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TOS - Tandberg Operating System

tingo

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Thanks a lot. It's very interesting that they mention address FDFC as storing the start of RAM that early, since this feature was not added until TOS21 1.7 in 1979. I have been able to verify this from the disassembly project.

Also, the EBCDIC and ASCII pointers right before have already at TOS21 1.4 been replaced with the :XM: and :RC: device pointers, so the page is clearly not something that was added at a later time. Otherwise the majority of the manual seems to match up though, except for a few unmentioned bugs and the occasional preliminary detail that was eventually changed.

And about the datasheet, my goodness that's quite some claims! Someone didn't get the memo that the display/keyboard-portion would be purely logic-driven in time.

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As of the system documentation manuals, I see that v1.4 is where the capabilities and accessories of TOS21 kind of matured to a feature set that would be kept consistent all the way up until at least TOS21 1.7, possibly TOS21 1.81 (if I only could get a full system disk of that one). Out of these, I would say that 1.7 is the version with the best all-round coverage between different machines in the TDV-2100 series, with the only downside being that TTY does not recognize XMON/F from the later TDV-2124 model. It's a relatively small patch to fix, though. TOS21 1.81 improved support for XMON/F, but in the process I can only guess they may have removed tape support entirely.
 
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So, what other machines in addition to TDV 2114 and TDV 2124 could run TOS?
I don't know of any other than the TDV-2114/2124 which is supported by TOS21 v1.x. There's of course the Siemens OEM versions of these machines, the System 6.610, but Siemens also had their own version of TOS21 with some minor modifications and a different name (BS1).

TOS v2 is very much made for the TDV-2124, and for backwards compatibility with TOS software on the TDV-2324 in mind. TDV-2324 is a quite different non-modular platform based on the 8085, with a video controller based display system rather than the logic-driven terminal-module of the TDV-2100 series. It also has an IO coprocessor for the disk drives, can page all 64kB over to RAM, and it also supports a harddisk. The TDV-2324 also seems to have been sold in OEM form as the Siemens System 6.611, with TOS v2 being translated to German and renamed BS1MP.

To make TOS v2 work on the two quite different platforms, it relies more on internal APIs, and keeps a loadable XMON/23 IO abstraction layer that is automatically loaded on startup when it detects a TDV-2324. In comparison the TDV-2124 has XMON/F in ROM at all times (unless it has the "CP/M hardware mod" added, then it too can page in RAM).

Tandberg stopped making computers shortly after the TDV-2324, since Siemens (the majority shareholder in Tandberg Data at the time) didn't want Tandberg to compete with the other Siemens (non-Tandberg) computer products that had emerged after the Siemens System 6.610. Some people from the Tandberg Data computer division then went on to start their own company (Indata a/s), making some very little known 68k-based UNIX systems (IN4000, IN4200), before completely disappearing in 1988. I guess the Tandberg Data computer division being shut down in 1983 was the final nail in the coffin for further developments for TOS.
 
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