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Amino Got More Than the Amiga Name
vigi writes "Despite early announcements, it seems Gateway sold pretty much anything Amiga to Amino. As this executive update points out, Amino (soon to be renamed Amiga Corporation) acquired all trademarks, inventory, licenses, domain names and the Amiga OS."
They've killed Amiga!
YOU BASTARDS
nt
I love how people get so worked up over a person they claim didn't exist.
So, why not have the new Amiga (which was famous more for it's custom hardware than it's OS), use BeOS on top of some killer custom multimedia hardware? AmigaOS/Workbench was nice for the time, but it definitely looks like a 10 year old OS these days
Yep.. BEOS is a speed demon.. Linux may be king of command line but BEOS is the king of GUI.. boots up in 15-20 seconds..
My P3/450 emulates most Amiga software at well over 100% speed.
There's a pretty simple reason why this issue crops up every so often, even years after C= screwed themselves. ... if they are only looking at the physical machine. They are also rather grievously missing the point.
People want the Amiga to live and they believe it can and should live. Otherwise they wouldn't be bothering to care.
But why do they want/believe this, in spite of the last few years of repetitive disaster?
Do I think the Amiga hardware can be revived? Hell no.
Do I think the Amiga software can be revived? Since it's essentially married to the hardware, and rather behind the times in L&F to boot, no.
Nor should either, really, because of those tradeoffs mentioned.
All of the people talking about the Amiga being dead, or that people should just let it rest in peace are right
The Amiga, at least the part that counted, was not found in the motorola CPU. Nor was it found in Angus, Denise, Paula, et al. If you dumped the contents of the kickstart ROM, or viewed the OS source, or tinkered with the developer docs, you would see the result rather than the thing itself.
The only part of the Amiga that really mattered was the Idea. The attitude. The spirit, so to speak. It had, as you say, elegance. People loved it, and continue to love it (and use it) years after its alleged passing, flying in the face of everyone pronouncing it repeatedly dead.
Simple concept, but hard to convey, especially to people that refuse to dignify this sort of "romantic nonsense" so they can devote more time to religious jihads on other topics.
Look at Autoconfig. Look at the multitasking. Look at using AREXX as a standard part of the OS. Look at how easy it was for people to use, hack, etc. Look at the philosophy behind IFF. Look at Datatypes. Sure, it had its flaws, like a lack of MP or VMM; nothing's perfect, and I'll laugh at anyone claiming any other platform to be.
The point is, it tried. There was a niche that the Amiga filled in the computer market during its heydey. That niche doesn't have a name that I know of, but it was there. Call it "the computer that tried to be interesting to most everyone". Call it the "fun" computer. Call it whatever you like, the fact is that it refuses to go away, so it must have struck some chord with us. It must be important, or it would have passed when C= did.
It continues to be a thorn in the side of detractors and "let-it-die" people to this very day because it was something special to its users, not just another ho-hum work-a-day computer platform to be listed on a resume. The Amiga continues to haunt us because nothing has filled that void to date.
Eventually, something will (or at least should). Whether that thing will bear the name Amiga on the case is debateable, but not really relevant. What we should be preserving and insisting upon is the Idea.
Proposing that we should let the Amiga die in peace basically means giving up everything we love about computers, and letting everything boring, tedious, ornery, pedantic, patronizing, kludgy, and monolithic take over. Are you sure you really want to go there?
Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps tons of computer users once regarded as leading the pack are now just deluded, nostalgic idiots who should accept the facts, roll over, and let Gates continue his merry way unimpeded (or whatever the personal agenda of these people is).
But to me, that seems rather too facile of an answer. YMMV.
If the new Amiga Corp. goes open source (which would be logical) then all of this is a moot point. Their trademarks and logos will put an "official" stamp on whatever they do with the AmigaOS. As their update says, they are in it to service the Amiga community, not for the patents. If they do this right, they will not have to worry about patents (which will soon expire). They can get the patent licenses from Gateway for now, and if they go open source (via perhaps AROS) then they will be writing entirely new code anyway, and in a few years they won't even be using the original code from the existing AmigaOS.
Wow!
You're beautiful.
The kind of thing that makes me wonder if breeding isn't such a bad idea after all.
You saw it too! So I was not hallucinating.
You bastard! You threw out TWO of them? Haven't you heard of eBay? If not that, you could at least given them away to someone. I'd take them. :-(
Ah yes, Atari. We can thank that cheap bastard Tramiel for running a once fine computer and gaming company straight into the ground. He had a chance to buy the Amiga too, and he nickle and dimed the poor Amiga guys until Commodore showed up and gave them a decent offer. Bastards.
What, you can't spring for $1299? Your digital camcorder is going to cost at least that much.
Gateway is basically killing Amiga with this move.
What the hell are you talking about? Gateway was killing Amiga by keeping it and doing nothing. By selling Amiga to a company that wants to actually develop it (Or so they claim. We'll see.), it now has yet another chance to make a comeback. Given it's previous track record (what voodoo priest put a curse on this thing anyway?) it doesn't look good, but it would be nice if it could be brought up to date. Open-source or not, more competition in the marketplace is a Good Thing (TM).
isn't there anything that was once great, then faded, which isn't kicked back up and dragged around these days? Leave the amiga to the legend it once was.
They had basically nothing in common with the Amiga except the CPU. However, unlike the Amiga, you can buy modern Atari's: Milan 040
The current model has things like PCI slots, the new one (to be shown at CeBit 2000: Milan 060) will even have USB ports. Doesn't look like they're adding AGP, and they still are using 68K processors.
Of course I'm honestly not sure why anyone would want one, unless it was to run thier old Audio Applications.
Zane
Make it open and portable. Port it to x86, PowerPC, etc.
Insert SNL sketch here; sprinkle word "Amiga" into script where appropriate.
Wow. For 2 years now people have been driving up the stock values of companies with no earnings. Maybe if these guys are or go public, people will go even more wild over them because they won't have _products_ either! "This is a manifestly better business model," remarked Joe Blow from the SureTrade commercial, "because they can keep manufacturing costs contained.". The pundits agree....
What exactly is the point of this?
Are you trying to make a statement? (None that I can see.)
Are you trying to be funny? (You're not.)
Are you trying to make people mad? (You might be succeeding here.)
All that you're doing is fucking up Slashdot for the rest of us. When they start having to restrict access, it will be your fault. I ask again, what is the point? What are you trying to accomplish? Does anybody who is reading this find this type of bullshit ("SODOMIZE JAR JAR") even remotely amusing?
Grow up.
It doesn't really matter too much what the corporations are doing with the remains of the Amiga, as a full copy of the OS source code has been leaked.
AC
You sound like a disgruntled ex-Atari user.
I think you summed it all up when you said "I never used an Amiga"... it was just the damned coolest computer ever built, why do you think people still obsess over it??? There is no computer these days that I think is fun and powerful like the Ami was. Thats why I hope for an Amiga for the 2000's
If you think it's dead then why don't you just not read the Amiga news articles? Why don't you just shut up if you don't have anything positive to say? There are still plenty of people left who want to hear every little bitty of the Amiga ongoing drama.
So, when they come up with time travel machines that can take us back ten years, it will be a damn impressive machine. Otherwise, who cares?
Nobody, in case you didn't catch my drift.
Reminds me of the plague scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. People have been saying Amiga is dead for 5 years, and yet it still lives on. It seems like many know its not dead, but wish they could bash the Amiga in the head just like in Monty Python, and throw Amiga on the wagon with the rest of the dead computer platforms. Now why is that?
People who say it is dead or outdated are partly right, but miss the point that Amino/Amiga aren't just going to maintain the existing platform: they want to create something new which carries the existing platform ahead of the rest once again. As far as hardware goes, the talk is of using the IBM POP motherboards (open source hardware) and porting the OS to PowerPC. But there is no reason why the whole OS could not be portable, and make ports to PowerPC, x86, Alpha, etc. Obviously Open Source for AmigaOS would be a logical next step. Will they work with AROS? The AmigaOS needs to be rewritten to make it portable, give it memory protection, etc. Will they rewrite the existing kernel, or go with QNX or Linux? In the past Fleecy and McEwan expressed preference for QNX, but QNX is not open source, and they would have to license it (more money out the door). Why not go with AROS? They have already cloned most of the AmigaOS and made it portable. Make AROS the official Amiga replacement, make it a truly open, but centrally managed, open source project, and get to work making a fully modern, AmigaOS replacement. Isn't this what /. should be discussing, rather than more lame Amiga flames and nostalgia?
Please.
One thing about the Amiga was that it combined the best features of the Mac and Unix. And provided high quality video and audio back when Macs were monochrome and PC's were....very limited. Plus preemtive multitasking and such. One must really read up a lot on computer history to realize what a missed opportunity the Amiga really was. There's a reason why we are still talking about Amiga in the year 2000.
Oh, fuck off. Just because he's not a drooling 'tard fanatic like you are. Loser.
Yep. Everything that dies ends up eventually at Corel.
Linux fans should take note of that.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (Intel was introducing the 80486 and Motorola the 68040) I lusted after the Amiga for its great design. Separate hardware/chip components for video and audio relieved the CPU of those tasks.
... if Be was ported to Amiga -- and what is still a good hardware design -- it would probably be an awesome combination.
I'd also like to see Be ported to Alpha but ...
(All ®trademarks are the property of their respective owners.)
craig the anonymous
I used to wonder what the political parallels where in the OS Universe. Now I know of some good coorelations.
1. Windows NT is Stalinist
2. The Mac OS is Trotskyite
3. Amiga is Albanian (meaning, the rabid 'Hoxa'(sp?)Albanian communists)
It's not going to become disclosed source. It's going to stay closed.
I always wonder when people refer to formerly closed source as being 'opened.' The only thing that I can visualize is 'opening' a dead fish with a sharp knife.
You know, there are many decaffeinated brands on the markets these days that taste almost as good as the real thing.
You don't get it. The amiga *was* a quantum leap forward that, until very recently, hadn't been bested. If others are like me, they care about Amiga news because they are hoping for a quantum leap forward. We're not content with what is currently offered - Microsoft, Linux, or anything else currently available. We want a HUGE leap forward, not the evolutionary thinking we've been stuck in for the past 10 years. *THAT* is why it's news for nerds!
Stability and functionality. Gnome and KDE are both still very unstable...I hate to be the one to break it to you.
We do
I'm in complete agreement with the subject post, FWIW. I bet that Be could have swept up a lot of the old Amiga crowd if they'd bought the rights to the Amiga name and started work on porting tools for the old Amiga applications (something like FX!32 or WINE, for example).
Simply because, the ST was a joke. Now the atari 8 bit machines, that was the best damn computer, had 2 assemblers (one on disk, one on cartridge...I ran the disk version off my ramdisk with the floppy drive door open(it read a sector that was fixed to see if it were on the orginal floppy...but leaving the drive door open was sufficient!), basic, then there was turbo basic by that german company...ah man...it was the shit. And the c compiler was great...etc. All low cost to own. I even had 2M of ram and used second party os's that used all the ram...you could even create multiple virtual machines in each ram space. And talk about open source software...their was tons of it. Now I run linux of course, but I play with the 8 bit emulators still.
GTK-- is excellent (at least the newest versions, I heard bad things about 1.0.x). The best part is that you program for it in C++, not some hacked-up preprocessed dialect of C++.
When Der Fuhrer says "We iss de master race!" We Ach Tui! Ach Tui! Right in Der Fuhrers face! Not to love der Fuhrer is a great disgrace So we Ach Tui! Ach Tui! Right in der Fuhrer's face!
I watched Bladerunner the other night and I must admit I had a bit of a laugh when I saw the Atari sign:).
What, you don't count a major revision to the OS as being new?
An OS based on C++ ?
That's really ugly.
I have no idea how this relates to the OS universe. In fact, I have no idea how this relates to the universe I live in. Maybe we need a new moderation category, "+0 incomprehensible."
Just what made you think that the Linux Community was going to implement YOUR IDEA of "the one true interface" anyways?
Many of us use Linux to begin with because we would rather not be subjected to such fascist notions. (one true UI)
BeOS is just the system software.
The clever retort you failed to completely come up with was: the BeBox.
That's been nixed already.
The NeXT? At $10k, I think it was a little out of the $1300 Amiga's range. Besides, the original NeXTs were b/w.
It had none of the Amiga's coprocessors, a crap OS, and a lousy GUI. Did I mention no multitasking and crap sound, too?
Certainly does.. I can't recall any Gateway press releases that started with a rebel yell..
CES 1984, awwwww yeah. To be 11 again.
Take a sip...
* Every time the owners make an exciting yet vague announcement
* Every time the Amiga is rumored to be associated with an actual up-and-coming company
* Every time the Amiga owners forge or sever ties with a company that would be up-and-coming in Bizzaro-Earth
Take a gulp...
* Every time the owners change their strategy (they must discard at least six months of work for this to count)
* Every time the Amiga is sold (multiple gulps if the property is split up)
* Every time an owner or recent owner goes bankrupt
Finish the glass...
* If anything is ever actually released, ever
-cr@zyuncledave.com, drunk off my ass since '93
(This isn't a troll. I'm curious if anyone out there agrees or disagrees with my point of view.)
A show of hands: Who out there is able to use just about any computer they sit in front of?
No doubt, Amigas -- OS + hardware -- were good machines. Back when they were being produced in quantity, they were sweet...
...yet, if you look at any computer today, they are so damn similar. Speed and capacity seem to be the only differences at this point in time. I don't have any problem using a Unix/Unix-like system, Mac hardware, PalmOS, or SPARC BIOS configuration. The same problems are solved slightly different ways, and the tools are sometimes different, yet there are more similarities then differences.
The GUI -- if any -- is not hard to learn. The CLI -- if any -- is usually similar from one machine/OS to the next. The complexity or features in any of the parts tends to go with the intended audience...though beginer skills tend to translate well reguardless of the OS or hardware.
After finding where help is located, and dealing with the largely minor differences that the hardware and OS have, I feel at home.
Real Genius or just waxing philisophical about old comercials?
Perhaps this mean a revitalization of the Amiga system? That would be good, but I doubt anyone would actually care. "Is it open source?" The one thing that Amiga really contributed to this entourage of effemability that is the PC marketplace was the MODule file format, and IFF. Patterns, tracks, titles, the works, it's all good. Then along came the Evil PC Demoscene, and their non-Open Source policy, destroying everything we had worked for with their evil Demos of PC superiority. DAMN YOU CREATIVE LABS!! DAMN YOU TO HELL!! "What now?" What now indeed. "Why does slashdot have such retarded and lame ad banners? I mean, they're not 'Punch the Monkey', but they are pretty damn irritating." Point taken. I think the reason is that Slashdot appeals to the more discriminating, Open Source, Linux and Amiga using technological milieu. As such, they are required to have add banners that appeal to their interests and levels of intellect, for example, an animated gif of microsoft's office (building, not the program, silly!) being blown to smithereens. Naturally anyone who works in that building would be offended, at the least, by that ad. But it serves its purpose well (much like the MODule file format): it is not 'dumbed down' like that "LOOKING FOR CLIPART?" banner with the fake combo box, with the annoying as hell mouse, but it appeals to people of a higher understanding of the commercial, political, financial, as well as technological issues of the computing industry. Hence the exploding office (the building, silly!). Personally I think the Amiga named should be used to signify a close friend, perhaps a female, spanish-speaking, or perhaps a sobriquet to be used between close friends when being "totally not serious!" That would be the best use of it.
Fuck you, Jesús!
Check the webpage http://www.amino1.net/amino1.html
It says:
"... and so it begins"
yeah not so interesting, but the page source has some insightful keywords listed:
amiga, linux, kosh, free, open platform, open system
Guess it's open platform soon...?
> Amiga OS is far superior to any other OS out there, Windows, MacOS, and Linux included.
I wouldn't say that. Amiga OS is a nice microkernel which makes it very easy to dynamically enhance, but it has some bad issues:
1. OS isn't designed to be memoryprotective
2. OS isn't designed to be secure or multiuser
Good issue is that it is a microkernel and therefore it has features like GNU Hurd does. Amiga OS has actually copied lot of it's characteristics from MACH OS (the same thing GNU Hurd did).
I would point out to slashdotters that Amiga's microkernel can for example dynamically load an alternative threading system and/or virtual memory on the fly! Linux supports those natively but Amiga does those things with dynamically loaded external software (Amiga OS is very dynamic). I'm waiting to see how GNU Hurd manages, I believe Hurd will be something wonderful.
i require an amiga database to calculate the total number of gallons of hot grits i pour down my pants on a weekly basis. thank you.
Oh, you fuck off. He IS a drooling 'tard fanatic. He's just an anti-Amiga fanatic. At least the Amiga fanatics might help keep something non-Intel, non-MS alive for a while. The anti-Amiga fanatics are just crowd following, status quo worshiping, losers.
> It is a great emu but it still is a bit slow choppy sound) and a lot of games refuse to work.
:-) Amiga emulation is still based on cheating to a degree. For example, sprite collisions have not been implemented properly. I wonder how UAE deals with sprite multiplexing (writing to hardware sprite data registers with copper in real time). The graphics hardware is so utterly tricky to emulate that current emulators don't cope 100% with copper tricks. And the emulator doesn't emulate missuse of hardware properly yet. For example, when someone hits blitter hardware before it's finished with previous blitting (it is actually undefined but some demos/games do that all the time for some strange reason).
I recall a time few years ago when PC freaks estimated that Pentium-500Mhz will emulate A500 with 100% speed in all cases. Now we can see that they we're wrong. Now I'm making a questimate that it takes 1.5GHz Pentium to emulate A500 in realtime
> If they decide to opensource the amiga will it help the emulator any?
No, Amiga must be emulated on hardware basis. AmigaOS is a small detail in this project. Most of the demos run without OS intervention after proper (or not so proper) initializations. It's the hardware tricks that don't work very well on UAE.
Is it 1987? If not then if more money than is in my wallet [not much] changed hands, there is a great IPO opportunity I'd like to tell these people about. It's going to be huge and make everyone a millionaire. It said so right in the email.
Eh?
A couple of pd hacks bolted on, and NewIcons. Wow!
Here we go all over again.
Yet another company buys the rights to the Amiga.
Yet again, everyone gets all excited "This is it!!! It's gonna rock!!!"
Yet again we have to wait a year or so for anything, and then we'll hear the same old story "Well, it's not what we originally wanted to do but we're working on something blah blah blah" then in another year or so someone else will buy it and it'll start all over again.
Face facts folks, Fleecy and Bill ain't gonna achieve anything.
Fleecy? Ah yes, the guy who *started* (but NEVER finished) ICOA, KOSH, Aqua and now Amina. Given his track reconrd of never finishing ANYTHING, who in their right mind believes he'll ever get anything done this time?
Bill? Ah yes, the PR guy for Amiga Inc during Gateway's time - they guy who gave us the BIG announcement of WOA97 (remember that flop everyone?) and then told us FSCK ALL, all announcements and news [read 'lies & bullshit'] coming from others in AInc (no wonder gateway sacked him!).
So, remind me folks - why are we supposed to be optimistic THIS time???
Actually, a lot of what you mention is available in modern computers. So they caught up, it's not as if they're still catching up. The cross-application scripting was the only thing I truly missed on the Amiga. Once I learned AppleScript under MacOS, I stopped regretting selling off my A4000. Like AREXX, only better.
Early reports indicated that Gateway had just kept some patents received after they bought Amiga. This link indicates that they kept *all* of them and just licensed the older ones to Amino.
Well, maybe in time it will be amusing. Just think of the possibilties of what could happen to these assholes should their IP address be released out into the open the next time slashdot is hacked...
I bet you this company has baby ATX mobos on the shelves -- with fully integrated 32 MB. OpenGL support, 100 MB. lan, running a modifed version of the Hurd on a Transmeta CPU by summer.
All for less than $250 dollars in a shrink-wrapped package with a warrior penguin logo on the cover.
I'm SO excited about this new Amiga! This will rock! Thanks slashdot for making my evening!
The Linux crowd is SUPPOSED (according to the hype) to be providing some grand unified theory of
computing, but for every Linux shortcoming someone points out, we get either "write it yourself" or an explanation of why we don't want it. I thought it was the Microsoft way to give excuses instead of Products People Want.
You IMHO have the wrong sight what Linux is.
"The Linux crowd" is not supposed to provide some
grand unified theory of computing as nature is not
supposed to deliver the unified theory of life.
Both simply evolve.
"The Linux crowd" is providing that software, that
people out of this crowd are writing because they
want it to happen. There isn't such a thing as a
counter where you can order what Linux software
should be coded next.
If you want it, then start it up. If you cannot
get enough people interested in it, then forget it.
Gateway is basically killing Amiga with this move. But, this is completely unfair. Amiga OS is far superior to any other OS out there, Windows, MacOS, and Linux included.
but what do i know...
(and yes, i realize your post was humerous)...
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
The amiga that could do this stuff was released over TEN YEARS AGO......You idiots who know nothing about Amigas say "of course you can get a box right now that does that stuff"! Fools the lot of you! Oh sorry about the type I meant to say thousands, just so used to saying millions when talking about colors.
Poor bastards.
He's alive !
As I understand it one of the gentlemen who run Amino headed some of the QNX work at Amiga/Gateway. Reportedly he parted ways with Gateway after they dropped QNX in favor of Linux. For that reason, I don't think we'll be seing Linux driving whatever Amiga becomes. While I'm a huge Linux supporter, that is IMO a good thing. Amiga is too different an animal to become just another desktop environment under Linux.
The Amiga produced a ton of great demos and games. A lot of the copyright holders are releasing their amiga games for free now. At least it seems that way since a lot of amiga sites have the games for download.
For a while I was trying to get some of these games to work with UAE (the only amiga emulator available for linux). It is a great emu but it still is a bit slow (choppy sound) and a lot of games refuse to work.
If they decide to opensource the amiga will it help the emulator any? Is UAE still being maintained?
Tim
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
You know, that's one of the things that really bothers me about the "Open-Source Uber Alles" crowd here; the basic assumption that anything cool or powerful developed by anybody should be open so we can pick it apart for the crown jewels like Apple did to PARC.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
enough said
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/
You can also get Fellow which is a great emu as well (and a lot faster) but not as compatible with a lot of software from here:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/52
Then of course there is AmiNet which has TONS of software on it... www.aminet.org (i think)
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
www.cloanto.com
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Ah, you never get over your first, do you? It was the first machine I actually bought, having worked on mainframes, minis, PCs and embedded processor development systems for 10 years before. I finally saw a machine that I thought was worth spending my money on. Funny, I was just thinking about cranking up the old A1000 to see if I could get the 3 Stooges game running. And Sinbad, and ... you get the idea. I'll be glad to buy a new one if they get their act together.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Just what made you think that the Linux Community was going to implement YOUR IDEA of "the one true interface" anyways?
I'd vote for Linux just DECIDING on a user interface instead of the current disjointed mishmash. Doesn't anyone think it's odd that a well-populated Linux screenshot looks like a composite? You may be comfortable looking all day at a screen that looks like it's made from six different OSes, but it drives me nuts that I have to spend all weekend just CHASING DOWN all the different places I have to edit just to change color! (Minus three or four apps where you CAN'T change colors.) This is a feature in your book, yes?
Many of us use Linux to begin with because we would rather not be subjected to such fascist notions. (one true UI)
Fascist notions like, oh, a STYLE GUIDE? One UI instead of fifty? You sound to me like you use Linux because it's just as scrambled and disjoint as you are. Or else you consider a convoluted and inconsistent interface a form of security, or at least a rite of manhood.
I don't want to force user interface ideas on anyone. But to even use the term "human interface" in a sentence with Linux, or X Window in general, is a punch line. And you are precisely what I'm ranting about, Mister Anonymous - you defend the lack of a consistent package by trying to tell me I shouldn't WANT one, that it's WRONG to want one. As for starting my own, I've considered it, though even if I did have the time to work on such a thing, or the people-power to do it, the end result would be totally unpalatable to you because it would not resemble X Window at all. And are you one of those who think Linux deserves to be the One True OS? Or that it should only be used by those Worthy of its Power and the rest deserve Microsoft? Which goal is served by your stance?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I would have to say GTK-- (a C++ wraper for GTK+) pretty much kicks ass. GTK+ has a decent OO design, which is kind of a pain to use in C, but GTK-- manages to make GTK+ easy to use without losing functionality, or being so totally diffrent from GTK+ that you can't use GTK+ documentation to "figure out" how some underdocumented Gtk-- bit works.
I use to do a lot of Xt and Xaw, and even raw Xlib work. Then nothing for about six years. Then I picked up GTK-- and wrote a half decent MP3 juke box in a cupple of weeks. Higly recomended.
Keep in mind that if you yourself can program "enough people" is one. Many great projects start that way. Many more then having someone map out a great plan and then look for someone else to code it up. So if you have a Great Idea, and can't intrest others, go out and buy a good book on programming, dig in. Be the next Linus. The world over can mispronunce your name too!
>Our box bit the dust a long time ago
Ha ha! My 2600 still works beautifully!
And no one's getting it!
Hmmmm ... just like WordPerfect, huh?
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
Media OS?
Where is the DV support?
Where is the MPEG1/VideoCD compression support? (Encoding, not playback)
I was interested in using this on my BP6 2x400(500) Celeron system as a video workstation for burning VideoCDs of home movies onto CDRWs or silver/silver discs, but because of the lack of DV support or MPEG1 compression, I had to go to (horrors!) NT.
BeOS is neat, but it isn't really ready for prime time in the video space.. Any rig that can't handle DV is definitely not suitable for modern corporate/hobbyist video.. DV is _that_ cool.
Your Working Boy,
What has come out of Amiga in the past years that was worth anything? Nada! Let the sucker die a dignified death and stop tossing it around like a hot potato. There's better things to be doing.
Just an interesting fact from the mighty mind of ME!!!
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
but in the immortal words of one of the 'Angry Beavers', "Die you stupid thing DIE". Honestly, I have had my hopes dashed way to many times to get excited about this.
Yes it is very saddening to see a good old friend slowly die. I've also moved to the Linux platform and am still amazed how insanely great it is after having used it for a couple of years, but it's not the same feeling as with the original Amy (I'll never part with my A1000/A3000).
Thanks Leo for some of the great hacks and a couple of good giggles.
Heiko
Prefixing names serves a few purposes:
It indicates which compilation unit the name belongs. Eg KButton is probably a KDE class and its interface is probably found in $KDEDIR/include/kbutton.h.
It reduces name space collision. So if you prefixed all your classes with say MC then your names wouldn't collide with the names defined in KDE (or Java).
cheese63's statement 'and the letter "J" in front of every class.' lead me to believe he was only referring to code.
In the case of programs your comment is fair. I would agree it is mainly a branding thing (though a little name space conflict reduction still comes into play).
I'm a C++ programmer who 12 months ago had very little experience with GUI programming on *nix. I read the QT tutorial http://www.troll.no/qt/tutorial.html and found it to be very informative. It's a 14 part tutorial which each step taking roughly an hour. It's neat because you can download QT and play with all the examples given.
I'm interested in hearing if there is something similar for GTK+, (I'm not interested in C for GUI stuff, just C++)
QT is kinda like Java in that it's almost insulates you from the OS. This is good in a way but bad when you find yourself with no other choice but to make direct system calls, (because you suddenly find yourself out of your depth).
To help out in these situations I have bought myself a copy of Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens it's good and covers the differences betwwen BSD and SVR4, which is useful as I want my code to run on Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Solaris.
To be honest I've never seriously considered Beos. I liked NeXTStep a lot, and it had some great apps, but it didn't last. I can't see anything different enough about Beos to stop if suffering the same fate as NeXTStep.
Now don't even get me started on Atari!!!!
October 9. 1985, I got my first Atari ST, serial number in the hundreds. The OS wasn't small enough yet to fit into the 192K roms, so I had to load it off a floppy disk every time I booted, chewing up my RAM. 512K should have been enough, but with the OS loaded there was almost nothing left.
Then, the only programming language that came with the computer was Logo. ST Basic wasn't even out! I didn't even have Neochrome at that time. All I could do was play my Hitchhiker's Guide Infocom game. When ST Basic came out it was a bug ridden piece of trash that couldn't keep strings straight. First time you ran the program, strings would look OK. Second time you ran the program, the strings would contain nothing but garbage. Rebooting as a part of the edit/run cycle became standard, destroying the learning benefits of an interpreted language.
Then the machine broke one day. I sent to the service shop and they took 9 months waiting for a board from Atari before they gave up and gave me a brand new computer.
And they made their C compiler part of a $300 dollar development kit which no high school student could afford. I bought TDK Modula-2 instead which was a decent product, but the documentation was all part of that expensive developer's kit. Boo!
I wish I knew then what I know now. I would have gotten the cheapest PC clone I could find and a copy of Turbo Pascal 3.0a and actually learned something. I wasted a couple good years of my life dinking with garbage undocumented hardware and a company that didn't care about their users.
When you say "poor Atari" I really can't say that I share the sentiment. Atari screwed me bad and I wish that I knew enough about computers back then to avoid the trap. I hope Trameil and sons are in the poor house.
Well, I can't really say that I didn't learn anything. Atari taught me that open hardware/software documentation and free or extremely cheap compilers were the number one criteria for a computer. And here I am today, a Linux fan because of it.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The Amiga was a freat home system, not perfect but very good.
You had autoconfig on hardware boards, just plug in hardware, copy a driver into a directory and that was it!!!
It had pre emptive 32bit multi tasking in 1985, and had a consistant user interface, drag and drop, AREXX, inter process communication, used lists for system resources, and best of all was light on the resources. Like you would be amazed by what would run in 16Mb RAM.
Today you have consoles and then you have the PC/MAC with a big of a gap in between.
The console can't be hacked by the end user, and you need plenty of money to hack windows and a MAC. *nix would probably blow away someone trying to learn from scratch how computers work, so there is a gap.
Take the Amiga OS, protect the memory, make the stack dynamic, abstract the hardware more, generally update it a bit to enable growth in the future and couple this with an updated autoconfig bus, have on board CPU, graphics and sound hardware, but allow CPU cards, graphics cards and sound cards to overide the default hardware.
What do you have, a small, effecient, powerful easy to use upgradeable system that is affordable to everyone and is easy for the youth to hack and learn about computers.
I have still and old B2000 that had been upgraded to a 68040 with 16Mb 32bit RAM, 2Mb 16bit RAM and 1Mb chip. It had a CDROM and 2Gb of hard disk as well as an ethernet card. I also have an A4000 that I was given for nothing from my old company that was slinging them out. For the record I have a dual boot 98 / NT box and a dual boot 98 / Linux (redhat 6.1) box (lives mainly as linux).
It was a good system and could still be a good system if someone has the guts to move away from a x86 view of the world, remember with no legacy hacks to contend with the price comes down too.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
He, don't like Troll and its stuff , do you ?
...
IT doesn't matter anyway cause X is not going to be the next GUI of the "people" anyway
Does this mean we get to see more of Petro Tysh.. Tsch.. Chech.. Tsych.. Ahtsye.. ah, never mind.
can some one elighten me why having a patent profolio is useful to a generic systerm cloner?
is just useful for patent trading reasons?
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
It's dead. Why not let it rest in peace?
Continuing to torment the poor corpse of this once worthy soul is only going to cause nightmares and discomfort of the decendents who it will rise to haunt. If you are not careful it will come after you too.
It did nothing bad to you in life, but now it is dead. Don't play with the dead, it isn't polite or respectful to the its memory.
....The Curse of the Amiga(tm)?
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Would this still be true if they opened up the OS?
How many BeOS developers might prefer the power/speed of BeOS, but with access to the source?
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I am just having a hard time justifying spending the time to learn the API of BeOS when it might be more profitable to learn the QT or GTK libraries.
I know that GTK is not C++, but I will put my situation on the table.
I am a X-Windows Developer. I have written a lot of c++ in college, but never in production and never on a WINDOW(ED) environment. I have written quiet a bit of Java code and (shamefully) spent almost 1 1/2 years working w/Visual Basic.
I feel that there is a strong future with C++ (And I believe JAVA IMHO), but where next?
I could spend the next few months (3 minimum I believe) comming up to speed with C++ and *A* Window Manager/OS.
Do I spend the VERY LITTLE spare time I have now weaning my limmited C++ experience to a open source solution with THOUSANDS OF PROJECTS TO JUMP INTO, or take on BeOS.
I have heard from various people (BeOS fanatics of course) that BeOS is a dream to develop for.
To sum up, maybe someone can give me a opinion on a good "Starter C++" platform:
GTK+
KDE
BeOS
Java Swing
Thanks for any suggestions...
amino acids can do that!
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Copyright won't be a problem. Existing (C) is protected for 75 years. So long as they hold the appropriate patents and trademarks to go along with (C) they're pretty much covered.
It would be good to see Amiga OS in serious development and production.
"Una piccola canzone, un piccolo ballo, poco seltzer giù i vostri pantaloni."
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
"Amiga" is the feminine for friend (a friend who happens to be a girl). Girlfriend in the couple sense is "Novia". So I guess your analogy was a little bit off (unless you sweep all your friends who are girls off their collective feet, in which case, may I ask how you do it?), but point taken anyway. :-)
:-)
Loved that machine, though. Used for years and made a good living consulting for a couple of audio-visual and video production firms and outfitting them with Amigas, toasters, ARexx scripts, etcetera. It was a really neat platform to work on.
And their command-line shell was much better than DOS, although of course worse than, say, bash. Still ARexx allowed you to do really cool things in realtime with a couple of Amigas hooked up together.
I also lost hope about a year ago. I still keep one of my old Amigas and my software lying around though
- No Sig Today
exactly what are the patents that gateway own?
searching on www.patents.ibm.com for patents owned by amiga reveals 3 patents: 2 ancient ones for joysticks and one recent one for a bus arbitration scheme or something.
searching for patents owned by commodore returns 14 patents, for stuff ranging from cdrom error detection to case designs.
escom have 4, including what looks like a patent on HAM.(hold and modify)
nothing hugely exciting as far as i can see.
go to http://www.amino1.net/ ,And view the source. Check out the keywords. You will find Linux along with Free, Open System, and Open platform. They seem to have some plans involving Linux.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
We will be making an announcement on January 8th, 2000 with one of our partners at CES in Las Vegas, and more details will follow that release.
Is thewre anyone here who will be in attendance at the CES to check out what they have to say?
--sugarman--
Well good, I was pretty sure Gateway wasn't going to do anything good with 'em.
And with luck, some good old fashioned Strategic Alliances.
Check out the circa-1988 "3d computer graphics"
Hands in my pocket
While the name Amiga does happen to match up with the Spanish term meaning roughly "female friend". The original marketing brochures that pitched the Amiga claimed that the name came from the combining of Alpha and Omega.
Pure Spin. One of the founders thought the word might have some possible racist connotations; so marketing made up another reason for the name.
Ah, yes, BeOS. I always seem to forget about it.
:)
I have heard nice things about the BeOS, and have been tracking it since the beginning (Back when JLG was touting it as Amiga'96), but have yet to actually use it. Back when I first got my PC, and it was still freely available, it didn't support the rather strange hardware I had. More recently, I shied away from it because Be seemed to be pushing the OS as only for media content creation, not mainstream use. It's as if they only want the BeOS to ever be a niche market OS, and not mainstream. (This is the same argument I have against the New-Amiga-NG alliance created between QNX and Phase5.) It does look like they're starting to snap out of that now.
I know Squid above (who I usually respect) is always ragging on the BeOS, but if it's good enough to use on a daily basis, like my Amiga would be if it had some better hardware, I will be happy. At the very least it could help me last until a better successor comes along. I can get used to the shortcomings if it's not crashing every hour or needing constant reconfiguring and upgrading.
And then a new Amiga can come along, and save us all.
-JuPo
I don't like having to hassle with the OS to get things done. I am not a dummy -- I certainly hope I qualify as a geek, with my collection of 20+ computers at home. I've been using computers for 14 years, from Apples and VIC-20s to SGIs and Suns.
This is why I still would rather sit at my "slow" 68040-based, graphically un-upgraded Amiga 2000 than at any of my other systems, including a "modern" K6/2-450 system I recently built.
Of course, I usually do sit in front of the above-mentioned PC, because websurfing is a lot nicer in 24-bit color as opposed to 16 colors. It was cheaper to buy the parts for this system than to get a gfx card for the aging Amiga.
I bet I'll loose my all-important karma for this, but... I had hoped Linux would help me be able to move out of the past and into the modern world without Microsoft, but the more I use it, the more I hope that it will not be the future of mainstream computing. After three years of playing, it now exclusively resides on a 166MHz Alpha for use as an internet gateway. I might add that I can't even run X on this system (with 64 megs of RAM, even) without everything slowing to a crawl. I may someday dualboot a PC for experimenting and programming, but it's just too combersome for my everyday use.
I will say that using an SGI is a real pleasure -- while it definately sucks up CPU and graphics horsepower, IRIX is the only *nix OS I know that's as consistent and well-integrated. The 6 year old Indigo box I used for a while would be my second choice for everyday use, if it were that easy to choose. (It's about as hard to play my new copy of StarFleet Command on an SGI as my Amiga, methinks.) Too bad they've screwed themselves over with their whole NT migration strategy last year.
I'm still holding onto the hope that someone will capture the Amiga spirit and give us a modern computer that is as fun and easy to use as my Amiga, without being as limiting as a Mac. All the better if it's got the label Amiga on it as well. Gateway never really planned this. Amino sounds like they just might.
They've got my support...
-JuPo
Atari will be remembered forever as the commercial sign that appears at least 6-7 times in Blade Runner. Watch closely and you will see the light (green neon sign). :)
*g* I have an Apple 2e emulator on my PC too. All my friends say "WHY???". I have a logo program and an Aztec game. I still remember logo, and it seems so long ago. *shrug*. I also have an Atari 2600 emu and a ton of games I never had as a kid. Our box bit the dust a long time ago. Honestly, I never thot I would play Joust or Phoenix again. I love the old games. Yes, I realize they were dippy and extremely low tech, but they are still fun.
So is any of these companys going to do anything with Amiga, or are they just gonna pass the trademark from company to company?
Actually, it seems to me it's mostly a way of branding your code/program. Put K in front of everything, and everyone knows it's a KDE program or interface. Sort of like saying "Intel Inside", or "Windows 95 Compatible", or "100% Java". It serves advertising purposes, mostly, especially since none of your reasons explains why programs are named with these prefixes. Your reasons have to do with code components.
But, even then, there are better ways to do it. in Java, you use a packaging system. Your package should be unique if you use your domain (org.slashdot.Button for example).
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
This made me laugh. You're absolutely right. Who started this stupidity of putting a capital letter in front of everything?
In Java, it's Jthis, Jthat. For KDE, it's Kthis, Kthat. I asked someone why this was done, they said it's nice cause it tells you the program was written for KDE. Sorry, but that's what a readme is for. I don't want the program name to blare it out constantly. Very annoying.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
I'm with you. At first like most people I slapped my forehead and moaned, "Oh no, please, not again!"
I mean, so many times we have all said "The Amiga is DEAD, [insert Amiga zealot bait here]"...
But then I thought, "Yeah but somehow I'm *still* saying it... So paradoxically it's not dead at all, in some sort of f##ked up kind of way!"
And to heck with it all, I'm sick to death of Linux hype. I really miss the Amiga guys... Come back, all is forgiven!
RA RA RASPUTIN!
THE AMIGA IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE AMIGA!
Have you considered sending these ideas to the Amino guys? Seriously--it sounds like the sort of feedback they could use, and your suggestions are really great! For myself, I agree--a new Amiga will only make an impact if it tries to be truly revolutionary, really moving beyond the PC/Mac world: filling the spaces they won't fill, doing the things they won't/can't do. A consumer Alpha-based computer would be just the ticket. Best of luck to the Amino guys!
> Cutting edge stuff twenty years ago...stinkaroo today
;)
Because some of the classics STILL aren't available on the PC. (Listed in order of most favorite)
Rescue Raiders
Aquatron
Lode Runner (and Champsionship)
Goonies
Aztec
Prisoner 2
Gemstone Warrior
Karateka (I had the most fun when I finally was able to rip the end music
Gumball (Lots of easter eggs hidden in this game)
Spare Change
Ahh, a lot of youth wasted on those.
Cheers
*Listen*
That's the funeral dirge forthe Amiga platform. Lets all bow our heads in silence and bury the damn thing, its been a zombie too long.
Maybe I misread your post, but what does "Java Swing" have to do with c++? By the way, there's not much to learn when it comes to swing, it's just like the awt, with more stuff and more managability, and the letter "J" in front of every class.
This is for all of those who does not belive in Amiga. Just stop reading this area if you are not interested. After all these years I still have some hopes and belives to Amiga rising again.
And why I still belive and hope? Simply because I have seen better machine, used it and programmed IT. This my up-tp-date PC has a lot more CPU-power, memory, HD etc.. but it's just recently reached that original 1984-Amiga feeling of usability. With Amiga way, this days HW would break free and really fly.
Like in 84... No other reasonably affordable computer could offer those features. It really pushed envelope to limits. 90*ties was not so hot time on Amiga, perhaps it's time to make comback with attitude.
I read about a group of borderline nutsos, guys who thought they could do the impossible. Get out there and take on the mightiest computer company out there, Apple. Especially their newest product, Macintosh. Their company name was Hi-Torro, their product, Lorraine.
Then, to fund their increasingly expensive product, (making hardware is not for cheapskates, TRUST me) they decided on IPO'ing. Then they got an offer from Atari, it was not much, but enough to complete the project. They were going to take it, after all Atari was owned by Jack Tramiel, the father of the Commodore 64. Then Commodore stepped in, outbidding Atari 3 to 1. The Hi-Torro team went with Commodore and thus began the Commodore Amiga effort. That, as we all know, turned into a disaster. If Commodore had not been a billion-dollar firm by that point, the Amiga could not have made it into the 90's. It was only due to the massive back-history and huge credit file that Commodore continued, mis-managed and under-marketed.
We know the history of the Amiga after that. From one owner to another, and so on. Neverr in control of it's own destiny since Hi-Torro. Always at the mercy of older, larger companies.
But now, for the first time since the Hi-Torro sale, Amiga controls it's own destiny. It is the master of it's own fate. No longer trapped by the rules of corporate law, the Amiga has always made for a new way of doing things. So now under the new, unified Amiga Corporation banner, we may be finally able to complete the original Lorraine project, to produce a system that is revolutionary in every aspect, from the OS to the hardware, capable of delivering more performance per dollar than the best macintosh, than the biggest PC.
For the first time, Amiga is in control of it's own destiny.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I almost ran out of breath just reading that. I can't imagine trying to say it out loud!
:-)
I wonder what prompted Gateway to sell off all the Amiga stuff after buying it? More to the point, one wonders if they made a profit off of the sale, and if they will continue to broker companies. Might be a lucrative niche market for cash heavy companies..
"In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." -Nietzsche
I know amiga is.... historic.. but has it done anything lately?
From the update, it doesn't sound like they're going to be peddling vaporware, which is doubtless good news for Amiga fans whoa re bound to be feeling jerked-around by now.
I never used an Amiga, but I just gotta say...So what? A lot of Amiga fans wax nostalgic over their old boxes, like I did over my old Apple ][+. That is, until I got an emulator and some floppy images and played a few games. Cutting edge stuff twenty years ago...stinkaroo today. Between Mac OS X, BeOS, Linux, and Windows 2000, what niche of modern computing could Amiga possible address that the big boys won't tackle this year? And do it in such a way that they have a superior price/performance ratio? It's difficult to see.... There's always room for one more player, of course, but I hope Amino has more up their sleeve than just a trip down memory lane.
with iMovie
I wouldn't trust Fleecy to finish anything he starts other than a sentence.
I wanna know, who owns the tech for the c64/128? Now *that* would be useful! :)
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
I think we're up to the one with the American playing the Doctor really badly, which as I recall, only lasted for one movie, on Fox.
Not really, it's a $600 AMD box I use for diffusion problems. But how many people out there really do that kind of thing? In fact, I don't do much of that these days and when I'm finished with school, I hope to do something else at home besides work. I might pick up my old glider design hobby, but that's about as intense as I want to get for a while.
Who are we kidding? Gaming and boob tubing are the home market. Those marketing guys got it right, but their timing was off. They could have tried to push "serious" systems ala Microsoft, I suppose. I wish you and them all the best of luck.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ahem.
*cough* Apple. *cough* LinuxPPC.
John
The Amiga was both before and after my time. When I was a teeny little girl we had an IBM 8088 system...later, we got a Gateway P-133, and now I'm trying to share a room with a K6-2/400 I built, a Mac IIci, and a crackheaded 486. However, I do vaguely seem to recall a cousin talking about one.
Seriously...To be the next big thing, this would have to be a really big thing. There would have to be incredible amounts of innovation going into this to make the old Amiga live on.
I'm but a tyke with a limited sphere of influence, but it seems to me that there are three real "survivors" in the personal computing market.
-Microsoft. Make a PC, bundle it with Windows, and Joe Average buys it. Joe Average doesn't know how to use anything other than Windows, and he heard from his cousin John that Macs suck. Just about anyone can write Visual Basic apps. Joe Average lets them.
-Apple. Closed architecture, but lots of novices love Macs for their simplicity; many experts love them for their complexity and elegance. They're cute. I love them. Apple has always put out innovative products (the screamingly powerful new iMacs have NO cooling fans!?)
-UNIX and Friends. Including our beloved Linux, as well as the proprietary types. Haven of geeks and software revolutionists. They're stable, we love them, and we hack them.
Seems like most things have to be compatible with these three in order for them to fly. We have a few weird ones out there, and then there are the varied and radical palmtops which don't really count...but these three are the names everyone knows, whether that's good or not.
Perhaps we're ready for a drastic change. Perhaps we're ready for the next big OS to come and blow away the suits. But Joe is going to keep buying Microsoft stuff; geeks and techies will keep embracing new forms of UNIX; and Apple will survive, just because it always seems to pull through with really neat, slightly quaint products.
Can Amiga live up to this? A multitasking box, cheap, powerful software, great graphics and sound capabilities, clean, tight, stable code...all for under $2000....Nah, gimme my Linux box anyday...
Let's wish Amino well. I dunno if they can seriously make Amiga big again...
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
Just the system software? I'd that's quite important. I want Amiga Corporation to open source AmigaOS, develop GUI solutions and maybe licence the BeOS. Add the Dual G4 motherboard from www.siliconfruit.com and things could get interesting for people who really want a new platform! -JK
BeOS is not ready for everyone yet, but it doesnt get in my way (I'm smart and pick hardware that works :-)
I loved my Amiga A4000. Of all the computers that I have worked with it is the one that has taught me the most and inspired me the most. Basically I could take this machine and understand it inside out. It helped me learn assembler (68k varity) and help me understand how C code is transalted into machine code. V. Useful for writing really good C code. This was definitely a machine to aspire too.
... Eh! No, its sits in my house permanently switched on running nontheless .. Linux or Redhat 5.2 Linux with 2.2.10 kernel. It acts as file server, print server, firewall and gateway (well when I get the HyperCOM 3+ driver working for it, all I need is the damn registerary locations for the chip and vola), backup system, mail server, etc. All nicely secured.
And now where is A4000 now? Dead?
And all this and more on 25MHz 68040 - it runs without complaint.
Believe me - my A4000 is certainly not dead and I trust it far more than the Intel-PCs that I have around me.
My point is that although QNX may have developed a OS for the Amiga - The ability to run Linux and have all the functionality that it intales means that it is still a very useful piece of kit.
Also you should remeber the APUS project - Linux for the PowerPC chip. Certainly things at this end are very nice indeed - latest prototypes are multiple G4 processors (enough speed there give an Atholon system a good kick several times over) using as a Gfx card a GForce based card. That is certainly NOT a redundant system.
Its seems to me that Amiga has evolved behind the scenes with drips and drabs coming out in small number. All I think Amino have to do is to take likes of this prototype (although Phase5 use this - me thinks), package it in a cool looking case with a more solid construction (i.e. the processor and gfx cards are not hanging of each and everything shoved into the clock port, and oh yeah good power supply), get Linux APUS up to the point where it is ready for a stable release (i.e. on the 2.4 kernel series) or go with the QNX OS with backward comptability for existing apps.... and you have a system that can sold at an affordable price and has the power take on the likes of a Solaris server. Hmmm NEAT.
Amiga is definitely not dead... only been in hiding.
So does this mean that I can finally do video editing on a cheap machine while still leaving my home machine free for Quake/UT?
=======
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
This is really an interesting article as Amino has bought basically the name and legacy of Amiga, but in reality I don't think that this will count for much as new Amiga stuff has not been seen in awhile and while I loved messing around with that old tech, its going to take some effort to bring about a new take on a good thing
My love for you is ticking clock, BESERKER.
I still remember the first time that I saw an Amiga [I believe that it was the A1000 model]. I was blown away! I was still playing around with a C64 and still enjoying every minute of it. That is until I saw the Amiga, at the local computer shop they had a floor model just cycling through a graphics display, and I was amazed, It was the most impressive thing that I had seen from a computer [and it was the better part of a decade before I saw anything that I felt matched that demonstration form the mid-eighties].
After that it was so hard to go back to my trusty old 64, but without the money to buy an Amiga I went back, and hoped that someday I could have a computer that was that cool. Although I was never fortunate to own an Amiga, I feel that for many people like myself it went along ways to show us what was possible.
I hope that this time the Amiga really does get an honest chance at making a return to the limelight. If they can successfully make a machine that is true to the original spirit, I would gladly wait in line to buy one.
all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut
While the name Amiga does happen to match up with the Spanish term meaning roughly "female friend". The original marketing brochures that pitched the Amiga claimed that the name came from the combining of Alpha and Omega. The begging and the end, or the last word in Personal Computer Technology.
One hopes that it does not turn out to be the End much to soon after the beginning [for this interesting platform at least].
all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut
Thanks Leo for unnumbered happy days, back when the world was a nicer place...
As far as Open Source goes -- the Amiga as a separate general-purpose hardware platform is dead. Nobody in their right mind today would bring out a computer based upon proprietary components and expect it to be cost effective in today's market. The only possible commercial use for the AmigaOS is as a webtop OS, where it's lighter-weight than other operating systems like BeOS (for example) -- an AmigaOS webtop could operate in 4mb of ROM and 4mb of RAM quite nicely, thank you. But as a general purpose OS? Get real!
Open Sourcing the thing could create some excitement. AmigaOS is a much simpler and easier to understand OS than Linux is (thanks to having only one address space, thus no flutzing about with page tables and call gateways). It is emmenently hackable, or would be if the source was available (even without source it can be hacked pretty niftily, thank you!). This in turn could bring some ports of software, though the Amiga memory model can be somewhat problematic for many Unix programs (especially the limits on stack space -- Unix programs, for example, are accustomed to allocating whopping buffers on the stack so that they'll get automatically de-allocated upon the 'return', and this is somewhat incompatible with the way the Amiga's stacks work). I don't think it'd ever get past the hobby stage to being a commercially viable platform again... but it'd be FUN, and it certainly wouldn't cost Amino any lost sales to Open Source it -- assuming that Amino intends to actually sell Amiga hardware. More software == more hardware sold. Even if Amino only came out with a video card for the PC platform that did the amazing tricks that the Amiga could do in 1985, that alone could finance their operations for quite some time...
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
For better or worse the Amiga is dead. I have no delusions on that matter. Even if it wasn't dead, the Amiga design makes tradeoffs that don't make as much sense today as they did in 1985.
For example, the Amiga has one single address space within which all Amiga programs run. This makes interprocess communications basically a matter of plunking a pointer into another process's address space. Meaning that they could create an extremely light-weight multi-tasking message passing operating system in 1985 with hardware that would be viewed as laughably crude today. But the price... the price was high. The price was stability and portability. Stability was a problem because your program could overwrite anybody else's data. Portability was a problem because this memory model resembles nothing else under the sun... I ported several Unix programs to the Amiga, and the difference in the stack model alone caused me to make many patches to, e.g., allocate buffers on the heap rather than on the stack (programs were started in the Amiga model with a fixed-size stack segment, and that stack segment was NOT allowed to grow).
So the Amiga is dead, and the tradeoffs made to get adequate performance with 1985 technology means that most people wouldn't want to revive it today. But there are still important lessons to learn from the Amiga, the most important lesson being this: Simplicity. The Amiga was a very sophisticated machine for its time, with pre-emptive multitasking, near-real-time message-passing, dynamic libraries, dynamically loaded device drivers with full plug-and-play capability, dynamically loaded file systems, etc. etc. etc... but despite this, it was SIMPLE. You could take the documentation released by Commodore, read it, and you could understand exactly how each piece of the system fit with the rest. Other than the BCPL code hacked in from TRIPOS, the whole system had a simple elegance to it that, for better or worse, is totally lacking in today's Linux distributions. If you don't believe me, load Red Hat 6.1 onto your computer. I don't think anybody will ever describe Red Hat 6.1 as "simple" -- or even as a coherent operating system (it isn't... it's like, three layers of cruft, all sitting atop the Linux kernel, all resulting in enormous bloat).
Don't get me wrong. I'm running Red Hat 6.1 today to post this. But the simple elegance of the Amiga is nowhere to be seen, and that simple elegance is something that needs to be remembered.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Yes, indeed, a generic x86 box running Linux could do all the things described, for vastly less than $2000.
Glad to see that you noticed that...
(Hmmm... I wonder if I forgot to use the SARCASM tag on any of this message... Nah, I'm sure everyone's observant enough to know where it should have been applied...)
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Are we up to the one with the silly clothes going around strangling people yet? Or have we passed that and reached the guy falling off his exercise bike, hanging from his umbrella, and chasing cats?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
So it sounds like Amiga might finally be in caring hands.
Makes me wonder what all the Amiga hype was all about.. I was always a C128 junkie myself :-P
--
How do you keep an idiot in suspense?
Tell him the next version of Windows will be faster, more reliable, and easier to use!
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
That, and the world needs a kick-ass laptop with a SrongARM processor or some other RISC chip with high performance and low power/heat requirements, with good Linux support for all the hardware.
Maybe that's the route the Amiga folks should take; instead of reinventing the wheel, make a kick-ass Linux system and add the necessary multimedia stuff to Linux. They'll have all the help they can eat.
That is still a matter of choice.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
So long as they hold the appropriate patents and trademarks to go along with (C) they're pretty much covered.
Patents are only good for 17 years. Many of the Patents in the Commodore/Amiga portfolio are already expiring or will be fairly soon. Making the assumption that Commodore/Amiga was filing patents up until their demise in 1994, the last of their patents will expire around 2011, which isn't really that far off.
As for trademarks, they are a little different. Trademark holders have to actively use and defend their trademarks or risk losing them. Given the way that Amiga has operated, or essentially not operated, it doesn't seem totally impossible that someone could challenge their trademark due to neglect within the next few years. I don't know why anyone would bother to do so, but in today's litigous society, it doesn't seem too far out.
I was one of the die hard amiga users who had their hopes dashed earilier in the year by the possibly premature announcements of whomever the flavor of the month is. (was?).
The amigas did amazing things in their day, but what a lot of people forget was how they did those things. There's room for some real amazing things to be done today too, but I think the culture of hackers that made the amiga are a much rarer breed than they used to be.
The amiga concept was that bigger wasn't better. The amiga was designed from the ground-up to be a multimedia and graphics powerhouse; Back in the day this needed those custom IC's that we were so fond of. The machine was designed so that the processor wouldn't be tied up with graphics or sound calculations; That chips could share memory and use it efficiently. Ah, for the days of chip and fast ram.
The amiga technology of yore is indeed dead. It's too slow and old to be of any use, anyone could see that after about 1995 or so. But what isn't dead is the philosophy that drove the brilliant engineering we saw in the amiga. The coupling of the ground-up hardware and tight OS integration are something that I have not seen since the Amiga, and possibily the early mac days - largely because of the legacy software problem. Nobody wants to break from the pack - be it x86, or MacOS. Remember the flak Apple took when they went to the PowerPC line and broke some stuff?
Set up boxes and thin clients suck ass. These things have been around for decades and never caught on, I have lots of ads for 286 "diskless workstations" and anyone remember the Commodore CDTV units? Yuk! This is not the future of the amiga.
What the market wants is a standardized platform for developing home applications on. No worrying about what hardware a customer has - it's all standardized at some base level. The Amiga 500 provided this, and that's why the games rocked hard. The game developers worked on using the hardware they knew everyone had to the absolute maximum - this is what 3dfx saw, and it's what the opengl people are starting to see too. (A standard platform or API is a good thing).
There exists a great opportunity for Amiga to take some existing (bitching fast) chips - like a optimized Athlon, or Alpha, or PowerPC - and then integrate it with ultra-fast graphics hardware from leaders like Nvidia, with sound engineering from someone like Creative or Turtle beach - and then write (or port something like Linux, or QNX Neutrino) an operating system that takes full advantage of the hardware with which it was provided. Something that used multiprocessing to it's intended end, and it worked right out of the box. Something that provided a nice platform for people to develop on. Something that (gasp) came in a sexy box.
Ship that with some applications, bring the gaming manufacturers on board, and I think you'd have a winner. That's what the amiga was about.
There's another player, though. If Sony "got it" and opened up an OS (like linux) for the Playstation II, or a derivative, you'd have the machine that I described above. Bitching fast graphics and IO, Intenet connectivity, a customized (preferably open) OS, and the rest will follow.
Kudos!
..don't panic
That, and the world needs a kick-ass laptop with a SrongARM processor or some other RISC chip with high performance and low power/heat requirements, with good Linux support for all the hardware.
Maybe that's the route the Amiga folks should take; instead of reinventing the wheel, make a kick-ass Linux system and add the necessary multimedia stuff to Linux. They'll have all the help they can eat.
An inexpensive RISC laptop would be cool, especially if it used something Linux, BeOS, or BSD ran on. I suppose you could even use something like an early DEC Alpha (21064A @ 266 MHz). A true 64 bit laptop would rule, and it would live up to the cutting-edge Amiga name.
Now, what I'd do, if I owned the Amiga name, is
When the user is ready for the next level, he can simply upgrade. What happens to his old software? Well, if he's using a real operating system, he can still run it. If he's running NT, I suppose there's NT4/Alpha. But I really don't know about the future of Alphas and NT2K. I haven't followed it much, besides Compaq shutting it down. For all I know, Microsoft will take up the slack themselves. Maybe Be will port BeOS to the Alpha.
WEll, that's just me.
BeOS. duh.
Wake up.
*sniff* I just threw two of the buggers out three weeks ago actually.
(In this case, the prize is probably bancrupcy.)
Oh, goody! I can't wait for the next game. I hear it's "Musical Chairs", with a random number of chairs being yanked away each time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They can drive it to bankruptcy, sell it to a PC clone maker, market into oblivion, miss out on a chip technology transition, and sell it again to some guys in a garage - and it JUST WON'T DIE!!!!
It won't die, but it's walking around with knives, chainsaws, and barbed wire sticking to it's zombie hide, and there are gaping holes from the BFG blasts it's taken. I mean, geez!, this is getting to be worse than a bad horror movie - or to use the '80s metaphor, a bad episode of Dallas or Dynasty.
Alright, Amino - we'll give you until the end of CES. Then put up or shut up, I'm begging you!
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I wrote this essay almost five years ago. Some of you may enjoy it.
Personally, I wish the puppeteers would stop coming forward, making the corpse flop around a bit and proclaiming, "Look! It lives!"
I'm really tired of these charlatans playing off (what's left of) the loyalty of the Amiga crowd. If you're going to do something with it, do something with it, and stop jerking people around.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Well it's good to know that the Amiga will live on in Press Releases and Executive Statements.
LONG LIVE AMIGA!
Yet another round of people saying, "Here we go again."
I'm wondering if the only reason that Slashdot still covers the Amiga is that it makes good drama. Y'know, kinda like a soap opera for the keyboard-enabled culture. There can't be THAT many amiga owners anymore, can there? Do 500 Amiga owners and falling deserve this kind of attention on slashdot?
I should've known better than to believe that Gateway would have actually created a new desktop for people that was different than the generic PC they usually produce. Of course, the Amiga community never did learn their lesson with ESCOM, which pretty much did the same thing, apparently trying to get people to buy ESCOM branded PC's. And now everyone is supposed to take Amino on faith, that they will actually do something, anything, and release a computer that lives up to the AMIGA name.
Sorry Amino. It's not you. After following the Amiga story for 5 or 6 years, I know better. There's no way in hell that you can create a decent machine that lives up to the Amiga name. Even if you release a computer it better be fast, and it better capture the excitement that the Amiga did a decade ago, otherwise we'll just be laughing ourselves to the grave.
What an embarassment.
What does Amino do...or produce..or whatever. I am looking forward to new Amigas. However I don't know if they could ever be as groundbreaking as the originals were. When they came out they had a unique GUI that was stable, supported multitasking, used millions of colors and proved to be incredible powerful at a wide range of tasks, even production quality 3D, from a machine costing less than $2000! I just hope that no matter who owns Amiga the spirit of the machines stays alive.
When I got my hands on an Amiga 500 back in 1987 (has it been that long?) the machine was incredibly powerful compared to anything else I had ever tried.
Finally, I abandoned the Amiga in 1994 for educational purposes, even though I viewed the Amiga as a more powerful and user friendly platform.
Today however: I don't think there is room for Amiga hardware even loosely based on the original technology. There are numerous reasons for this
To sum it all up: I don't really think there is room for a new Amiga. If there will be a new Amiga I mainly think it's going to be an entirely new computer, with some ideas and behavior preserved from the old one. I hardly think it will attract the original Amiga owners.
http://virtuelvis.com/
At this rate the amiga OS will be out of *copyright* by the time the make another amiga.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I think this means that Amiga has officially had more incarnations than Doctor Who.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
After opening up the shring wrap on my new BeOS I couldn't believe how fast and responsive the machine was. Made my humble AMD K6-2 350 run like a champ.
:)
I have never done audio/video production, but to me it is a very solid OS that has proven to be quiet stable.
I believe that if Amiga was to make a come back, it would have a hard time matching what BeOS has, and further more not only having to compete with BeOS, but deal with the loss of there cult following to other more interesting Hobby OS's. (I have the privilige of working on a Linux box at work all day, so I can't really refer to it as a hobby box anymore
$.02
http://www.amino1.net/
Not much there, tho'.
Look, I know we're all getting fed up with the problems at Amiga, the missed promises, the bad feeling. So am I.
BUT...
Gateway bought Amiga to strip the patents, then got a lot of people asking what they planned to do with regard to new Amigas. Hence the delays, the confusion and the rather half-hearted approach. It wasn't what they really wanted to do, and it showed.
I don't know Bill McEwen, but I DO know Fleecy Moss reasonably well and I'd trust him. I can think of almost no-one with more drive, more ideas, more enthusiasm. He loves the Amiga and wants to do something with it. And I'd say he's got as much chance as anyone of pulling this one off.
Maybe nothing will happen, just like before. Maybe I'm a dreamer. But this gives the Amiga the best chance it's had for years, as it's controlled by people who know and love it.
Give this one a chance please, guys. Don't be cynical until this bunch have proved themselves worthy of only cynicism. If they fail, I'll join you in the moaning. But they don't deserve that yet.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
As exciting as the idea that yet another handsome stranger will come and sweep the poor destitute Amiga (which means girlfriend in Spanish, I think) and save her, I think that it is really time for all of us Amigans to realise that she is well and truly dead.
The crucial upgrade that Commodore missed was the upgrade to PowerPC. Some companies came up with PowerPC cards, but they were all horrendously late, poorly constructed, had non existant support and always had underpowered chips compared with what was currently available on the market.
The Amiga has basically seen no development at all since Commodore went belly up. From the hardware standpoint, absolutely nothing, from software, well, OS 3.5 could have been thrown together by a group of open source people (who would have done a better job). Trying to make anything new from circa 1992 parts would be completely unworkable, even if you had lots of money (like say, Gateway).
Gateway was a huge disappointment. With huge amounts of funds available, they did basically nothing with the Amiga. Every week you would hear something completely new and different. New PPC Amigas, Amigas on a card in your PC, new Amigas with the Magical Mystery Chip (transmeta was the best rumor), new console type systems, then no new hardware, but a new AmigaOS, then no AmigaOS, but Amiga environment running on top of Linux. It made you think that Amiga, the company, consisted of five guys that went to lunch each week and came up with a new crazy idea to throw out to us hopefulls they drew up on paper napkins. Hell, I have even seen some of those paper napkin drawings on websites heralded as "the New Amiga".
What I really wish would happen is that the AmigaOS would be released to Open Source so that if there is anything still usefull or interesting in the code, it can be used for things such as window managers, etc.
Even though part of me wants to hope that something could come of this, I have to admit to myself that the Amiga is gone forever.
This is quite sad because, as much as I love Linux, I realise that it is not suited to be a home users OS. The Amiga was great for this, with it's GUI and standardised install program (which I loved, gave you 3 levels to choose from: expert, intermediate, beginner. I wish Linux had such a standardised way to install.) What the world desparetely needs now is a good home system, that does multimedia as well as the Amiga did (Windows will always suck at this, no matter how hard they try, as I found out with one of those Gateways that are designed to be multimedia), has as straightforward and simple interface as the Amiga, and as kick ass graphics as the Amiga.
But unfortunately we live in a world in which only one OS matters and we have to live with mediocracy.