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Please don't lump the Amiga and Atari ST together.

The Amiga was a *very* similar m68k-based unix-like platform to NeXT (except amiga had no true memory protection (big downer that, but it meant that the AmigaOS had near-realtime latencies and could use extremely fast message passing-by-reference to shunt data around.)).

At a fraction of the price, it was just marketed by complete buffoons. CBM management actually managed to screw up a deal for the amiga A3000UX to become the low end Sun (or was it DEC?) workstation, but the Amiga still managed to dominate the video producton industry for a decade, despite CBM marketing's repeated attempts to sell it as a "games computer" in toy stores.

The Amiga division was making a profit even as the parent company folded, but blithering-idiot CBM management continously pumped money out of amiga R&D and into marketing their over-hyped, under-specced CBM PC line.

There's still features from AmigaOS I miss on Linux, mainly to do with the way the filesystem works (Assigns and Device handlers to let you cd into TCP connections, shell archives, windows and the like), the extra "screen" layer of UI abstraction that Enlightenment tries to emulate (the Rasterman is an ex-Amiga hacker), the system-wide REXX scripting, the way applications didn't spread themselves across about 10 different directories, and a load of other little niggling things, many of which are available as patches and add-ons into Linux, but on the Amiga, they all worked together seamlessly.

The same can not really be said of the ST.

The ST was kludged together from off-the-shelf parts in a cynical business decision by Atari, after CBM bought Amiga out from under their noses.

Please see www.blizzard.u-net.com/AtoZ/history .html
for a history of the amiga, www.amiga.org for amiga news, and www.amiga.com for information about the Tao/Amiga Virtual Processor technology.

They have a portable binary like Java, and dynamic compilation like Java (actually it sounds a bit like ust a simple JIT, and not a HotSpot like compilation). However, they get a lot of speed improvments out of only compiling and loading methods or functions (that they call tools) instead of whole classes at a time.

Tools however, can also be replaced with purely native versions. That means for instance that some feature of your hardware could be taken advantage of easily just by replacing a few "tools" (methods or classes) here and there with native versions. It's seems like a nice setup becuase in theory no Amiga code has to be written to indicate it uses native code anywhere - an interesting example might be a Math class of some sort that you write Altivec native code for to provide for fast scientific calculations.

The Amiga SDK also has seperate virtualizations of the Motherboard and CPU - in theory you could provide a box with different types of CPU's, and code would run just fine!

I think the most important thing to learn here is that they have created something like a Java VM, only at the lowest (hardware) level (OK, the procesor level like Transmeta's engine is a step lower).

It also complements the Java platform. As part of the Amiga SDK, they include a Java VM that's supposedly the fastest Java VM around. It's also Sun certified.

Development for the Amiga requires a Linux box, though in the future they said that the Amiga can also run directly on hardware or on top of other OS'es (I'm not sure if that's yet possible). They sell the kits for $99. From the article, you can get it here.

The whole point of the concept, correct me if I'm wrong, is that we get a fast multiplatform OE, something like what JAVA once was supposed to be.

My objection then is, that every layer that you apply (OS/OE) is going to slow down the running task (program). That was probably Javas biggest flaw, the lack of speed.

Amiga says their VP-translator is much faster, and will be able to run almost as fast as a native OS app.

I for one find that pretty hard to believe, but if they succed, boy do we have a winner here... :)

Some more info on the SDK is here.

--

"I'm surfin the dead zone

Check http://www.amiga.com/feature/061400-volker.shtml it's about someone who's built his A500 to have an lcd screen and more.. (sorry for mentioning the amiga here - don't beat me :-) The article mentions a laptop's lcd won't work as the controller for that is on the motherbord, he used 'an industrial' type of lcd. So getting an lcd screen for your project should be possible, using one of a scrap laptop will be a problem.. (unless you find out what part of the motherbord you have to use ? :-)

The Amiga Foundation Layer

1994 Byte intro to Taos

It can be bought online from amazon.com or an authorized dealer. It`s 99$ and you will get free support and a nice manual and free updates as the OS advances.

The only reason why x86 processors are still developed despite its inferior archtecture is because of the many x86 applications available.

This is why Java will soon become the main language for programming applications. The only limitation stopping this development is the speed of Java code execution.

Now with the new technologies developed by Tao Group and Amiga Inc this disadvantage will bew eliminated. Their JVM is quote "22x faster with Multimedia than any other JVM!".

Sun Microsystems will advice all it`s clients to use their JVM instead! More info here

My personal favorite to go against Microsoft is Amiga Inc. which is developing some remarkable software together with the Tao Group !

But then there`s also QNX Neutrino which is more like the traditional OSes but with a solid clean structure. Outsiders like BeOS and MacOS X look less promising but have more potential than the current Microsoft monopoly. And finally Linux won`t become a truly better desktop OS, but it will survive as it`s free and has it`s useful for being a good server or development tool.

What`s view upon for the future?

About the only thing the forthcoming new Amiga has in common with the old "classic" Amiga is the name. If you read up on the Amiga and Tao, you'll see the new Amiga is quite innovative - a generalised virtual machine and operating system that dynamically recompiles for the target architecture, using optimising compilers running within the virtual machine (currently supported languages are C, C++, Java, and assembler for the virtual machine).
Sort of Transmeta-Crusoe-backwards. I also suspect the Tao Virtual Processor machine code will turn out to be quite similar to Crusoe native code, but that's just a hunch.

You may have seen the recent slashdot articles connected to Tao, such as the one about heterogenous multiprocessing CPU cores on a single die, with each core at least semi-automagically executing the parts of a Tao/Amiga application that it is best suited for.

As an ex-Amiga user, I find that many of the "innovations" of microsoft are only innovations with respect to their own previous product line. I'm sure many mac and UNIX people feel the same way. (Beleive it or not, many amiga people simply assumed versions of MS windows prior to 95 had pre-emptive multitasking, simply because it was such a trivial feature of a usable system in their eyes, the amiga having had it since 1985. Many were thus very surprised when MS touted it as a big new feature of W95, similarly with the multiple clipboards of Office 2000 - the amiga having had them since 1985 too...)

Anyway, my point is Microsoft does not innovate. It brings other people's innovations into the mainstream. It is a "close follower", not an "innovator", no matter what their PR dept. say.

Also, I'd hardly say systems research is dead. EROS is a very promising pure-capability GPLd OS, Atheos was recently mentioned on slashdot, Exokernels are still in development, The Tao/Amiga Enivronment is new, and ground-breaking system.

If you ask me, Mr. Pike is either hopelessly out of touch or just spouting the MS line for money...

Tao sounds familiar...
Echos of an article
Amiga perhaps?

ftp://ftp.amiga.com/pub/developers/
___

Hmm... that means there are 4 Amiga-Like systems available today - two closed source and 2 open source:

Closed source:

AmigaOS itself: closed source operating system, now severely outdated, but groundbreaking for its time - soon to be replaced by a completely different OS from Tao, which is rather cool in itself, being a VM a bit like a Java VM, but without the language dependency (it includes a gcc/g++ port...)

BeOS - what most people think of as the AmigaOS done right. While it has been market mostly to Mac-like media people, in fact it attracted a load of ex-amiga people, particularly developers too. It's OS structure is undeniably similar to a refined AmigaOS.

Open Source:

AROS, the Amiga Research OS. An Open-source clone of Amiga OS 3.x, ported to architectures including x86. Many Amiga os-legal apps work with just a recompile. Not finished. Work progressing slowly due to legal complications - the OS depends on Amiga-copyrighted system include files and infringes on several Amiga patents. However, the current amiga intellectual property owners seem to look quite favourably upon AROS, and it looks increasingly likely it will get their blessing, since the Amiga is now going to be based on a completely different OS from Tao, and does not use any old AmigaOS code, so AROS is a good option for keeping the "classic" amiga alive and up-to-date. There's already Quake and Doom ports, so they've got the important stuff going. :-)

Atheos The new kid, the subject of this discussion. People have noted its UI similarity to the AmigaOS UI already on this thread, but architecturally it is also very similar to AmigaOS and BeOS. But it's open source, unlike AmigaOS and BeOS.

There are still folks out there running DOS 3, not to mention the Cult of the Amiga and the Trash-80 and the Timex-Sinclair. How do you put a stake through the heart of these beasts? (esp. one that Big Blue sold to banks, governments, etc).

"IBM wants its customers to deploy ebusiness technology applications concurrently with existing OS/2 applications until platform neutrality has been achieved, and then change the operating system," said the spokesman (quoted from the article)

Wonder if the folks who thought then that they couldn't get fired for buying IBM are sweating, or if they're not getting fired for buying Micro$oft now?

It is quite possible to have an environment that is both powerful and easy to use. A classic example of this, although I admit I am somewhat biased, is the old Amiga computers.

This was a machine that elegantly combined ease-of-use and power and was able to do so in a manner that both experienced and novice users were reasonably comfortable with.

I think one of the keys to the success of a system like this is the use of reasonable defaults. Amiga configuration tools would often provide defaults that worked for general classes of user, but also exposed the low-level configuration options to anyone who cared to get their hands dirty. Admittedly, the inclusion of ARexx as a system-wide scripting tool probably helped enormously in this regard.

Please, let's not have applications intelligently configure themselves. Or if we must, let's make sure that auto-configure isn't the only way to do it. Give those who want it the ability to configure the tiniest detail, whenever possible.

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

The Amiga OS is hardly dead, it's still being actively developed, in two main streams:

1. a next-gen distributed architecture based on the Tao VM (think of it as a language-agnostic generalised VM a bit like Java, but that can run on real hardware too).

2. the "classic" Amiga OS was extended to PowerPC with WarpOS (no relation to OS/2) microkernel. This allowed the user community to use more modern hardware, such as G3 accelerators, and 3D gfx cards.

The Amiga OS design, in the form of AROS - the "Amiga Research OS", which recently received blessing from Amiga itself, also lives on.

For more amiga info, go to www.amiga.org

Hmm... I wonder how "mobile linux" will stack up against EPOC32, which is a pretty good OS for palmtops?

Also, this processor could be pretty cool for running the tao virtual machine that amiga are using for their network environment - remember, amiga have already said they're going to run stuff on top of linux in palmtops.

http://www.amiga.com/amigaOS35.

So on one hand Linus has a vision, where his focus was on designing Linux for appliances smaller than laptops rather than putting it on desktops, and on the other we have Amiga's Internet appliance plans, not to mention their support for Linux.

Thoughts?

So on one hand Linus has a vision, where his focus was on designing Linux for appliances smaller than laptops rather than putting it on desktops, and on the other we have Amiga's Internet appliance plans, not to mention their support for Linux.

Thoughts?

Imagine you're an employee of Amiga, Inc. You'd never know, when you arrived in the morning, what you'd be doing that day. Are there any employees doing real work? I haven't actually seen anything come out of Amiga Inc. in a long, long time.

Oh, to make a liar out of me, on their website, they talk about AmigaOS 3.5. I guess that's something. I don't see any mention of anything beyond evolution of the existing AmigaOS, though.

Hey they've got a caching CDFS. They shoulda included my CacheX utility :)

Check out the AmigaOS 3.5 feature list. It's funny seeing some of the advancements they've made when you're coming from a world where those things are expected (like DHCP support).

Cool that they got 2500 applications to beta test it.. guess a lot of people are still using their Amiga.

They're going to be at a big show in Cologne in November. The ad says "Come to experience the computer revolution of the next millennium with us". Funny that this sentence is the only one on the poster that alludes to anything new.

- Steve

Imagine you're an employee of Amiga, Inc. You'd never know, when you arrived in the morning, what you'd be doing that day. Are there any employees doing real work? I haven't actually seen anything come out of Amiga Inc. in a long, long time.

Oh, to make a liar out of me, on their website, they talk about AmigaOS 3.5. I guess that's something. I don't see any mention of anything beyond evolution of the existing AmigaOS, though.

Hey they've got a caching CDFS. They shoulda included my CacheX utility :)

Check out the AmigaOS 3.5 feature list. It's funny seeing some of the advancements they've made when you're coming from a world where those things are expected (like DHCP support).

Cool that they got 2500 applications to beta test it.. guess a lot of people are still using their Amiga.

They're going to be at a big show in Cologne in November. The ad says "Come to experience the computer revolution of the next millennium with us". Funny that this sentence is the only one on the poster that alludes to anything new.

- Steve

Imagine you're an employee of Amiga, Inc. You'd never know, when you arrived in the morning, what you'd be doing that day. Are there any employees doing real work? I haven't actually seen anything come out of Amiga Inc. in a long, long time.

Oh, to make a liar out of me, on their website, they talk about AmigaOS 3.5. I guess that's something. I don't see any mention of anything beyond evolution of the existing AmigaOS, though.

Hey they've got a caching CDFS. They shoulda included my CacheX utility :)

Check out the AmigaOS 3.5 feature list. It's funny seeing some of the advancements they've made when you're coming from a world where those things are expected (like DHCP support).

Cool that they got 2500 applications to beta test it.. guess a lot of people are still using their Amiga.

They're going to be at a big show in Cologne in November. The ad says "Come to experience the computer revolution of the next millennium with us". Funny that this sentence is the only one on the poster that alludes to anything new.

- Steve

--

Hmmm - Acording to Amiga... This is their fastest(off the shelf)

There's also a bit too much bias, whether on purpose or not. For example, when Amiga announced its new OS would be a Linux/BeOS hybrid, slashdot reported it'd run Linux, while not mentioning BeOS at all. It turns out BeOS is the only OS that was correct in that statement (Linux is not being used), so the slashdot story was 100% wrong, compared to the 50% wrong of the story it linked to.

If Slashdot was 100% wrong, how wrong does that make you? See http://www.amiga.com/diary/1999/990709-e.html , in particular "Amiga has selected Linux as the OS kernel for the new Amiga Operating Environment that is scheduled for release later this year."

Of course Slashdot's contributors are biased, but I've never found it reached the level where it made me uncomfortable. Most of the people who complain about bias just seem to be sore that their platform doesn't get mentioned more, or NT weenies who seem to have got lost on the way to msnbc.com (like, seriously, why do those people come here?)

Amiga Inc have put up some official pictures on their web site.

I believe there is a hazy spec up for the next gen Amiga box. amiga.com I believe also that the die-hard amiga community is rather perturbed by the decision to use Linux as the kernel and USB and suchlike as the hardware interfaces. Doesn't concern me... I'm happy to play Bard's Tale on my A500. :)

From the technology brief:

Finally, there will be a suite of end-user
workspaces, including a new Amiga Workbench being designed at Amiga. There are already a number of interesting desktop environments available for Linux, and it is our intent to contribute the Amiga workbench to the open source movement, and encourage the creative Amiga and Linux communities to modify, enhance, replace, and generally get creative when it comes to next-generation desktop environments (we believe that one of the disadvantages of today's Windows and Macintosh personal computers is the "closed" nature of their desktop environments).

I think they want a Window Manager and a File Manager. They have choosen him because he has experience on window managers.

Looking forward to the technology brief.

Every year there's a rumor about a new amiga coming out. "It will be a PPC"! "It's gonna be RISC!" "It's linux-based!" "No, it's qnx" "It's amigaOS 3.0".."a great new company bought the amiga technology!"..and nothing ever comes out at the end.

Me? I'm happy to discuss what they're working on... it's nice to see someone is actually attempting to do something. But I won't be completely happy or even concrete in my thinking about Amiga's future path(s) until I start seeing some product. And I dont mean their silly products like offical Amiga boxer shorts and AmiCola. (I'm not kidding, see it here).

"Death is just the beginning. - Amiga T-shirt.

Amiga has been in secret talks with Transmeta, and have decided to go with their upcoming superprocessor. And at the same time, they've made the logical switch to Linux, which already runs in native mode. (Not just x86 emulation mode.)

This article explains:

On the CPU side we have selected a CPU that will bring exciting new capabilities to the Amiga. I can't disclose what instruction set it uses at this time because of confidentiality agreements. I can tell you that it's very exciting and NOT an x86 architecture processor. Our plan is to disclose the CPU in several weeks at the World of Amiga and AmiWest shows. At this time I hope to disclose all of our technology choices and partners.

Remember, you read it here first....

--

Call me uninformed or misinformed, but stuff like this really makes me wonder which of the various rumours and announcements have any substance... (I certainly wouldn't bet on that, or any other of the announcements on www.amiga.com, being true)

"July 9, 1999 - San Diego, California. Amiga has selected Linux as the OS kernel for the new Amiga Operating Environment that is scheduled for release later this year. Amiga is selecting Linux after several months of evaluating the technical progress of the OS and the tremendous industry support that Linux has gained."

http://www.amiga.com/diary/1999/990799-e.html

Read the Executive Update article as well. Interesting dynamics between this announcement and the QNX announcement of only a few hours earlier.

Click a couple of links and you get to this one that explains the whole relationship.

It's not Amiga-like, it's Amiga - Revision 5.

To overcome this, there will first be a developer machine, which is going to be an x86 based system.

Following the development system, the really new machines will be released. The new machines will NOT be x86 based. All this info is available on Amiga's website, e.g. here.

Try this one:

Executive Update

strange - my Cyberstorm 604e PPC 233MHz with 68060 50MHz amiga seems pretty real. Think before you write something. Dolt. Look where team amiga are in the RC5-64 decryption tables. Yep. Hovering about sixth or seventh. Not bad, for such a minority eh? PPCs kick x86 butt.
Incidentally, I dual boot AmigaOS 3.1 and LinuxPPC (APUS is the name of the Amiga ppc linux port - it's on sunsite.auc.dk). I have an 8MByte Permedia 2 gfx card, 128Mbyte ram, and ultra-wide scsi 3 4.3 gig HD.

No, it's not a top of the range spec, but I'd say it's not bad.

Makers of the amiga PPC hardware ->
www.phase5.de

Makers of the PPC-side kernel favoured by the majority of PPC amiga users, and the Warp3D Amiga OpenGL API->
www.haage-partner.de

Claim to be developing an amiga G3 card ->
www.escena.de

amiga ppc news->
come.to/amigappc

Amiga ->
www.amiga.com

QNX ->

www.qnx.com

Yes, most decent amiga stuff comes out of the UK and germany, and this is a US site, so some ignorance among the readership of this site is to be expected, I guess.

PS. I suppose my machine isn't a "desktop" - It's in a tower case...

I, too wish QNX was open source - It looks like it is where the HURD is headed. Howver, one thing to remember is that it is the kernel that is closed source - device drivers written by third parties need not be, they don't run in kernel space, and the standard dev tools for Neutrino are GNU ( not for older QNX OSes though, they use Watcom...). The OS is POSIX, so porting is pretty easy, too - except that QNX has that Photon MicroGUI windowing system, which has a somewhat different API to x-windows... That's not to say x-windows isn't available for QNX - it is, the QNX people just consider it too big for embedded applications...

http://www.qnx.com
http://www.amiga.com