Tripos

At the University of Cambridge, the term Tripos (ⁱ/ˈtraɪpɒs/, plural 'Triposes') refers to undergraduate examinations which qualify an undergraduate for a bachelor's degree. It also refers to a course taken by an undergraduate. For example, an undergraduate studying mathematics is said to be reading for the Mathematical Tripos, whilst a student of English literature is reading for the English Tripos.

In most traditional English universities, a student registers to study one field exclusively, rather than having "majors" or "minors" as in American universities or Scottish universities. In practice, however, most degrees may be fairly interdisciplinary in nature, depending on the subject. The multi-part tripos system at Cambridge also allows substantial changes in field between parts; the Natural Sciences Tripos is especially designed to allow a highly flexible curriculum across the sciences.

Etymology

The word has an obscure etymology, but may be traced to the three-legged stool candidates once used to sit on when taking oral examinations (confer tripod). An apocryphal legend says that students used to receive one leg of a stool in each of their three years of exams, receiving the whole stool at graduation. Another tradition holds that the name derives from the three brackets printed on the back of the voucher.

TRIPOS

TRIPOS (TRIvial Portable Operating System) is a computer operating system. Development started in 1976 at the Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University and it was headed by Dr. Martin Richards. The first version appeared in January 1978 and it originally ran on a PDP-11. Later it was ported to the Computer Automation LSI4 and the Data General Nova. Work on a Motorola 68000 version started in 1981 at the University of Bath. MetaComCo acquired the rights to the 68000 version and continued development until TRIPOS was chosen by Commodore Amiga in March 1985 to form part of an operating system for their new computer; it was also used at Cambridge as part of the Cambridge Distributed Computing System.

Influences on the Amiga computer

In July 1985, the Amiga was introduced, incorporating TRIPOS in the AmigaDOS module of AmigaOS. AmigaDOS included a command line interface and the Amiga File System. The entire AmigaDOS module was originally written in BCPL (an ancestor of the C programming language), the same language used to write TRIPOS.