2.1 The Operating System TOS

The operating system TOS (The Operating System) may be subdivided into various sections. Communications with the users is realized via GEM, which offers a comfortable user-interface and is composed of AES- and VDI-functions.

Beyond this many further routines are available, which may be allocated to one of the following categories:

TOS dates back to the year 1985. In the course of time it was further developed by Atari and is available for various models of computer (ST, STE, Mega-ST, TT, Falcon, ...). In addition there are a number of TOS-compatible systems offered by third parties. Worth mentioning in this connection are, above all, MagiC and Geneva. While MagiC has become important particularly in Germany (and the U.K.), Geneva seems to have met with a certain amount of approval in the USA. Thanks to MagiC Mac, an implementation of MagiC to the Apple (Power) Macintosh hardware, TOS programs are now running also on Apple computers. A later variant, MagiC PC, has also extended this to many Windows machines.