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Information about Tripos

This article is about TRIPOS, the operating system. For the name given to undergraduate degree subjects by Cambridge University, see Tripos.


TRIPOS (TRIvial Portable Operating System) is a computer operating system. Development started in 1976 at the Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University and it was headed by Dr. Martin Richards. The first version appeared in January 1978 and it originally ran on a PDP-11. Later it was ported to the Computer Automation LSI4 and the Data General Nova. Work on a 68000 version started in 1981 at Bath University. MetaComCo acquired the rights to the 68000 version and continued development until TRIPOS was chosen by Commodore Amiga in March 1985 to form part of an operating system for their new computer. In July 1985, the Amiga was introduced, incorporating the TRIPOS file system in AmigaDOS.

TRIPOS provided features such as pre-emptive multi-tasking (using strict-priority scheduling), a hierarchical file system and multiple command line interpreters.

The most important TRIPOS concepts have been the non-memory-management approach (meaning no checks are performed to stop programs from using unallocated memory) and message passing by means of passing pointers instead of copying message contents. Those two concepts together allowed for sending and receiving over 1250 packets per second on a 10 MHz Motorola 68010 CPU.

Most of TRIPOS was implemented in BCPL. The kernel and device drivers were implemented in assembly language.

TRIPOS was ported to a number of machines, including the Data General Nova 2, the Computer Automation LSI4, plus Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086- based hardware. It included support for the Cambridge Ring local area network. More recently, Martin Richards produced a port of TRIPOS to run under Linux, using BCPL Cintcode.

TRIPOS is still actively maintained by Open G I Ltd. (formerly Misys Financial Systems) in Worcestershire, UK. Many British insurance brokers have a Motorola 68000 based (and latterly Linux/Intel based) TRIPOS system serving either Qume terminals or Qume terminal emulators over a Telnet style TCP/IP connection - the systems are used to run Open G I's BROOMS Application suite. Open G I have added a number of features to support the modern office such as the ability to print to Windows/SAMBA or HP JetDirect printers, and XML Integration services.

Cintpos

Cintpos is an experimental interpretive version of TRIPOS which runs on the Cintcode BCPL virtual machine, also developed by Martin Richards.

Sources



This article is about the Cambridge Tripos system. For the computer operating system, see TRIPOS.


The University of Cambridge, England, divides the different kinds of honours bachelor's degree by Tripos, a word which has an obscure etymology, but which may be traced to the three-legged stool candidates once used to sit on when taking oral examinations. A common (but untrue) myth says that students used to receive one leg of a stool in each of their three years of exams, receiving the whole stool at graduation. An undergraduate studying mathematics is thus said to be reading the Mathematical Tripos, whilst a student of English is reading the English Tripos. (In most traditional English universities a student is expected to register study one field exclusively rather than having 'majors' or 'minors' as in American universities. In practice however, English degree fields may be fairly interdisciplinary in nature, depending on the subject. The multi-part Tripos system at Cambridge also allows substantial changes in field between parts, and the Natural Sciences Tripos is especially designed to allow a highly flexible curriculum across the sciences).

Tripos est in partes duas divisum

A Tripos is divided into two parts: Part I, which is broadly based, and Part II, which allows specialisation within the student's chosen field. Since a bachelor's degree usually takes three years to complete, either Part I or Part II is two years, and the other one year. The details of this can vary from subject to subject. There is also an optional Part III offered in some subjects, such as the Mathematical Tripos; these are not required to complete a bachelor's degree. Some Part III courses allow the student to graduate with both a master's degree and a Bachelor degree: for example, scientific Part III courses allow the student to graduate with an M.Sci. degree in addition to the B.A. degree which all Cambridge graduates receive. The Engineering Tripos on the other hand is divided into Parts IA, IB, IIA, and IIB, each corresponding to one academic year, and leads to the simultaneous awarding of the B.A. and M.Eng. degrees.

Students are examined formally at the end of each part, and are awarded a degree classification for each part. The Part II classification is usually considered to be the classification for the degree. Most subjects are examined in all three years; for example, the Natural Sciences Tripos has examinations for Part IA (read: "Part one A"), Part IB ("Part one B") and Part II ("Part two").

Degree regulations state that, to be awarded a degree, you must have passed both a Part I and a Part II examination. This makes it easy for an undergraduate to switch out of a subject, but only into a complementary Tripos. So a one-year Part I (or Part IA) must be followed by a two-year Part II, and usually vice versa. More exotic combinations are possible, with the permission of the student's college and prospective department, but some combinations create a four-year bachelor's degree. A few subjects (e.g. Linguistics, Management Studies) exist only as Part II, and can be preceded by any manner of Part I subject.

Students who already possess a bachelor's degree or equivalent from another university are generally permitted to skip Part I, and thus can complete a Cambridge bachelor's degree in two years or less. Students already holding a BA degree from either Oxford or Cambridge are not permitted to collect a second BA from Cambridge.

List of Triposes

Below is the list of Triposes offered by the University (numerals in brackets indicate the Parts available):
  • Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Tripos (I, II)
  • Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos (I, IIA, IIB)
  • Architecture Tripos (IA, IB, II)
  • Chemical Engineering Tripos (I, IIA, IIB)
  • Classical Tripos (IA, IB, II)
  • Computer Science Tripos (IA, IB, II, II(General))
  • Economics Tripos (I, IIA, IIB)
  • Education Studies Tripos (I, II)
  • Engineering Tripos (IA, IB, IIA, IIB)
  • English Tripos (I, II)
  • Geography Tripos (IA, IB, II)
  • History Tripos (I, II)
  • History of Art Tripos (I, IIA, IIB)
  • Land Economy Tripos (IA, IB, II)
  • Law Tripos (IA, IB, II)
  • Linguistics Tripos (One Part only)
  • Management Studies Tripos (One Part only)
  • Manufacturing Engineering Tripos (I, II)
  • Mathematical Tripos (IA, IB, II, III)
  • Medical and Veterinary Sciences Tripos (IA, IB)
  • Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos (IA, IB, II)
  • Music Tripos (IA, IB, II)
  • Natural Sciences Tripos (IA, IB, II, III)
  • Oriental Studies Tripos (I, II)
  • Philosophy Tripos (IA, IB, II)
  • Social and Political Sciences Tripos (I, IIA, IIB)
  • Theological and Religious Studies Tripos (I, IIA, IIB)

See also

External link

An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer. An operating system processes system data and user input, and responds by allocating and managing tasks and internal system resources as a service to users and programs of the
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computer is a machine which manipulates data according to a list of instructions.

Computers take numerous physical forms. The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th century (around 1940 - 1941), although the computer concept and various machines
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An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer. An operating system processes system data and user input, and responds by allocating and managing tasks and internal system resources as a service to users and programs of the
..... Click the link for more information.
19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1940s  1950s  1960s  - 1970s -  1980s  1990s  2000s
1973 1974 1975 - 1976 - 1977 1978 1979

Year 1976 (MCMLXXVI
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University of Cambridge (often Cambridge University), located in Cambridge, England, is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world and has a reputation as one of the world's most prestigious universities.
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Martin Richards is a British computer scientist, best known for his development of the BCPL programming language, which is both the earliest major development in portable software and the ancestor of the widely used C programming language.
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1940s  1950s  1960s  - 1970s -  1980s  1990s  2000s
1975 1976 1977 - 1978 - 1979 1980 1981

Year 1978 (MCMLXXVIII
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The PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corp. in the 1970s and 1980s. The PDP-11 was a successor to DEC's PDP-8 computer in the PDP series of computers. It had several uniquely innovative features, and was easier to program than its predecessors.
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The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the United States company Data General starting in 1969. The Nova packed enough power to do most simple computing tasks and was packaged into a single rack mount case.
..... Click the link for more information.
The Motorola 68000 is a CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector). As the first member of the successful 32-bit m68k family of microprocessors, it is generally software forward compatible with the
..... Click the link for more information.
19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1978 1979 1980 - 1981 - 1982 1983 1984

Year 1981 (MCMLXXXI
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University of Bath is a campus university located in Bath, England. It received its Royal Charter in 1966, making it one of the newest "traditional" universities in the United Kingdom.
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MetaComCo was a company started in 1981 and based in Bristol, England by Peter Mackeonis and Derek Budge. MetaComCo employed Dr. Tim King to market TripOS which he had previously worked on whilst a researcher at the University of Cambridge.
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The Motorola 68000 is a CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector). As the first member of the successful 32-bit m68k family of microprocessors, it is generally software forward compatible with the
..... Click the link for more information.
Amiga is a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner (1932-1994) as the principal hardware designer.
..... Click the link for more information.
20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1982 1983 1984 - 1985 - 1986 1987 1988

Year 1985 (MCMLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link displays 1985 Gregorian calendar).
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20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1982 1983 1984 - 1985 - 1986 1987 1988

Year 1985 (MCMLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link displays 1985 Gregorian calendar).
..... Click the link for more information.
Amiga is a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner (1932-1994) as the principal hardware designer.
..... Click the link for more information.
file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them.
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AmigaDOS provides the disk operating system portion of the AmigaOS. This includes file systems, file and directory manipulation, the command line interface, file redirection and so on.

In AmigaOS 1.
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Pre-emption as used with respect to operating systems means the ability of the operating system to preempt or stop a currently scheduled task in favour of a higher priority task. The scheduling may be one of, but not limited to, process or I/O scheduling, among others.
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command line interpreter (also command line shell, command language interpreter) is a computer program that reads lines of text entered by a user and interprets them in the context of a given operating system or programming language.
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BCPL>BCPL
Paradigm: procedural, imperative, structured
Appeared in: 1966
Designed by: Martin Richards
Influenced by: ALGOL
Influenced: C

This article is about a computer language.

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kernel is the central component of most computer operating systems (OS). Its responsibilities include managing the system's resources (the communication between hardware and software components).
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A device driver, or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a computer hardware device.

A driver typically communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware is
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assembly language is a low-level language for programming computers. It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture.
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The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the United States company Data General starting in 1969. The Nova packed enough power to do most simple computing tasks and was packaged into a single rack mount case.
..... Click the link for more information.
The Motorola 68000 is a CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector). As the first member of the successful 32-bit m68k family of microprocessors, it is generally software forward compatible with the
..... Click the link for more information.
Intel 8086
Central processing unit

Produced: From 1978-79 to 1982
Manufacturer: Intel
CPU Speeds: 4.
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The Cambridge Ring was an experimental local area network architecture developed at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory in the mid-late 1970s and early 1980s. It used a ring topology with a theoretical limit of 255 nodes (though such a large number would have badly
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