What is AROS ?

Some time back in the year 1993, the situation for the Amiga looked somewhat worse (doesn't it always ?) and some Amiga fans got together and argued about what was to do to increase the acceptance for our beloved machine. Immediately the main reason for the missing success of the Amiga has been found: It's propagation or the lack thereof. The Amiga must become a more widespread basis to make it more attractive for everyone - for the users and the developers. So plans were made to reach this goal. During this effort, all bugs of the OS of the Amiga should be fixed and it should become an OS of the 90s. AOS was born.

But what is a bug ? And how should they be fixed ? What's the thing a so-called modern OS must have ? And how should they be implemented into the Amiga OS ?

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). And 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 this one was ripped apart 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.