Work on MiNT began in 1989, as the developer Eric Smith was trying to port the
GNU library and related utilities on the Atari ST TOS. It soon became much easier to add a
Unix-like layer to the TOS, than to patch all of the GNU software, and MiNT began as a TOS extension to help in porting. MiNT was originally released by Eric Smith as "MiNT is Not TOS" (a
recursive acronym in the style of "GNU's Not Unix") in May 1990. The new Kernel got traction, with people contributing a port of the
MINIX file system and a port to the
Atari TT. At the same time, Atari was looking to enhance the TOS with multitasking abilities. MiNT could fulfill the job, and Atari hired Eric Smith. MiNT was adopted as an official alternative kernel with the release of the
Atari Falcon, slightly altering the MiNT acronym into "MiNT is Now TOS". Atari bundled MiNT with a multitasking version of the
Graphics Environment Manager (GEM) under the name MultiTOS as a
floppy disk based installer. After Atari left the computer market, MiNT development continued as FreeMiNT, and became maintained by a team of volunteers. FreeMiNT development follows a classic open-source approach, with the source code hosted on a publicly browsable FreeMiNT
Git repository on GitHub and development discussed in a public mailing list, which is maintained on SourceForge, after an earlier (2014) move from AtariForge, where it was maintained for almost 20 years. == MiNT software ecosystem ==