I first imagined AMC-OS in july 1997. Basically, it was most for fun, and to understand better all the undergoings of the computers. At this time, the most common system was Windows(r)95 and it was quite deceiving, motivating me to write something clean, protected and stable. But by lack of time, and because it was quite a weird idea to write my own OS, i finally abandoned the first project draft AMC-DOS 1.0.

But during the cold winter of 1997, the project came back on my desk, as this was the best thing to spend my time on. I learned the IA-32 assembly language and started writing some basic microkernels, leading to AMC-OS 1.1 in october 1998. In this release, system was booting on floppy and executing some basic code. Then, a splash picture was added, with progress bars showing the progress of the system analysis. It was mostly 16-bit BIOS-dependant code at this time, but a good beginning. The goal of creating AMC-OS still was for fun, and to learn all possible things on computers, from pinout of the processors to the object models used in high-level programming.

During 1999 and 2000, I learned IA-32 protected mode, paging and all relevant programming aspects. AMC-OS 2.0 was released, in native 32-bit and BIOS-independant. At this time, it was a complete running OS with a basic API, interacting with user and managing system resources.

From then, a large number of evolution were made : multitasking, API, text-based shell, VM86, disk and FAT support, throughout all the years. Most stable release, 2.08, was done in december 2005. Project is semi-frozen now, depending on the time I have for it. I try to redesign or add support for things from time to time. I released in 2008 a specific linker for AMC-OS to allow mixing ASM and C code for some parts (especially shell). From 250 lines of code in 1999, it has in 2009 more than 33000 lines of code.

Aurélien Méré