NOTE: I have stopped maintaining this page somewhere halfway 1996. The most important change since then is that the further development of AMOS has started again. Francois Lionet's company Clickteam has released the source code to both AMOS and STOS. The AMOS Development Group has taken up the challenge of bugfixing, updateing and improving AMOS.
Contents:
The way in which Europress dropped all support for Amos -it never officially did!- has caused a long period in which Amos users have been uncertain about the future of Amos.
Although I cannot take away this uncertainty, I can at least try and take away some of the doubts and some of the gaps in information and replace them by suggestions for a future direction an Amos programmer might take.
To fill the gaps in information, I have decided to write a history of Amos. (Or rather, a history of the future of Amos).
To point into new directions, there will be several sections on this page, as soon as I have worked out of what nature these pointers should be (suggestions are always welcome).
There are several documents available on the net outlining the history of Amos.
If you want to go way back in time, visit the STOS FAQ at the STOS homepage.
The AMOS FAQ, as written and maintained by Michael Cox, is included with every recent archive of the Amos Discussion List. These archives can be found in the Amos directory on Aminet.
On the F1 Licenceware homepage you will also find a history of Amos, as written by Steve Bye himself.
I have started ploughing through the archives of the Amos Discussion List as they can be found in the Amos directory on Aminet. I have only done 35% so far (rough estimate), which has taken me about 30 hours. Some dedication, eh? I have extracted the messages about the future of Amos.
Then I made a version of the archive of extracted messages with all the noise removed.
From this new, edited archive:
These are _edited_ snippets of the Amos-list archive on Aminet, asking for or giving news of Amos developing beyond its current stage. They stem from a file called AmosList.txt, which contains the full messages. I have snipped: - ASCII 'art' - non-relevant parts of the messages - the headers - signatures and taglines - multiple blank lines The headers have been edited to fit the following format: date: DATE from: AUTHOR'S NAME <EMAIL-ADDRESS> subject: SUBJECT Furthermore, all messages are preceded by a line "MSG -----" and ended with a blank line.
Finally, I made a digest based on the edited archive.
Click on any of the links below to download the item you want.
What it is I am going to say here very much depends on what I am going to find out the next few months.
Maybe Amos will remain a viable language to program in for years, nay decades to come. In that case I will focus on continuing using Amos.
On the other hand, I might conclude that Amos' glorydays are over and that people should start looking at other languages and packages (or even OSes) for different tasks.
Most likely however is that in the near future I will pay attention to both possible paths in this section.
If you feel you have got something to add to this page, I would very much like to hear from you. At the bottom of this page you will find a link to my private post office, from which you can submit a form or send an email.
If however you are subscribing to the Amos Discussion List, I would prefer it if you sent your contribution there, so that it can be discussed by a whole lot of Amos experts, rather than just you and me.