1. Background

Some time back in the year 1993, the situation for the Amiga looked somewhat worse than usual (doesn't it always?) and some Amiga fans got together and argued about what should be done to increase the acceptance of our beloved machine. Immediately the main reason for the missing success of the Amiga became clear: it was propagation - or the lack thereof. The Amiga should get a more widespread basis to make it more attractive for everyone to use and to develop for. So plans were made to reach this goal. One of the plans was to fix all bugs of the AmigaOS, another was to make it an OS of the 90s. AOS was born.

But what is a bug? And how should bugs be fixed? What are the features a so-called modern OS must have? And how should they be implemented into the AmigaOS?

Two years later, people were still arguing about this and not even one line of code had been written (or at least no one had ever seen that code). Discussions were still of the pattern "we must have ..." and someone answered "read the old mails" or "this is impossible to do, because ..." which was shortly followed by "you're wrong because ..." and so on.

In the winter of 1995, I (Aaron Digulla) was fed up with it and I posted an RFC (request for comments) to the AOS mailing list in which I asked what the minimal common ground might be. Several options were given and the conclusion was that almost everyone would like to see an OS which is compatible to OS 3.1 (Kickstart 40.68) on which further discussions could be based upon to see what is possible and what is not.

So the work began and AROS was born.

AROS' goal is it to create an OS which

• is as compatible as possible to AmigaOS 3.1
• can be ported to different kinds of CPUs, for example Intel x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA and more.
• should be binary compatible on Amiga and source compatible on any other hardware
• can run as a standalone version which boots directly from hard disk, as an emulation which opens a window on an existing OS to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time and as a link library which allows to create native applications with the comfort of the AmigaOS

To reach this goal, we use a number of techniques. First of all, we make heavy use of the Internet. You can participate in our project even if you can write only one single OS function. The most current version of the source is accessible 24 hours per day and patches can be merged into it at any time. A small database with open tasks prevents all developers from doing something twice.

This is the current developer list. Please note that the e-mail addresses of all developers but the coordinator are missing. The reason for this is that we want to protect the developers from junk mail. If you have something to ask or say, contact the coordinator digulla@aros.org.

• Aaron Digulla
• Matthias Fleischer
• Peter Boeckmann
• Iain Templeton
• Peter Bortas
• Martin Recktenwald
• Lennard voor den Dag
• Chris Lawrence
• Geert Uytterhoeven
• Kars de Jong
• Nils Henrik Lorentzen
• Stefan Ruppert
• Harald Frank
• Martin Steigerwald
• Sebastian Rittau
• Luke A. Guest
• Johan Alfredsson
• Stefan Berger
• Jesper Skov
• Wez Furlong
• Stefan Czinczoll
• John J. Karcher
• Adrian Brown
• Henning Kiel
• Przemys³aw Szczygielski
• Michael Schulz
• Adrian Brown
• Mattias Gustavsson
• Stefan Reinauer
• Christopher D. Judd
• Tommy Johansson
• Paolo Costabel
• Daniel Verite
• Michael Roth
• Nico Heinz
• Bernhard Fastenrath
• Thomas Schwarz
• Yannick Koehler
• Hans Van Ingelgom
• Ross Cohen
• Janos Farkas
• Morten Holm
• Robert Lumley
• Sven Drieling
• James McArthur
• Gregor Goldbach
• Jim Cooper
• Claus Herrmann
• Marco Fanciulli
• Jörg Rebenstorf
• Gabriele Del Prete
• Milos Masopust
• Joseph M. Hinkle
• Armin Obersteiner
• Joakim Ogren
• Erhan Bilgili
• Bernardo Innocenti
• Wojciech Czyz
• Fabio Rotondo
• Paul Firth
• Vitas Povilaitis
• Bill Sidhipong
• Cristiano Contin
• Lars S. Jessen
• Patrice Le Gurun
• Branko Collin
• Paolo Pisati
• Giulio Eulisse
• Karl Staas
• Fabio Alemagna
• Mathieu Chouinard
• Pawel Kolodziejski
• Eirik Nicolai Synnes
• Phill Wooller
• Georg Steger
• Jonathan Adamczewski
• Richard Tew
• Panagiwths Katsaloulis
• Michael Aldred
• Johan Grip
• Ujvary, Bela Istvan
• Aard Keimpema
• Peter H. Froehlich
• Robert Falk
• Richard Drummond
• Rory Toma
• Troein Carl
• Philippe GOETZ
• Mark Junker
• James Woodcock
• Dwight Schauer
• Thomas Eriksson
• Adam Chodorowski
• Daniel Schwill
• Magnani Christophe
• Sebastian Bauer
• Markus Poellmann
• Mathias Spjuth
• Eric Johnson
• Artur P. Kuptel
• KOIKE Masanori
• Sebastian Heutling
• Christopher Tagoe
• Tobias Seiler
• Dennis Paulisch
• Lars Bischoff
• Henrik Berglund
• Ronny Loken
• Joerg Dietrich
• Carlo Dapor
• Alexandre L. Holzhey
• Kjetil Svalastog Matheussen
• Peter Hans van den Muijzenberg
• Giampiero Gabbiani
• Otto van Daalen
• Stefan Kost
• Daniel Kasmeroglu
• Flavio Stanchina
• Francis Swift
• Florian Keck
• Mario Cassani
• Artur Remplakowski
• P. Gnodde
• Mark E. DeYoung
• Jon Langseth
• Thomas Bodlien
• Stuart Kyzer Caie
• Peter Eriksson
• Bjørn A. Larsen
• Staf Verhaegen
• Berno Langer
• Thomas Dreibholz
• Jonathan Perkin
• Paul Cardwell
• Xavier Bestel
• Michael Lothian
• Olli Hinkka
• Stefan Stuntz
• Bjoern Paschen
• Etienne Vogt
• Requin Frederic
• Oliver Marks
• Nicolas Sallin
• Sasu Purola
• Orlando Bellocchio
• Kenny Dahlroth
• Marco Fanciulli
• Nicholai Benalal
• Fabien CAURA
• Emmanuel Lesueur
• Dwight Hubbard
• Matthew Jenkins
• Ognen Duzlevski
• Daniel Holmen
• David Somerton
• William Goltz
• Paul Huxham
• Rob Ostensen
• Björn Hagström
• Mark Hulme-Jones
• David McMinn
• Ivanov Alexey Vladimirovich
• Matt Parsons
• Anders Wallden
• Chris Jean-Marie
• Rainer Koschnick
• Stefano Fedrigo
• Nathaniel Downes
• Jan Pruente
• Elena
• Ryan Blair
• Craig Huggins
• Ralph Schmidt
• David Le Corfec
• Thomas Ernst
• Jens Langner
• Marcin Kurek
• Paul Smith
• Luca Faustin
• John Chandler
• Michael Haynes
• Brecht Machiels
• Lorenzo J. Lucchini
• Kolbjørn Barmen
• Anders Hasselqvist
• James Diffendaffer
• Emm Vasilakis
• Hendrik De Vloed
• Olivier Adam
• Ole-Egil Hvitmyren
• Gabriele Greco
• Martin Gierich
• Joshua Lokken
• Paul Pledge
• Peter Ashford
• Ruben Monteiro
• Randy Vice
• William Dibble
• Morten Irve
• Ola
• Keri Mathews
• Frederik Harwath
• Tor Petterson

These are things which are still to do:

• Use SDE - one binary which runs on any AROS hardware
• Ports to PPC, HHPA, Sparc and Alpha