ARM Club 3/TheARMClub_PDCD3.iso/hensa/misc/tornado/brief006/Guide/1

Text File | 1995-09-23 | 4KB | 64 lines

What is tornado?
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Many of you reading this will already know of the movement in the Acorn world
- a sort of revolution if you will - involving tornado. And while much
misinformation abounds, there are a few things which are fact:

   Tornado has been designed and is being written by Acorn users for no
direct monetary reward whatsoever. It is being produced by writers entirely
independant from Acorn, because they are tired of Acorn's reselling of the
same product and unwillingness to make changes.
   Tornado does not come on a set of ROMs like RISC-OS. It actually comes in
a set of resources contained in a directory. When this directory is seen by
the filer, tornado is loaded into memory and the tornado environment set up.
From hence tornado applications can be executed under the tornado
multitasker, a piece of engineering far more sophisticated than the RISC-OS
Wimp Manager. This multitasks code preemptively, and allows a level of
multitasking far beyond that seen before on Acorn machines.

Tornado is split into (currently) four parts. There is the kernel, which
provides various extensions to the RISC-OS kernel not currently available eg;
better memory management, and mouse control - this part of tornado can be
used by any code in the system. Next is the tornado shell. This runs under
the RISC-OS Window manager as a wimp task, and under that then manages the
various tasks running on tornado. Next there is the tornado hacks module,
which isn't really part of tornado but as it needs both the tornado kernel
and shell it is packaged with them. It hacks into the existing window
manager, and provides things like multitasking disc i/o (including loads and
saves). Finally there is the tornado filing system, which among other things
interfaces between tornado and the RISC-OS filing systems - the main
difference being that under tornado you can have unlimited length filenames.
TFS does this by creating a single file in the root of a filing system, and
then manipulates the storage of files in that single file, like an archive.
This bypasses the existing restrictions of filecore. Also, TFS provides a RMA
based filing system, tfs: which is used by TShell to cache and optimise
various operations. THacks also requires this module to operate correctly.

Tornado is very future proofed. It uses 32 bits to describe colours used, and
uses 32 bit filetypes too internally. It is not relient on any particular
architecture, and can utilise up to 4Gb of RAM. It also can load files up to
4Gb into tornado applications using only as little as 512k. Almost every part
of tornado can be intercepted, or hacked into, or redirected. This allows
infinite possibilities of future expansion into the next century.

Finally, tornado's first and primary aim is increase productivity. This
means, conversely, that anything hindering productivity will be axed, and
'gadgets' designed to impress the ignorant masses will not be tolerated.
Tornado is a powerful, functional operating system - it will not molly-coddle
newbies, it will not pull punches. It will not use simple language to users.
Users will be expected to know what they're doing, and if they don't then
they should find out.
   This does not mean there will not be an extensive help system available.
Complex hypertext documents and interactive help can be bundled with
applications, in order to lessen the learning curve (which when high impedes
productivity!), but they can be deinstalled (thus saving disc space and
processor load) when no longer required.

Well, that's a summary of tornado. The rest of this archive goes on to
explain tornado in greater detail, and there are docs available which will
even break down the internal data formats and protocols used. They are not
generally available, as few can really understand them, but every document
will be available from hensa and the Digibank BBS - ie; don't email me and
ask 'cos they're available from both those sites!