl Sassenrath, Dale Luck, and Dave Needle. Legend has it that Carl Sassenrath was hired on the spot at his job interview when Pariseau asked him what his ultimate dream job would be, and he replied, "To design a multitasking operating system." That's what ya call a slam dunk!

This and a lot more interesting info. re: hardware/software development for the Lorraine / A1000 can be had at the links below:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007...miga-part-3/2/

http://www.geekometry.com/2015/01/ga...miga-computer/

Originally Posted by Jope

The in-house DOS that Tripos replaced was progressing too slowly, but according to what I read, it wasn't lost/destroyed in any way.

Originally Posted by Gorf

So where is it now?
(would be quite interesting ...)

As far as I know, the other option for DOS was not really "in-house" either, but outsourced to a different company ... and that team was going in a more unix-like direction and was not really cooperating with the amiga team, hence that cooperation was stopped...

Originally Posted by Jope

Yeps, we can read snippets of info about it from various interviews and history websites.

http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/caos.html
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007...odore-years/2/

In 1988, Commodore's software manager Andy Finkel wrote a cracking article for the premiere issue of Amiga Transactor that compared the never-completed CAOS to AmigaDOS. He says in the article that Carl Sassenrath was primarily responsible for the design specs of CAOS.

To cut a long story short, Finkel didn't think that there was too much lost overall when comparing AmigaDOS to the proposed CAOS:

"This, then is a quick overview of CAOS. Let's say it was available now. . . What would we have gained? Personally, I think the main thing would have been a much more integrated system. From these specs you can see that AmigaDOS is really as powerful as CAOS was intended to be. The problem is that AmigaDOS is different from the rest of the Operating System. CAOS would have used the same type of data structures as the OS, the same type of stack, the same languages (C and assembler), and would have made understanding the system easier."

Some years later, Carl Sassenrath was quite forthright about the failed development of CAOS and made this very telling comment online at the AmiWest '98 show:

"CAOS was contracted out, for the most part, to a company that felt Unix was a better choice and didn't buy into my design. They became history when they started using their Sun development systems for other projects, not the Amiga higher level OS functions."

http://www.thule.no/haynie/caos.html (text version of CAOS article; for those interested, the original published article has been upped to the Zone)