And yet they've pretty much evaporated since. References to this system are very rare and it seems like only a small circle of people ever truly experienced it. No public copy from what I can see.
A photo of a package for Acorn Archimedes refers to a 'developer edition'. Archimedes computers could host transputers.
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/AcornOS.html
Right at the bottom - labelled as 'never released'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_%28computer%29
Looks like Acorn were considering TAOS OS just before retiring from the general computer business.
EDIT: A later development after they went into embedded with some kind of java based runtime
http://www.osnews.com/story/157/Tao_Group_on_ElateOS_AmigaDE...
According to Wikipedia the company was sold in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Group). That's a pretty long run from the early 90s.
I've tried emailing Chris Hinsley to see if he wants to answer questions on HN. An old email address, but maybe he'll see it at some point.
The wiki article lists quite a convoluted history, not to mention all the rebrandings. It seems like they never really focused on attracting researchers or considering any FOSS presence, which is a shame because it's now practically lost by this point.
If Hinsley answers, that'd be great.
(a) was obviously dumb, but (b) had a point. We would have gotten people asking us questions. With a tiny staff we'd have had to blow off anyone who weren't paying for a support contract, which would have gotten us bad press; and given how weird intent was, we would have got questions. Part of the reason for the Amiga deal was that they'd do this for us. Well, that went well...
With hindsight Tao should have done this.
Chris
This sounds like a massive case of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Prior to the rise of the GPL and other formal F/OSS licensing models, there was some explicitly-dedicated-to-the-public-domain software, and lots of lax enforcement of copyrights in software, and, especially prior to 1974, some doubt about the copyright status of software. Before automatic copyright in 1978, and especially before 1974, lots of software was probably not copyrighted (because it took an active step to do so and because there was doubt about whether doing so would have any legal effect.)
But I don't think open source was ever the norm for software once it was clear that copyright protection was available, and certainly not once it became automatic.
Chris Hinsley
However I did start an experimental project a while back to do a simple Taos like kernel over BSD/Linux in x86_64, VP macros and process load balancing, point to point link network simulation and function level dynamic binding ?
https://github.com/vygr?tab=repositories
Look for the Asm-Kernel project amongst my other stuff.
Was just starting to work on a GUI, AVE MK 6 :) But then got into a new job and it's currently sat at that stage till I go back to it.
Regards to all, was great to read this and bring back such wonderful memories of the great team we had at Tao, some of the brightest tech people I have ever had the pleasure to learn from.
Chris Hinsley
Would love to see it (what's left of it!) open sourced.