Detailed design spec etc.

>I was just added to the mailing list yesterday and get the VSTa files
>by anonymous ftp. I unzipped/untarred them on a UNIX machine and
>looked over everything.

Good

>However, I did not see the most important
>part - the Detailed Design Specification. I also did not see any
>Programmer's Guide describing the system calls available under VSTa.
>Where can these documents be ftp'd from? Please don't tell me
>"VSTa is yet another UNIX clone" and supports all the UNIX system
>calls (fork, exec, read, write, etc.).

So far the only documentation for VSTa is a paper by Andy, and the
source. So you have to "Use the source Luke".

A goal of VSTa is to be POSIX compliant, or nearly so. That means that
for user programs, it will appear to be close to Unix. The underlying
system architecture is completely different however.

>I was looking for a completely new operating system - one that did
>not care about backwards compatibility. Is this not what VSTa is?

This is what VSTa is. Andy's extent based file system is nothing like
most Unix file systems. I am writing a windowing system that is
nothing like X, or Windows. One day I plan to write a persistent
object store, and experiment with a truly object oriented operating
system; one that should support distributed computing seamlessly.

VSTa is *very* easy to understand. I must admit to being a fan of
VSTa. Why? I have ported Linux, BSD386, Minix and Wendin DOS to the
NEC hardware. I have messed around with Mach. When I first saw VSTa, I
fell in love with the design. I often thought about writing my own OS,
and even got most of the specs done. VSTa is similar to the design
ideas I had, but so much more as well...
Received on Wed Dec 15 16:00:07 1993