Valencia's Simple Tasker (VSTa) is an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

with a

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

architecture, with all device drivers and file systems residing in

userspace A modern computer operating system usually segregates virtual memory into user space and kernel space. Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour. Kernel ...

mode. It mostly complies with the Portable Operating System Interface (

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming inter ...

), except where such compliance interferes with extensibility and modularity. It is conceptually inspired by

QNX QNX ( or ) is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. QNX was one of the first commercially successful microkernel operating systems. The product was originally developed in the early ...

and

Plan 9 from Bell Labs Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has be ...

. Written by Andy Valencia, and released under a

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

(GPL). As of 2020, the licensing for VSTa is

Copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose ...

. It was originally written to run on

Intel 80386 The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

to several different platforms, e.g.,

Motorola 68030 The Motorola 68030 ("''sixty-eight-oh-thirty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 family. It was released in 1987. The 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040. In keeping with general ...

based Amigas. VSTa is no longer developed. A fork, named ''Flexible Microkernel Infrastructure/Operating System'' (FMI/OS), did not make a release.

User interface

The default

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...

provided as a tar-ball with the system was

ManaGeR Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activities ...

(MGR).

References

External links

*
http://www.vsta.org/distro/
download site Free software operating systems Unix variants Discontinued operating systems Microkernel-based operating systems Microkernels {{Operating-system-stub