AmigaDOS

AmigaDOS is the disk operating system of the AmigaOS, which includes file systems, file and directory manipulation, the command-line interface, and file redirection.

In AmigaOS 1.x, AmigaDOS is based on a TRIPOS port by MetaComCo, written in BCPL. BCPL does not use native pointers, so the more advanced functionality of the operating system was difficult to use and error-prone. The third-party AmigaDOS Resource Project (ARP, formerly the AmigaDOS Replacement Project), a project begun by Amiga developer Charlie Heath, replaced many of the BCPL utilities with smaller, more sophisticated equivalents written in C and assembler, and provided a wrapper library, arp.library. This eliminated the interfacing problems in applications by automatically performing conversions from native pointers (such as those used by C or assembler) to BCPL equivalents and vice versa for all AmigaDOS functions.

From AmigaOS 2.x onwards, AmigaDOS was rewritten in C, retaining 1.x compatibility where possible. Starting with AmigaOS 4, AmigaDOS abandoned its legacy with BCPL. Starting from AmigaOS 4.1, AmigaDOS has been extended with 64-bit file-access support.

The Amiga console is a standard Amiga virtual device, normally assigned to CON: and driven by console.handler. It was developed from a primitive interface in AmigaOS 1.1, and became stable with versions 1.2 and 1.3, when it started to be known as AmigaShell and its original handler was replaced by newconsole.handler (NEWCON:).

The console has various features that were considered up to date when it was created in 1985, like Command Template Help, redirection to null ("NIL:"), and ANSI color terminal. The new console handler - that was implemented in release 1.2 – allows many more features, such as command history, pipelines, and automatic creation of files when output is redirected. When TCP/IP stacks like AmiTCP were released in the early 1990s, the console could also receive redirection from Internet-enabled Amiga device handlers (e.g., TCP:, copy file TO TCP:Site/Port).

Unlike other systems originally launched in the mid 1980s, AmigaDOS does not implement a proprietary character set; the developers chose to use the ANSI–ISO standard ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1), which includes the ASCII character set. As in Unix systems, the Amiga console accepts only linefeed ("LF") as an end-of-line ("EOL") character. The Amiga console has support for accented characters as well as for characters created by combinations of 'dead keys' on the keyboard.

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