VSTa was an operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 with a microkernel

Microkernel

In computer science, a microkernel is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system . These mechanisms include low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication...

 architecture, with all device driver

Device driver

In computing, a device driver or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device....

s and file system

File system

A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...

s residing in userspace mode. It is mostly POSIX

POSIX

POSIX , an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

 compliant, except when POSIX compatibility got in the way of extensibility and modularity. It was conceptually inspired by QNX

QNX

QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. The product was originally developed by Canadian company, QNX Software Systems, which was later acquired by Canadian BlackBerry-producer Research In Motion.-Description:As a microkernel-based...

 and Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...

. Written by Andy Valencia, and released under the GPL

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 license. Currently the licensing for VSTa is Copyleft

Copyleft

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work...

.

VSTa was originally written to run on i386 hardware, but was subsequently ported to several different platforms, e.g. 68030 based Amiga

Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

s.

VSTa is no longer developed, but its ideas and source code

Source code

In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

 are being used in the FMI/OS

FMI/OS

FMI/OS is a fork of the VSTa operating system. It shares most concepts with VSTa but has some new additions like ELF support, POSIX environment, POSIX error numbers and ability to compile with recent GCC versions....

 operating system, which continues the cause of VSTa.

User interface

The default graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 provided as a tar-ball with the system was ManaGeR

ManaGeR

ManaGeR or MGR was an early windowing system originally designed and developed for Sun computers in 1984 by Stephen A. Uhler, then at Bellcore....

(MGR).

External links

• The VSTa Wiki official home page
• FMI/OS home page
• http://www.vsta.org/distro/ download site