#CAOS
Amiga Transactor, April 1988, Volume 1, Issue 1:
"In the beginning was CAOS", by Andy Finkel:
".. CAOS did memory management to a greater extent thatn AmigaDOS, and would
have had resource tracking..
"..interesting areas to look at: multiprocessing, the File System, and
Memory management…
"Multiprocessing: a CAOS Process structure is built on top of an Exec Task
structure. CAOS was intended to keep a linked list containing blocks of
resources used by the process – file control blocks, I/O blocks, message ports,
libraries, memory usage, shared data, overlays and so on (This part of CAOS
lagged behind the rest, which may explain why we don't have a semblance of it
now)…
"Memory Management: COAS bsically provided well-managed regions of memory.
. COAS would manage the memory within a sub-region, allocating sections for
code, data, program stack and so on .. If a sub-region became fragmented, CAOS
would attempt to perform compaction and garbage collection… Believe it or
not, the AmigaDOS Seglist gives almost as much functionality.
"File System: CAOS supported four types of files: ordinary files, directory
files, image files, and special files. Ordinary files are typed as well…
"CAOS allows file names of up to 30 characters. Both absolute and relative
paths are supported. CAOS supported both hard and soft links…
"CAOS maintained useful file information, like a descritption field (up to
255 characters), creation time, update time, link count, permissions
(R/W/Ex/Locked), type (directory, printable, non-printable, etc.), userID,
size, and blocks.
"Limits: max file size is 1 megabyte, max name size is 30 characters, max
path size is 255 characters, max number of files about 440 on a floppy, max
open files 16 per process, max length of a softlink text substitution would
have been same length as a path."
End quote. There's too much detail for me to transcribe it all.
–Jim