A/ROSE

A/ROSE
Developer Apple Computer
OS family
Working state Outdated
Initial release February 1988
Platforms Macintosh Coprocessor Platform for Apple Macintosh (Motorola 68000)

A/ROSE (the Apple Real-time Operating System Environment) was a small embedded operating system that ran on Apple Computer's "Macintosh Coprocessor Platform", an expansion card for the Apple Macintosh.

The idea was to offer a single "overdesigned" hardware platform on which 3rd party vendors could build practically any product, reducing the otherwise heavy workload of developing a NuBus-based expansion card. However, the MCP cards were fairly expensive, limiting the appeal of the concept. A/ROSE saw very little use, apparently limited solely to Apple's own networking cards for serial I/O, Ethernet, TokenRing and Twinax. GreenSpring Computers developed the RM1260, which was an IndustryPack (IP) carrier card with a 68000 CPU running A/ROSE that was intended for the data acquisition market.

Technology

A/ROSE and the MCP originally came about in August 1987 during the gestation of the Macintosh II project. While working on various networking products for the new system, the developers realized that the existing classic Mac OS would make any "serious" card difficult to create, due to large latencies and the difficulty of writing complex device drivers. Their solution was to make an "intelligent" NuBus card that was essentially an entire computer on a card, containing its own Motorola 68000 processor, working space in RAM mirrored in the main system, and its own basic operating system. The first version of the system was ready for use in February 1988.

A/ROSE itself was very small, the kernel using only 6 KB, and the operating system as a whole about 28 KB. A/ROSE supported pre-emptive multitasking with round-robin task scheduling with a 110 microsecond context switch time and only 20 microseconds of latency (guaranteed interrupt response time). The system's task was primarily to move data around and start and stop tasks on the cards, and the entire API contained only ten calls.

A/ROSE was a message passing system, and the main calls made by programs running under it were Send() and Receive(). Messages were short, including only 24 bytes of user data, and sent asynchronously. To find the appropriate endpoint, A/ROSE included a name server that allowed the applications to bind their names to their task IDs, allowing them to move in the system and be found dynamically. The OS also supported a number of routines for finding, starting and stopping tasks on other cards, one of those "cards" being the host computer.

To coordinate communications and provide a mechanism for talking with the host's CPU, a cut-down copy of A/ROSE also ran inside the Mac OS in the form of a system extension, or "INIT", known as "Prep" (which should not be confused with the later PReP hardware standard). Device drivers for A/ROSE cards were also written as INITs and started up automatically. After starting, they would find the Prep stub and use the normal A/ROSE communications channel it provided to communicate with the cards.

For instance, the Apple TokenTalk NB card installed its driver as an INIT, and optionally installed the Prep stub, assuming it had not been installed before. On startup the driver would find the Prep stub and ask it to enumerate the TokenTalk cards installed in the machine, and optionally upload code or settings to them. From that point on, Prep handled the communications with the card, handing off the results to the TokenTalk driver.

Legacy

Today, A/ROSE is infamous for its esoteric purpose, which was not understood by Mac end users, as well as for causing many Mac emulators, such as Basilisk II, to produce a system error at boot time. A/ROSE was internally called MR-DOS (Multitasking Realtime Distributed Operating System), but Microsoft (developer of MS-DOS) did not appreciate the name and put pressure on Apple to change its name. "A/ROSE by any other name is still MR-DOS."[1]

References

  1. ↑ Eric M. Trehus, a QA engineer on the Token Ring card that ran A/ROSE

External links

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