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Sixteen Degrees Of Separation
With the release of the new SDK, fans are treated to a showing of forward motion by a company bearing the name Amiga. The new management has gone out of its way not to announce projects until they're near completion, and this forward motion is only creating angular momentum for the thousands of Amiga zealots who are getting in line to wait for new hardware. While most take a wait-and-see attitude towards the new Amiga, there's certainly a lot of excitement brewing with partnership deals with Corel and the strong support of Linux as a development platform for the new AmigaOS.
The guys at Amiga are interested in doing something new and interesting. I recently spoke to Amiga VP of Development Fleecy Moss. "The concept of an operating system has been dying for quite a long time. What we're looking at is creating a dynamic digital environment, in which the most important thing is the producers and consumers of digital [content] matter, and they don't really care how they got there, or what they used to get there, they just got into this environment. You know, you can take it anywhere, you should be able to use any hardware with it. For the lynxey type, the hackers, the geeks, whatever you want to call them, they would want to get down dirty and nasty with the stuff. But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff. We're really trying to create this higher environment for developers and for users. It really is where we're moving towards the Gibson dream."
While the guys back in the home office cook up new things to connect us, the Amiga community is all about community. These guys are hardcore zealots fighting for their platform like angry lions. I recently got the opportunity to speak to Wayne Martin, news manager at Amiga.org, an Amiga news and information site.
Slashdot: What is the most important thing in the Amiga community right now?
Wayne: Being involved, I think. It's going to take a while for the new systems to arrive on the market, and it's pointless just sitting around and waiting for them to come. People need to be involved in promoting the Amiga. People need to start code, planning new projects, generally just getting involved. People really need to be active, they need to be out there, saying 'Look, we've got this brand new operating system coming out, and it has got features that nothing else has. It's the best, we think it's the best, here try it.' Amiga's got the best activists in the world."
Slashdot: What excites you about the new Amiga operating system?
Wayne: That it gives users choice. Instead of being restricted to the PC, you get to pick what hardware you want, and after all, that's the most expensive part of the computer. If you've got a job that doesn't require a 500Mhz Pentium III, a smaller chip, something cheaper, you can pick what you want because the operating system runs on so many chips and so many pieces of hardware. It gives the user the choice that they really need.
Slashdot: Do you feel that the purchase of the Amiga name from Gateway was a good idea?
Wayne: Yes, I do think it was a good idea. Gateway had some good plans, but I don't think their heart was quite in it, really. I think they meant well, but it really needs to be in the hands of people that want it on the market as much as the community does, and that's what the new Amiga brings, because it's staffed by Amigans, and you're not going to screw yourself over.
Slashdot: What's the best thing about being a part of the Amiga community?
Wayne: I think being able to go anywhere, and knowing that there's somebody there who knows what it's like to be an Amigan, who has been through the same things. It's like having a giant network of friends all over the world. You can go and stay at people's houses, if you want. You can be sitting on a bus, and talking to a person, find out they're an Amigan, and instantly, you're friends. You don't get that on the PC, if you're sitting next to somebody on the bus, and 'Oh, you use Windows, too!' It's not exactly the same kind of thing. When you're an Amigan, it passes being a computer user. There are some Amiga users who use it and they love it. There are some people who go much further than that, and it's more of a religion. It's coming even closer to a race of people, in a way, who all seem to think the same. They're very stereotypical, fanatical in some cases, but I think it's all generally there that the people have the right idea, and they're there for the long haul.
Slashdot: What is the stereotypical Amigan?
Wayne: A stereotypical Amigan is fanatical, loudmouthed, doesn't shut up about the Amiga, somewhat like me, I'm a perfect example. If you can possibly realize why we are so like that, you can see. It's like having this brilliantly cool toy, and nobody else can experience it like you have. It's almost like having a divine experience to search for words, something like this. You've got to tell everybody about it. They may not understand, but if you can get through to one more person, wow. That's them helped out, especially in the world of the Microsoft monopoly.
Slashdot: Given that Amiga's original big sell was stereo sound and multimedia capabilities, how do you feel about BeOS?
Wayne: Nice try, but no cigar. Be had a good idea, they wanted to make a media OS. It's obviously a hybrid between MacOS and AmigaOS. When it was there and ready, nobody came. It's a bit of a pity really, because it's not a bad OS at all. But if they can pull their act together, well, good on them, but I don't really see that happening too soon.
Slashdot: What about the 'soap opera' attitude the industry has towards Amiga? How does this affect the new company?
Wayne: Well, I wrote a small piece for Slashdot late last year. Within three days of writing that small paragraph, Amiga was owned by a different company, it was a different deal with AOL, and the entire computer spectrum for Amiga had changed, and that's just what it's like for Amiga. It's why I don't write articles anymore, because the second I do, the next day, the whole market has changed. That's the weird thing with this new Amiga. There's this eerie calmness. It's not erratic, people aren't making rumors, they're not seeking this stuff out, because they're actually getting the information! That's very reassuring for this company, and I think we're going to see good things from them.
Don't expect any of those good things to be Open Source operating systems, however. Straight from Amiga President Bill McEwen: "If we do any Open Sourcing of our architecture, releasing code on the driver side would make the most sense. I don't think Open Source everything makes sense. This is a point where Bob Young and I would disagree. I think it's done great, great things in a non-consumer environment, but in a consumer environment, I don't think you can Open Source everything. It makes it too hard to have a commonality in the way everyone could use it, because everyone's got their own opinion, their own way of doing something better. Unfortunately, in a consumer world, that doesn't mean that it's going to be better for everybody."
Just remember the phrase "The south shall rise again!"
And think about how well that phrase has been fulfilled.
Seriously, the Amiga had advantages a long time ago in terms of hardware. Back then, it was truly a superior platform. It lost the hardware fight and as a result lost the operating system fight. Does Amiga honestly have anything going for it at all? It may have a few cool features, but we don't need Yet Another Operating System to choose from. The way the open-source movement works, any truly superior techniques will be incorporated into Linux or BSD (not the code itself, of course, just the idea). Regardless of how good or bad Amiga turns out to be, there is no way they will get any market share at all. The time for that was five years ago, and there Amiga failed.
nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
The original Amiga included a lot of technology that is still used today. Where the technology wasn't there yet, they adapted their systems to make what they wanted to work work. Their systems are truly a work of art. I hope that this group has as much talent and heart in it as the original did. They have a lot to live up to. Good luck.
Eh...
Today, I can do the same things (and much, much more) with Linux, Windows, Mac, Be, etc. Hell, I can even simulate any of those machines with UAE.
The Amiga had it's chance to rule the world and due (partly) to Commodore's incompetence missed its opportunity.
Please, dear fellows... let the Amiga rest in peace. Soil no further my memories of that great machine, and let her spirit join the pantheon of the great (?) machines of the past: the Sinclars, Apple ][s and the TRS-80s... the TI-99s and the Atari Jaguars...
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
Well, every once in a while Amiga pops it's head out then goes back to it's hole. I remember when Amiga systems were the kick ass product for consumers that wanted to multi-media stuff. Since the IBM and Apple platforms have grown up a bit technology wise, I feel that Amiga has pretty much died off in the hardware sector. What's mentioned in the above is quite interesting, but I think they will head in to some turbulant waters with BeOS. Hey, who knows - weirder things have happened.
-Ellis of Geeknews.com
That's "outstanding" in the sense of missing, not in the sense of "good". We are missing at least one that I know of: Douglas Adams. Who else is out there?
--
Less money, less admin, less machine--more power
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I just hope they keep those informative red boxes in AmigaOS. I must say, they do provide a great platform for learning 68000 assembler.
If the Amiga is trying to jump back in as a viable OS, I think this might be a better time than any to come into the game with a translucent OS designed to get along with everyone and everything. The Internet is making cross-platform more of a necessity than ever before. Go for it Amiga. The more competition in the OS market the better.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Right on, we go on about the evil empires vaporware and FUD, but here we are promoting the same thing. Quite honestly who cares? It's basically pointless. If you have got good ideas, go and suggest them to an existing open source project (or even start a new one), the amiga/ST days are dead and buried, lets leave them there.
-colin
-Colin
...seems like a prudent thing to mention. Its had the handle replaced 3 times, and the head replaced five times, but its still the same axe.
What is `amiga`? The scene has moved on, the hardware/os is defunct...surely it`ll just be a new `pc` with a new os and an `Amiga` badge on the front.
Wouldnt it be cheaper and a lot less effort to just stick an `Amiga` badge on the front of your pc and run Fellow, UAE etc?
If you really think about it, there are only X number of people in the world willing to use an alternative operating system. I'd say amiga's OS was it for a long time. There was a lot of development on it by hobbiest and professionals alike. In fact it had the largest number of shareware/freeware programs at one point in time (maybe it's still true?). But since Amiga's collapse a new OS has come around and attracted the majority of the old Amigoids to it: linux. It'll be really hard sucking all those people back. I know I was estatic the first time I got NetBSD running on my A3000. It'd take a lot for me to pull that A3000 out of the box in my closet and turn it back on again (partially because it happens to be broken). I'm, of course, hoping that the linux freenzy will succeed in making a decent desktop that will finally take a decent size chunk out of the Win32 desktop market share. Amiga didn't quite pull it off, which is sad.
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
"That's the weird thing with this new Amiga. There's this eerie calmness. It's not erratic, people aren't making rumors, they're not seeking this stuff out"
I think its called `people not giving a shit`.
Slashdot: What is the most important thing in the Amiga community right now?
Wayne: Being involved, I think.
My brain: sounds like *BSD/Linux
Slashdot: What excites you about the new Amiga operating system?
Wayne: That it gives users choice. Instead of being restricted to the PC, you get to pick what hardware you want, and after all, that's the most expensive part of the computer. If you've got a job that doesn't require a 500Mhz Pentium III, a smaller chip, something cheaper, you can pick what you want because the operating system runs on so many chips and so many pieces of hardware. It gives the user the choice that they really need.
My brain: sounds like *BSD/Linux
Slashdot: Do you feel that the purchase of the Amiga name from Gateway was a good idea?
Wayne: Yes, I do think it was a good idea. Gateway had some good plans, but I don't think their heart was quite in it, really. I think they meant well, but it really needs to be in the hands of people that want it on the market as much as the community does, and that's what the new Amiga brings, because it's staffed by Amigans, and you're not going to screw yourself over.
My brain: sounds like *BSD/Linux
Slashdot: What's the best thing about being a part of the Amiga community?
Wayne: I think being able to go anywhere, and knowing that there's somebody there who knows what it's like to be an Amigan, who has been through the same things. It's like having a giant network of friends all over the world. You can go and stay at people's houses, if you want. You can be sitting on a bus, and talking to a person, find out they're an Amigan, and instantly, you're friends. You don't get that on the PC, if you're sitting next to somebody on the bus, and 'Oh, you use Windows, too!' It's not exactly the same kind of thing. When you're an Amigan, it passes being a computer user. There are some Amiga users who use it and they love it. There are some people who go much further than that, and it's more of a religion. It's coming even closer to a race of people, in a way, who all seem to think the same. They're very stereotypical, fanatical in some cases, but I think it's all generally there that the people have the right idea, and they're there for the long haul.
My brain: DEFINETLY sounds like *BSD/Linux.
Slashdot: What is the stereotypical Amigan?
Wayne: A stereotypical Amigan is fanatical, loudmouthed, doesn't shut up about the Amiga, somewhat like me, I'm a perfect example. If you can possibly realize why we are so like that, you can see. It's like having this brilliantly cool toy, and nobody else can experience it like you have. It's almost like having a divine experience to search for words, something like this. You've got to tell everybody about it. They may not understand, but if you can get through to one more person, wow. That's them helped out, especially in the world of the Microsoft monopoly.
My brain: Nothing more to see here..
BilldaCat
While what this company is doing seems to be in line with the Amiga name, how much of what they're doing is actually based on Amiga technology? Is it just an old name on top of completely new technology, or is there still an Amiga hiding somewhere in there? Will original Amiga apps compile with this toolkit?
At one point in time, the new Amiga had a commitment to develop a Linux operating system that would still run old Amiga apps MacOSX-style. Does this technology still exist?
I wonder whether any developments from Amiga will be designed only to appeal to the Amiga fanatacs, or whether their effects will trickle down to the rest of the industry. The most interesting aspects of the original Amigas were that they were the first PCs to focus on multimedia support. Now, multimedia is everywhere. I'm just curious as to what niche Amiga will now target and whether it can live up to the name.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Also...
Imminent Death Of The 'Net Predicted!
-JD
""Instead of being restricted to the PC, you get to pick what hardware you want, and after all, that's the most expensive part of the computer. If you've got a job that doesn't require a 500Mhz Pentium III, a smaller chip, something cheaper, you can pick what you want because the operating system runs on so many chips and so many pieces of hardware. It gives the user the choice that they really need. "" I dont see it, with computing cost being what they are nowdays, when you can get a good standard desktop pc for 400 dollars, and lets be honest, sure there are hardware platforms that run faster, but processing power for the dollar is in the PC. Amiga's problem years ago wasnt their lack of features, as has been mentioned already the mulitmedia, windowing, etc etc was way ahead of its time, but they flopped due to cost. At the time justifying the additional cost wasnt doable for most people. It would seem the current developers would learn from this and try to focus more directly on the OS. Make it run on a PC platform, that is what 90 percent of technical people use. Then focus on porting it to other platforms.
"...your future, make it a reality, all you have to do is fight for me"
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
I'm feeling a bit nasty this morning so those of you with warm fuzzies may want to look away... The quotes are all from a VP-of-something from Amiga.
"The concept of an operating system has been dying for quite a long time.
Wow! Now that's an introduction that doesn't take prisoners. I guess we should be thankful for the guy telling us. I mean, it's not like OS implementations suck, it's the whole concept of the operating system that's dying. See, we are not going to have operating systems any more. We are going to have, like stuff, and then, like, other stuff will happen with it, and then, see, it's digital content in a Gibsonesque environment and we geeks will want to get nasty with it. But not an operating system, no sir, nothing like that. That concept is dead.
What we're looking at is creating a dynamic digital environment, in which the most important thing is the producers and consumers of digital [content] matter, and they don't really care how they got there, or what they used to get there, they just got into this environment.
Ah, yes. "Dynamic digital environment" -- sounds good, doesn't it? Of course we all here are stuck in a static analog environment, but the new Amiga will lead us into the new world.
Now, take producers and consumers of digital matter. These are free-wheeling guys, they don't care about anything. They don't care where they are, how they got there, what they are doing there, what kind of shit they are producing/consuming -- but, man, they got into this dynamic digital environment -- let's party!
You know, you can take it anywhere, you should be able to use any hardware with it.
Take what? The no-OS-digital-dynamic-whatever-something? Of course, since there is no OS the hardware doesn't matter. It's digital dynamic, baby, who cares about hardware! I'll just make a Beowulf cluster out of my toaster, microwave, and can opener and run it. I won't know how I got there, but, hey, it all doesn't matter, does it?
For the lynxey type, the hackers, the geeks, whatever you want to call them, they would want to get down dirty and nasty with the stuff. But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff.
Ah, we get to the interesting bits. The wonderful lynxey type -- I presume, long-time users of lynx? Yee-haw, we really want to get dirty and nasty with that dead operating system concept, you know, hack that corpse to pieces -- that would be nasty, wouldn't it? Or is "stuff" some other stuff? Is it that dynamic digital thingy? Let's see... "But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff". Ah, I see. Now it's crystal clear. It's THAT stuff. Now I understand. And I really want to get dirty and nasty with it, oh yeah... Wait, there is more: "do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff". More stuff! How wonderful! And, of course, all these lynxey people just hate going down on a driver, err, scratch that, they hate finding drivers and changing config files. Changing config files is eeeeevil. Everybody who does this should be shot. Or dumped into the dynamic digital environment where they won't know where they came from or where they are going.
We're really trying to create this higher environment for developers and for users. It really is where we're moving towards the Gibson dream."
Higher? Oh well, I'm not even gonna ask. But I am really interested, what is the Gibson dream that we are moving towards?
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. `It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. `It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency."
Ah, I see.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I'm one of those former hard-core Amigans. I've owned every model of Amiga ever made (except the A600 - bleah!) at some point in my life.
I switched to Linux in 1997, and I've never looked back. Linux on a P233 so totally kicked my A4000 "super system"'s ass on every criteria I could think of to judge it. And I get source!
If you want to play "what if" imagine if Chicken Lips had open-sourced AmigaDOS around 1991 or so... the world would be very different.
Oh well, lost opportunities, spilled milk. The Amiga is DEAD boys. Dead as a coffin-nail. It used to be avant-guarde to be an Amiga user, now it's just sad.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Back in the halcyon days on 1985 the Amiga was a cracking introduction to computing. I remember opening the 'Bat-Pack' on Christmas morning, and being up and running (and swinging, kicking, driving etc) in just about ten minutes.
Isn't this where the likes of Microsoft, and the latest Linux installers (SuSE, RedHat, Turbo from my experience) are trying to go now? Seems like people want a decent machine without having to learn anything once again.
If AmigaOS is as easy and pleasent to use as it was back in '85 then people should flock to it.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Have the Amiga execs and the WWF execs switch places.
The Amega was fantastic. A new generation expanding on the old one's philosophy could be fantastic. In the meantime, though, if I don't see something in the way of at least a feature list or better yet a press release announcing the signing of fab contracts, then I have to write Amega II off as yet another brilliant piece of vapourware and go find an actual existing platform on which to do some non-hypothetical work.
--
This is not my sandwich.
from http://www.termisoc.org/~moosie/amiga/ahistory.htm :
:o).
Towards the mid-eighties people where becoming very cynical of the computing industry. Manufacturor where just churning out the same old machines but with different offers. Nothing ground breaking was on the cards. Part of the problem in this was that to help keep costs down the machines used off the shelf chips instead of custom designed ones. Many machines had the same chips in them like the sound chips.
In 1982 a group of designers got together to brain-storm over designing the greatest games machine ever. Those designers where Jay Miner (experienced desinger for Atari on the VCS system), Dave Morse (from Tonka toys) & RJ Mical (from Willaims the now legendary arcade firm). The managed to get funding from a trio of dentists and setup offices in Sillicon Valley. They named themselves Hi-Torro and put up the front of being
joystick developers. So secretive was this whole operation that the designers used code words when on the phones incase they where tapped. They decided that the least suspicious aliases would be female names. The explains the three main custom chips being called Paula, Agnus and Denise. This in turn lead to the machine picking up the
name of Lorraine & the company taking on the name Amiga (Spanish for girlfriend).
Although the main aim was to produce a pure games machine the first step towards a home computer was when they had to use a replacement for the intended Operating System, namely AmigaDOS. Usually games machine have very little in the way of an O/S as it's simply not needed. Thankfully the company Metacomco where totaly strung-up on
the Amiga's custom hardware that they gave the machine the then unique power to multi-task like a mainframe.
An amazing piece of luck became the Amiga in the form that consoles where dying out - people where no longer interested, so there was a gap forming for their new breed of home machine. Unfortunaley this flux lead to serious speculation by the big investors in the large computer companies, and many a software publisher.
Unfortunately the Amiga was nowhere near finishing and the machine (Lorraine) needed more funding to carry on. The dentists could not afford any more backing, so the team turned to the industry. They almost clinched a deal with Atari, but Atari where still negotiating when Commodore waded in and slapped a huge wedge on the table & said 'how about being part of our gang?'. The Lorraine now had the financial backing it needed.
Justifiably annoyed, and with a little knowledge of what Amiga where upto and some of those standard chips, Atari fudged together the Atari ST and beat Commodore on releasing the first 16-bit home computer. THus sparking off a war that would rage well into the 90's. Now both companies have been swallowed up by bigger fish.
The Atari ST was by no means (god this is gonna hurt to say this !) an awful machine. It did a fairly decent job of things but had no custom chips to power it. This lead to all the hard graft to be carried out by the CPU, which held the machine back hugely. The only things that where more attractive about the Atari ST where the fact that the cpu ran at 8Mhz where as the Amiga ran at 7.14Mhz due to internal architecture bottlenecks, and the fact the ST had a MIDI port as standard. The other killer difference was that the Atari ST was selling at about 799 ukp, and the A1000 was selling at about 1,500 ukp. Needles to say sales where slow.
Then the saving grace appeared, the A500. Tailored to themass-market. This then sparked the first of many vicious pricing wars betwix messers Atari & Commodore and they trashed anything in their paths. Due to a huge interest and the excellent PD (Public Domain) scene developing software, the A500 started to sell very well. Games where originally ported from the ST to the Amiga, but this soon changed as the A500 established it's self developers where writting on it and in some cases solely for it. The A500 sales where radically outstripping those of the Atari ST, and this encouraged third-party manufacturers to produce add-ons such as RAM and disk drives.
Workbench was hailed as a huge step forward in the right direction. Not a lot changed for several years only a new kickstart/Workbench (v1.3) was introduced and that was all. Most new developments where by the third party manufacturers, things like NewTek's (Developers of the Video Toaster) DigiView and DigiPaint, hard disks from people like GVP and scores of external disk drives and RAM expansions.
A problem with the Amiga's was that they had a distinct lack of documentation. Manauls where either lacking or too technical for beginners. This lead to Amiga owners taking the machine in hand and finding out what every nut, bolt, register & resistor did. This meant that many users had a better knowledge than the people at Commodore This lead to there being a wealth of free Public Domain software, that more often than not was a real god send. People could get down to the nitty-gritty of the machine and produce exactly the results they wanted. This lead to the transition that created the HUGE league of loyal
followers the Amiga had & has. It meant that the Amiga now belonged to the people, to be used in anyway they saw fit. So this could explain the totaly manic way an Amiga owner will defend their machine
New machines arived in the form of the A1500 & A2000. The A1500 was simply an A500 in a PC like box and all the PC like trimmings. The A2000 incorporated Zorro slots, a system of expansion slots which made life easier and expansion cheaper. It also contained a SCSI interface and a hard drive as standard.
Commodore then thought an ideal way of developing the Amiga into a home entertainment system was to coble an A500 and some recene hardware. They came up with the CDTV. It flopped, big time ! It was a marketing cock-up from start to finish and not very many units where sold. The only good thing was that Commodore/Amiga had showed a watching market what was to come in later years (No not that they would end up bankrupt!).
The A3000 was next out of the stalls, and it included some new nifty extras. It had the new Zorro III slots (for multiplexed expansion), a new Kickstart/Workbench (v2.0), some tarted up custom chips (the ECS Expaned Chip Set) & the new super sonic Motorola 68030 chip.
All these larks by Commodore & Amiga had attracted some dodgy looking sharks, in the form of Johnny SEGA and Nicky NINTENDO. They started ploughing large amounts of cash into cutom chip design and cute characters. Unfortunately instead of fighting back Commodore just rested on it laurels for a bit until it was too late.
A string on non-sensical arse-ups then caused unrecoverable damage. The A500 Plus showed up for a brief showing and was then kicked aside (along with the people who had brought one) to make way for the A600, which was also a total mess-up. People seriously lost confidence in the big C. And some Amiga owners felt short changed by their behaviour. A big bummer for Commodore was that they where losing money by the crate load with there over-priced & under-powered PCs and the Amiga was the only thing keeping them afloat. They made very little from selling their peripherals as they normaly where more (sometimes twice) expensive. They saw very little from software published unlike Sega & Nintendo who had license agreements.
Commodore released the new A4000 on a dubious public. Although the machine was extremely good, it was just too much money. It was in-line with the current PC prices but these where droping every day as interest in PCs started to rise. The A4000 was shelved as a 'serious users only' machine and people where left looking for the next home machine. This made Commodore chuck out the A1200, although it was never meant for release. They then set about producing the worlds FIRST 32-Bit CD console. The stage was set for a very nasty ending !!
Commodore - The last few months:-
The A1200 was selling well, many people where upgrading and a real interest was startinf to be taken in the Amiga again. The new AGA chipset was a real god send, but the fact that no high density floppy drive or a hard drive had been included as standard was a serious flaw. Also the new processor was not exactly up to the job, the A1200 still had 4 channel sound, and the Blitter chip was the same & handily reigned in by the CPU
and architecture bottlenecks. The CD32 was unleashed along with a large amount of
hype and an awful TV advert. Interest was growing in the machine when the proverbial excriment hit the draft making impliment and yes, i'm a tro11. Commodore had lost too much money and things where looking bad, they filled for a voluntary liquidation on a Bahams courts. The assetts where frozen and the supply of Amigas dryed up.
Despite reassurements that the situation was only temporary and the court said a buyer would be found within a few weeks/months it took almost exactly one year for the sale to go through. Although many interested parties (IBM, CEI, Dell - all pleadging huge amounts of cash (eg upto 24 million USD)took part in the cattle market like auction the final purchaser was a German third party PC manufacturer called Escom, who got it all
lock, stock (not much of that) & barrell for the bargin price of 10 million USD plus seperate deals for the UK, Dutch & Philippino assets.
Escom then had the daunting task of facing the Amiga using public & telling them what was about to happen to their machine. Escom or currently developing several Amiga based machines ready for release over the next 2 years and with the new breed of software trickling through on the Amiga; titles such as Alien Breed 3DII, Gloom Deluxe,
Xtreme Racing, Breathless & Worms; there is hope. The current Amigas can handle these titles just, so imagine the scope of any new machine. So keep your eyes peeled for perhaps the second coming. It would be a ressurection to match the one of 2000 years ago, but it's possible.
To 1984. Apple has just shipped Macintosh, and the realization is just hitting everybody (even the Apple II division - remember the IIgs?) that "you know, mice, pointing, and graphics are the One True Path". Microsoft starts working on a program called Windows (which doesn't surface until 3 years later, starting a trend for the company), Atari starts working on the ST (the legendary "Jackintosh", and Commodore gets the Amiga project underway.
Of all those, Amiga does something truly different, using nifty custom chips to give the machine a rich color palette and animation capabilities far ahead of it's time. The OS is pretty slick, too, and uses the hardware well.
Years pass. Commodore and Atari join the dustbin of history along with the Berlin Wall. Amiga survives briefly, being passed from owner to owner. After exhausting the capabilities of Motorola's dated 68000 processor series, PowerPC upgrades start hitting the marketplace, but few notice the improved performance possible. Thanks to a neat product called Video Toaster, Amiga has enough of an installed base that the market doesn't die completely, but it starts the long, slow fade into oblivion.
Cut to a couple of years ago - Gateway buys the remains of Amiga and potimism flares up that, in fact, they'll take the plunge into a new platform and out of the Wintel business. These plans, too, fizzle - Amiga instead becomes a "set of technologies" and an "information appliance", and it dies again. A handful of Amiga division people manage to extricate themselves from Gateway's clutches and split Amiga back away from Gateway.
Today, Amiga is now just another OS for Intel-based PC's. Whoopee do. As a platform, Amiga had the promise of continuity to the installed base, plus the opportunity to pick up converts from the weakened Microsoft monopoly. Apple's continued existence and profits prove that there is still a market for different platforms, if you give people a good reason to buy them.
The catch here is that Amiga now will have to compete with Be, Linux, Microsoft, and perhaps even Apple (if Darwin/OS X makes the jump to Intel) for mind and market share. It's not the same box anymore - it's just another Intel-based OS, though one that old Amiga software can be ported to relatively easily.
Though enough old Amiga users may buy generic boxes to run the "new" OS-only Amiga that Amiga will survive for a time, I think the ballgame's over. By dropping the hardware plans, they may have conserved capital (developing hardware is expensive, especially non-Wintel stuff - don't underestimate Apple's development costs), but at the sacrifice of long-term viability.
Meanwhile, Amiga remains the Rasputin of platforms. It just won't die!
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Tune in next week when Emmett interviews Fox Mulder:
Slashdot: What is the most important thing in the Conspiracy community right now?
Fox Mulder: Being involved, I think. It's going to take a while for the Visitors to arrive on the planet, and it's pointless just sitting around and waiting for them to come. People need to be involved in promoting the Conspiracy. People need to start decoding, planning new projects, generally just getting involved. People really need to be active, they need to be out there, saying 'Look, we've got this brand new form of life coming out, and it has got powers that nothing else has. It's the best, we think it's the best, here try it.' The Conspiracy's got the best activists in the world."
Wayne Martin and Fox Mulder: They want to believe.
--
Less money, less admin, less machine--more power
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Well, setting aside the fact that lots of vendors jumped into business relationships with Be, it seems like he could be describing his own future here. AmigaOS, 2001 Edition, will probably be "not a bad OS at all", but will anybody care?
He mentions the ability to run on older, cheaper hardware as a big advantage, but when I can slap together a killer NT or Linux box that costs little more than the change found in my sofa, or get one of those firewire-based Digital Video iMacs for a little more than a grand, is price really such a massive consideration anymore?
"Back in the day", what made everybody drool over the Amigas, above all else, was the Video Toaster. That's no longer enough to set them apart, because the void that was created by the "death" of the old Amiga has been filled.
This is great news for hard-core Amiga fans, who will finally get to play with their favorite OS on new hardware. The rest of us are happy for you. This will not change our lives much.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
An Amiga is simply anything I look at and think "Thats an Amiga!". I suspect most people have a similar opinion (using their own definitions of "me" and "I"). A key problem is that not everyone wil agree on what an Amiga is, and the new owners have to please everyone.
My wishlist is quite long, and includes having a similar GUI, (but the desktop must be multithreaded), a nice simple API, be well designed for desktop video applications, be available in a small cheap keyboard shaped box , but still be useful for games, and use incredibly well designed low cost but fast hardware so that it doesn't have to rely on the CPU for speed.
Fulfilling this wishlist would guarentee them 1 sale. To get more than 1 sale, they would need to fulfil the wishlist of every other amiga user as well. If there are 2 contradictory requirements, then it should do both.
I myself am somewhat of a closet Amigian. I loved my A500 (with its monster 1MB of RAM) and loved to work with the drawing/3D programs that ran on it. Whenever somewhat brings up multimedia I always mention how when Amiga did it they did it right and have since been copied.
They had great ideas. Separate processors for sound and video. Hmmm, only in the past few years have PC video card makers been doing that. A true multitasking OS. Very rarely did I have the OS crash when a program crashed. The software available was some of the most amazing stuff and you could create some amazing things with the limited amount of memory. 3D ray-tracing programs that could not only run in 1MB of memory, but also generate frames using that same memory with no hard drive is pretty impressive.
But even with my love of that platform I must say I am wary of any new developments. I think the big reason that Amiga was so successful was the combination of hardware and software. Both pieces were basically designed to do multimedia very well compared to other things in the market at the time. Now many of those niche features are in many different programs and OSes. I worry that any new developments may mar the history that is the Amiga.
That's really going to be where the lines get drawn.
:)
Given the fundimentally different design philosophies and goals between something like Amiga and something like Linux, you're comparing apples and oranges. Most people use an alternative operating system because they like it better than mainsteam OS's. Not just because the hate Windows or want to look cool.
Since Amiga and Linux have radically different purposes, they'll draw different kinds of people who want to do different kinds of things with their computers.
Anyway, the new Amiga SDK runs on Linux, so now instead feeling estatic for running NetBSD on an A3000, you'll be able to feel estatic when you get Amiga OS up and running on Linux
- My password is slashdot
I would have to agree with some of the other posters that these days the Amiga people really would have to bring something to the table to get people to take notice (e.g., make it free, make it open-source, make it somehow marketably different).
They're not trying to sell the old AmigaOS, dumbass.
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
Graphics3D 640, 480
I do like that last part you copied. "if you can get through to one more person, wow. That's them helped out, especially in the world of the Microsoft monopoly. " Welcome to the fold Wayne.
kwsNI
I agree that Amiga needs to be left to enjoy death in peace, and that we need all the OS competition we can get. This sounds contradictory, and it is!
Seriously, I think of the Amiga like I think about the Newton and the 3DO - great, but ahead of their time (and lets face it, plagued with problems).
Multimedia? Who isn't concerned with multimedia these days!
I liked the old Amigas because they could do what everything can do now, multitask and multi thread. Remember Wordperfect for the Amiga? Remember how it beat the shit out of the Wintel version, at that time? Multimedia? So it could play good games, well, so could Nitnendo!
Their focus on multimedia is what killed them to begin with. If they would have advertised the OS itself more, they mighta had something...after all, it wasn't until Windows95 that most people could easily do what the Amiga could do...(but in fairness, I'd call Win95 much more stable than the Amiga OS...hey, the truth hurts sometimes...)
I loved the Amiga, but it has been surpassed in every possible way, alas...there isn't a market left for them to tap into.
If they come up with a lightning fast display architecture with a decent API then the best of luck to them. X is just a _bit_ too bloated to be anything other than an engine for window managers. In all fairness it does a great job of doing what it was _designed_ to do, which was not unfortunately games or multimedia.
I miss the days of demos.
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
John
John_Chalisque
New /. Poll.
The next OS wars will be:
Amiga v. Be
Linux v. BSD
Linux v. Win
Mac v. Win
Mac v. Linux
Mac v. Be
Amiga v. Mac
Mac (Classic) v. Mac (OS-X)
Hemos v. Gates
Or will it be a battle Royal?
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
A stereotypical Amigan is fanatical, loudmouthed, doesn't shut up about the Amiga, somewhat like me, I'm a perfect example. If you can possibly realize why we are so like that, you can see. It's like having this brilliantly cool toy, and nobody else can experience it like you have. It's almost like having a divine experience to search for words, something like this. You've got to tell everybody about it. They may not understand, but if you can get through to one more person, wow. That's them helped out, especially in the world of the Microsoft monopoly.
Hmmmm... this sounds suspiciously like my Brother-In-Law when he talks to me about Amway. "Hey, I'm only trying to help you out. Multi-level marketing, baby, it's the future!
I don't know; maybe I'm weird but I don't want to join a cult, either Amway or the Amiga.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The new Amiga is not an Amiga. It is a new system with the Amiga name. It was designed ot get the existing userbase to use it. I want the real Amiga OS, not some new OS with a new name that runs on the x86. The Amiga would be much better if they updated the Advanced Amiga Chipset to do better sound and graphics, and then started selling Amigas with G4s(MPC7400). I would love to see a G4 based Amiga that could give me real time sound and video effects. And, the AA(2?) chipset should be on an AP card so you could upgrade it. I want an Amiga that has an amazing 3d card! I want it all based on Opengl. And, I want a standardized platform. If all the comuters are variations on the same core design, then nobody has to worry about incompatible hardware or different Chipsets. Life would be much simpler. But, it's never going to happen. Be had this, but the BeBox never sold, the Mac has this, but OS X's interface is horrible, and only Amiga can do this while still allowing a user to muck arund in a system. Too bad they will never see the light.
-----
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HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
I mean, why are so many people so very against the idea of taking the Amiga in new directions? I loved my little Amiga, as much as I loved the C64 I had before that, but I'll be first in line to admit that the system is getting out of date now. Even so, I really see no harm in people developing new systems. Variety rocks. No-one's saying you have to use it, and it seems really stupid to knock it before it even exists. I'm going to reserve judgement until we see something.
I own like 7 Amiga systems... (My Amiga 4000 kicks butt :) They are pretty outdated now. I would love to see new hardware, with an updated custom chipset. Something fully documented, etc...
:) But the new 'Amiga' guys need to come to the realization that the ONLY way to survive, in the 00's, is to open source everything. Otherwise, Eazel is looking better to me more and more every day..
The thing i see here is just another closed source operating system with an Amiga-like GUI and a Java-like programming engine. (correct me if im wrong) And a couple of cool Amiga guys that were able to get the Amiga name from Gateway...
I miss the Amiga hardware! Those machines were awesome toys
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
Oh please. The Amiga could kick Jesus' ass any day. Even with one arm tied behind her back.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
But I just don't think it's possible.
Before I get into rampant "I am a recovering Amigan" me-tooism, let me tell you why Amiga might have a chance, even after all the let-downs.
When I was living in Austin, TX, I got my hands on an A3000 with a good assortment of stuff in the mix for a couple hundred bucks, and ended up fiddling with it quite a bit. I eventually ended up getting a PC with windows on it so I could play games, and the A3000 went into the closet.
A friend of mine who was a former Amigan came over one day to pick up some hardware or manuals or something, and I hauled the A3k out of the closet to show him how far AmigaDOS had come just since 2.04, to 3.1. He just about cried to see that poor sucker boot up in under a minute and be running programs. That pathetic 68030@25mhz did the job just fine.
My point here is that this illustrates what we already all know intellectually; Amiga Diehards will never stop getting nostalgic about the Amiga hardware, AmigaDOS, and so on. If there was another AmigaDOS that was really slick and clean and had all the cool advantages of AmigaDOS back in the day (Like the patchlist, we're all fond of that) then you'd have all those people coming out of the woodwork.
I know we're used to thinking of linux and BSD folks as the big advocates nowadays, but if you gave the Amigans a new platform to get excited about, you could just about have them running around wallpapering buildings with six foot high Amiga logo posters of their own accord. Amiga types are just rabid, and I was no exception.
Keep in mind that I've recovered. I do still have an Amiga 1200 in case I run across a cool AGA game that I want to bust out and play; The A1200 has 2mb ram and a 80mb IDE disk in it, and it's reasonably speedy, but it's also an all-in-one system and it doesn't take up much space. As far as I'm concerned, Amiga is dead at the moment, and until it pops out with a completed operating system, I'm not even moderately interested.
Not that anyone's really interested, but what would float my boat utterly and completely would be a system for the ATX PPC motherboards hitting the market, and really good Athlon support; The mathlib needs support for heavily pipelined floating point, and so on. But that's not so important in the scope of this article, because all I'm discussing here is Amiga fanaticism.
So what makes Amigans more fanatical than the linux and *BSD types? They grew stronger through adversity. While other people were bragging about how badass their PCs were, Amigans were buying accelerator cards and (With the exception of MUI-GUI) were finding more ways to do things smarter rather than by taking the brute force approach. As a result, software on the Amiga had a tendency to do the same things all the other systems did, at mostly the same speed (Unless you're talking about povray) and on inferior hardware. Let's face it, the A4000 stopped being competitive long ago, as other people have pointed out.
We all know what killed Amiga, so I won't go into that here. If you don't know what killed Amiga, I'm surprised you've read down this far. What Amiga can't afford (Then again, they couldn't afford this a year ago, five years ago, etc) is to alienate the people they have left. I think a lot of people will come back to the fold, as it were, from linux or *BSD or what have you if AmigaOS is just cool enough. That's a big part of what made it work before, and it's the single thing they have to leverage now. It's necessary to do everything right... A journaling filesystem, good SMP support, driver support for the most useful hardware immediately (That means everything big; DVD cards, Nvidia and 3dfx graphics cards, and more sound cards than just the soundblaster line.)
But finally, it is absolutely imperative that it maintains all the benefits of the original AmigaOS; Autoconfiguration. Immense amounts of configurability at the user interface level. A wonderful flow of information from Amiga corp. to the users and developers. And let's not forget another badass ROM Kernel Manual... oh wait, never mind :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fleecy Moss? Sheesh... and I thought Moon Unit Zappa was the dumbest name I'd ever heard.
So.. cool technology: been there, done that. How about... a sustainable business for "new and interesting"...
This is simply not true. I have no idea where you got this from, or if you have some gripe against be to make it up, but Be has always treated it's developers pretty well. (Well, at least better than Apple/Microsoft, which I admit, isn't much)
Sheesh!
J.
No way in hell. No OS will ever be as great as Amiga OS. If we can just get someone to keep it up to date with current PCs and speeds we wont have to use Windows or Linux anymore. Shouldnt be using Linux for a desktop OS anyways..IMO.
I eat the flesh off the living, and I vote!
After being purchased from Amiga earlier this year, former marketing execs Bill McEwen and
Fleecy Moss [...]
Man, they're now buying and selling marketing people now? Hmm, perhaps we could sell a couple of ours...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
LinuxPPC or SuSE or Mac OS-X (ifwhen it ships) on a G4.
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Come on people the original platform rocked. However, why the hell would anyone waste the energy reviving this platform? Instead of improving the variety of open/free OS systems that have already gotten the support of big money some poor schmuck is going to go out and reinvent the wheel. Good luck, I guess. Still, it seems like an awful waste of energy.
There is only one reason to create a brand new Operating System. The time to create an OS is when you look around and realize you simply do not have the tools to fill an important niche in your devlopment or system needs. Linux played on the fact that sysadmins did not want to go with a buggy NT and the commercial Unixes were stabbing people for massive bucks to make up for their limited server sales. BeOS wanted to fill the niche for a great multimedia OS but between companies that already had the halfway decent Macs and the over-priced SGI boxes the Be folks seem to barely have a chance. (BTW, I really hope they succeed because it is damn good desktop OS.)
Until, the Amiga folks can come up with a compelling reason for buying the Operating system that justifies the price of the whole computer people will continue to ask, "So what?"
ACK
Please, dear fellows... let the Amiga rest in peace. Soil no further my memories of that great machine, and let her spirit join the pantheon of the great (?) machines of the past: the Sinclars, Apple ][s and the TRS-80s... the TI-99s and the Atari Jaguars...
Right. First of all, lets take a look at your list of machines:
Sinclairs, Apple ][s, TI-99's : Lovely little 8-bit machines. First computers for many a hacker. Fun for cutting your teeth on, and (largely) had BASIC in ROM. Then, when you were done with that, you could strip out the BASIC and start learning about programming the hardware directly. This was cool, but they all performed the same purpose, equally well by and large. You can do that on a Linux box today if you want to, so for hackers, these machines are fondly remembered. But there was no large user base of non tech-savvy people. Most of those who had these machines programmed as much as used commercial software. Very few just used it for games, unlike the Amiga. As for the Atari Jaguar.... Nice idea, crippled by a market that had no space for it.
The Amiga had it's chance to rule the world and due (partly) to Commodore's incompetence missed its opportunity.
Have to agree with you there, however, it still hurts that businesses seemed reluctant to use a machine that wasn't produced by Big Blue. On top of that CBM wasn't known for pushing the envelope on anything other than games machines (C64 etc). At least Apple was fondly remembered by the geeks who'd programmed the Apple ][s in school (I don't think the million-dollar Ridley Scott '1984' commercial harmed them either). The Amiga's only major failure in 1985 was on the marketing front. Of course, later came the interminable management cock-ups, but don't get me started on them.....I personally believe that the Amiga was strangled at birth, and never given a proper chance.
Today, I can do the same things (and much, much more) with Linux, Windows, Mac, Be, etc. Hell, I can even simulate any of those machines with UAE.
Actually, UAE still doesn't emulate quite quickly enough (scrolling and audio sync still not right on my Athlon 700!). Last I heard, no-one had come up with an implementation of the Amiga's multiple screen function, although Be came quite close. Until I can word-process, edit graphics and create music at the same time, switching seamlessly through the tasks, I remain unconvinced that the ol' Miggy can be replaced in my heart.
I owned an Amiga 1000 in 1987. Back then it crushed any other machine like a grape when it came to multimedia and games. I even went on to buy an A500 and an A1200 AGA.
The points you make are valid, but the machines you describe use ancient hardware. They are the legacy that the new Amiga has to live up to. The evolution of the mainstream x86 operating system seems to make every new hardware iteration perform at exactly the same rate as the previous OS on the older hardware. The jump from the A500 to the 1200 felt much more tangible to me than shifting my dual-booter from my (95/RH6.0)P200MMX to my (98/RH6.2)Athlon. I genuinely hope that the new AmigaOS removes this feeling of stagnation that I feel is rife in the computer world right now.
OK, sorry about the rant. The reason I miss the Amiga most is that it allowed you to go as low-level as you needed. If you just wanted to use it for games, you did. If you wanted to be artistically creative, you could. No nasty installs, no registry. However, (and this is my pet peeve with the Mac) if you wanted to dig deeper, you could. It allowed you to learn how a modern computer worked at your own pace. Sick of games? Bored with being creative? Let's go into the CLI and find out how this thing works! And then later, you dig a bit deeper, finding out how to program the thing, first in maybe BASIC, then PASCAL or C, and then, if you were feeling really brave, in 68K assembler. However, if it got really heavy going, you could save your work, reboot the machine and it would be ready for gaming and productivity again.
Now, I'm not saying you can't do that in Windows, but everything you install and uninstall leaves a trace, usually in C:\WINDOWS, until your system gets bogged down and doesn't work anymore. Reboot, Reformat, Reinstall. In Linux, you generally need to be quite tech-savvy before you can do the most basic of things. (Although this is changing, there's quite a way to go).
The Amiga was the only machine I know of that catered for the whole spectrum of computer users, and coached those at entry level all the way to being coders without making them feel it was all too much for them. None of this had to do with the hardware, it was all how the OS used it. This is why I feel that there is still a great need for an Amiga-style OS, to bring new and experienced users together as a whole.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
The execs were purchased from Amiga? Who bought them? Will they be freed? Are they slaves, or indentured?
Inquiring minds want to know . . .
However, if Amiga was using slave labor, it explains a lot about its failure to go anywhere . . .
SuSE : Nice distro, but someone thoroughly new to computers would still have trouble getting it to do what they want. Not so on the Amiga (pop in a disk, watch it go!)
MacOS-X : Opposite problem. Nice BSD back-end, but how hard is it to get to? I have never got far enough into the workings of any MacOS to let me do or know what I want. Maybe (just maybe) MacOSX will be different.
You realise all this is before we get on to the subject of draggable multi-resolution screens, uniformity of operation. All three are either too techie or not techie enough to present a rounded UI. The Amiga OS did it all and met in the middle, something which no-one has done before or since.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
A thousand apologies, that will teach me to try and add to a conversation!!!
Considering how BeOS is (to many) everything the Amiga OS should have been, and how many Amiga users have migrated to BeOS, to slag Be sounds like very sour grapes. My man is flogging a dead horse. I loved the Amiga as much as anyone, but even I admit it's as dead as a very dead thing. Amiga users may not be dead, and Amiga can still rise from the grave, I suppose, but the Amiga has been dead for quite a while. They should have turned Commodore over to Gassee a long time ago. Even I won't go back to the Amiga OS, unless it is somehow (impossibly) better than BeOS.
Voi Vod, Soriben, Gortician are among the metal bands that have utilized the Amiga at one time or another...
GORTICIAN
Anyone want to buy a CDTV, CD32, Amiga 2500/Toaster, Amiga 500/A530, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500+CD-Rom? I'm keeping the 1084s...
Agree on the draggable screens, but not on the "difficulty of getting to Mac OS (even Classic's)workings. RedEdit _is_ simple even for the neophyte, and you can edit ANY system or program resource file.
As for Uniformity of Operation, I am only a novice (and fan) of the Amiga, but the Mac OS is easily as consistent with Menus/Widgets/Commands.
Agree that Amiga did get "right in the middle" between geeky and easy. Mac erred on the simple side, Linux errs on the geeks.
OS-X...anyone's guess!
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Come one guys. I had an Amiga, loved the sucker. But it's old.
I'm a great fan of the old C64 too - you still can't quite emulate C64 stuff properly on a PC (or maybe you can given the kickass new processors, but anyway). And some of the games (Wizball!) were cool. But the graphics and sound which were so good back then are just dated and blocky now. Amiga's gone the same way. Starglider 2 was way cool at the time - a filled 3-D flightsim at that kind of refresh rate just didn't happen until then. But now it's just another 3-D game, big deal.
It was great at the time, and you can look back on it and say it was a fabulous idea. But without investment to keep it up-to-date it just didn't move, and the competition in the PC market put their processor development into warp drive. Meantime we got specialist graphics companies doing graphics cards for the PC, and the competition there pushed development as well.
I don't deny they were good in their time. But to insist that they're better than current machines is as daft as classic car enthusiasts saying 50's cars have better handling and performance than modern cars - every measurable standard says it ain't the case. The PET was a revolution in its time too, so should we now release a PET2000, with 500Meg of RAM, hard drive and Linux OS? It blatantly wouldn't be the same thing - it would only share the name. Amiga's the same - what differentiated it essentially was the hardware (the OS was nice, but it was just riding on the hardware, and it wasn't too stable). If the hardware's no different from a modern PC, all you've got is a PC running a different OS, and I don't see anyone claiming that a Linux PC needs a different name just cos it's not running Windoze.
Grab.
As for coding, point me to where it is encouraged out of the box? CodeWarrior's cool, but a bit expensive. Generally the feeling with MacOS is they prefer you to either stay behind the GUI curtain and use something like HyperCard or FileMaker, or get really into the deep end with a development IDE. On the Amiga, the CLI stage (learning how the file system and shell actually worked) really helped me understand how the machine worked, by giving me an intermediate ground in a way I don't think I'd have found so easy on a Mac.
Then again, I'm talking about from MacOS 7.6.2 onwards. I can't say much about the earlier incarnations, I could well be wrong.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
If not, I hope bill g doesn't hear about this.
And anyone using the BeOS in the year 2000 who has actually used it for more than a year of it's life also is very familiar with the concept "beating a dry skeleton". Um, unless you want to selectively forget how many times Be has re-invented itself and it's "products" over the past 10 frickin' years!!
... yet. They had a lot of close calls, though. Oh and Be isn't afraid of fsckin' over their users and customers to keep their business afloat -- that's probably helped them to avoid bankruptcy so far.
The only difference is that Be hasn't gone bankrupt
In the end, as a former Amiga developer and former BeBox/BeOS/BeANYTHING developer, I'll gladly jump on the Amiga bandwagon if they can show they are getting their sh*t together -- at least the Amiga was a real platform with a significant user base at one time. Don't forget that Be couldn't attract people when there was no cost just to look, and I don't see any big "rush" to the Be camp now that their "product" has been desperately made "free".
Talk about beating a dry skeleton...
What Amiga really needs is a goose similar to the one received by Nextstep from Apple a few years back. With no viability in the market over the long haul, find a place where your technology fits into a larger scheme and get utilized. Great technology is often underutilized, but I'd hate to see it happen here and have Amiga complete the downward spiral. The pit has been deep, but its never bottomless.
Unfortunately for the company that might consider this prospect, there is one key thing that can't be bought with Amiga. Steve.
Heh. You know you got all that "southern culture" from old people that moved from the north to retire.
:P
D- A picture is worth a thousand dollars depending on it's content.
My first computer was an Apple ][e; it was great. My next was an Amiga 1000; it was fantastic. I learned Unix and C in college; it was fun to play around with data like that. I graduated, and upgraded to an Amiga 2000. I loved it. At work I was using Sun pizza boxes, started learning X windows. Cool. The Amiga was dying... I didn't upgrade to the A3000. The PC was winning -- not because it was better, but because business wanted PCs. I got a PC to interact with work -- even though I was using SunOS at work. PCs could dialin, Amigas couldn't. Period. Did I like the PC? Not at first... but I got used to it. Then at work we switched to Windows projects. I learned VB and other things. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought. Got to mess around a bit with Linux, too, though it was a hard sell to the suits.
I've used Unix, Windows, and Linux. Know what -- THEY ALL SUCK. I want my Amiga back, damn it. Not what it was then, but what it should have been by now. Not Windows "we'll make our software to secure our market position" or Linux "we'll make Unix work on these Intel pieces of crap and make it look just like Windows".
For any product to succeed, you have to get people to buy it. Linux won't succeed on the desktop to anyone other than geeks, because to the great mass of users a Linux system offers no advantage over a Windows system. The Amiga, as a piece of software OS, won't succeed either. To break the Windows monoploy is going to take more than a Judge waiving his gavel around. The great mass of computer users MUST be seduced.
If Amiga comes up with something unique, I'll buy it. I want them to, desperately. If the only two things I can program on are Windows or Unix/Linux, I'm going to burn out and go mad. But Amiga -- or someone else -- is going to have to come up with something to break the entire concept of "sit down in front of a box and another box with a screen on it and move a mouse around and type some stuff and do things", because Windows *owns* that paradigm.
I want something that goes beyond what I believe to be possible with silicon and plastic. I want my jaded senses to be blown completely away by something -- anything!!! I want the entire concept of "computing" to change. I want my fun Amiga back, in a form so out in front of anything else out there that stunned people in companies throughout the West slump into their chairs in the sure knowledge that their businesses have been killed past saving.
I want a revolution, not an evolution. And if Amiga can't deliver that, it will fail. Again. Because emulating either Linux or Windows just isn't good enough.
I share your belief that Amiga's committment to the majority consumer hardware platform constrains their ability to excel or innovate, but as a business strategy I think it may be the only way to (re)capture some of the consumer market. There is a small group of faithful amigans who will buy anything at any price, simply because it is associated with the Amiga name. However, for the majority of potential users, the cost of a software license is probably the most they are willing to invest in a pipe dream.
I think it's safe to assume that any amiga advocate, past or present, probably uses an operating system for day to day tasks with which they are extremely dissatisfied. For them, the ability to play with the Amiga software while maintaining the ability to perform these day to day tasks is crucial. Amiga/TAO's intel-compatible software will also likely gain exposure to the growing amount of consumers who are toying with Redhat or Corel's linux distribution. I think this first step has to cater to the majority. As we all well know, especially in the software industry, quality does not equal sales, let alone does it create a market.
Although Amiga has clearly focused on Intel hardware as a development platform, their business model is also explicitly tied to various proprietary hardware architectures (appliances, devices, and possibly "computers"). I don't think anyone assumes that this first effort will actually replace our current OS and set of applications.
I'm trying to view Amiga's initial direction as a necessary step to regain trust, name recognition, and momentum in a market which fell victim to a very painful "soap opera", as Slashdot calls it. In fact, I'm sure this step pained Bill, Fleecy, and the others greatly.
I maintain, in classic Amigan fashion, a foolish hope that one of the "devices" we see in the future is a "home computer" comprised of great hardware and a hardware-dependent version of Amiga's OS/OE/whatever. Of course this goes against every word uttered by any vocal proponent of the so-called "convergence" market, but I still think the home computer is perhaps the most useful kind of internet appliance.
In the meantime, I'm just happy to have something interesting to play with on a computer -- it's been a while since I viewed it as anything more than a browser, compiler, and word processor.
I have no way of really describing the sheer impact that computer had on almost everyone who touched it. It was a vision of what computing would eventually become. Great graphics, multitasking, tons of memory, and wild expandability. It was, quite literally, 10 years ahead of its time. And those of us using it at the time *knew this* and evangelized it ceaselessly. Commodore sold millions of these machines based solely on word-of-mouth.
If Apple had had this machine instead of the Macintosh, we would all be running Motorola chips on our desks now instead of PCs. Seriously. It was that good. It just needed clever execution and management.
Commodore, on the other hand, didn't just shoot themselves in the foot on this one, they shot themselves in the head. They had the finest system-design team that had ever been assembled, didn't know it, treated them like dirt, and were somehow surprised when they all left. The Amiga never really moved forward because C= lost the resource that really mattered, the brains that had originally invented it. Had they preserved that team and kept them motivated, today's computing landscape would be far different.
But... christ. That was FIFTEEN YEARS AGO and the system hasn't made much progress in that time. The Amiga itself is dead. There is *nothing* that operating system does that modern OSes like Linux and NT don't do, and far better. (moment of epiphany for me was booting up Linux in late 1993 or early 1994 and realizing that, for the first time in eight or nine years, I could finally work with my PC the way I used to work on my Amiga -- more than one thing at a time.)
The look and feel is easy to duplicate with modern window managers. I can make Enlightenment work almost exactly like the Amiga's desktop did, and it is one hell of a lot more stable. Amiga just didn't have that great a desktop, folks -- it was nice enough for the time, but compared to what we're driving now it looks like GEOS on the C64.
I'm not sure what the Amiga team is doing. They may be doing something really neat. But it has no more relation to the Amiga than Battlezone 2 had to Atari's Battlezone or id's Wolfenstein 3D had to Wolfenstein on the Apple 2.
They are just capitalizing on the Amiga name and trying to redefine it to mean something other than what it really DOES mean -- an impossibly brilliant operating system design that dead-ended and died due to incompetent management.
The Amiga is dead and gone. Let's lay roses on its grave and think good thoughts about it -- and move on with our lives. Enough, already. Run an emulator if you're really nostalgic, but it's time to update to something modern and start over. There is nothing left worth salvaging in the AmigaOS.
But! (and this is a big butt), the amiga wasn't the perfect machine, even in its day. IMHO, there was a price to pay for its advanced features. You may have had a piece of software that ran fine. I knew many bbses in my area that ran on amigas. In general, in my opinion, they crashed, and they crashed alot...when using them for a normal single user purposes, where one switches from app to app and does routine 'computeree' things and such, they were not that stable! In comparison, my old 166mhz with 95b, is pretty stable, all in all...provided I reboot it at least once every few hours (which is why I now run Linux on my new pc)...
Lets have some honesty about computers, even old favorites, instead of fanatacism.
What will happen to the video tosater? Sure it's been redeveloped into VideoToasterNT 2.0 but thats non-linear. The Amiga/Newtek combo created a great linear editing system and i hope it continues...
Linux need not be a server OS. Corel Linux (for better or worse), has been called the easiest OS to install, period, regardless of platform by a CNET review.
Linux is like any other OS in that it is the layer between the user and the hardware. It's a 'feature', in my opinion, that it can do 'server' type things. It's a feature that it can do these things and still perform graphically (especially with the new XFREE86 4.0).
It's nice to have something so versatile, that it can be used as a desktop and a server. I myself use it as a desktop (yes, a desktop). I'm running KDE, which is the most advanced GUI I have ever, EVER used. It un-ashamedly takes the best that other GUIs have to offer, and combines them. When I am in K, and I add a shortcut to my K startup folder, I'm not thinking about my Samba server that's running and allowing my WinPC to access my drives...
Linux, right now and today, could be used by a soccer mom...and I intend to prove it by setting up my mums pc with Linux running K. If my mom can do basic soccer mom functions using Linux, than anyone can!
By the way, you said Amigians were/are hobbyists, this is true...those 'hobbyists' turned to Linux...the people that turned to BeOs, at least in the context you yourself describe, sound like those people that used Macs and St's back in the day, not Amigas!
This is something that I've wondered about for a long time. Apparently one of the Amiga's greatest strengths was its use of several bits of dedicated hardware that allowed it to be much faster and featureful than the other machines of the day. It occurred to me that a modern PC has a -lot- of dedicated hardware. Think: SB Live! has a powerful DSP capable of doing mind-numbingly fast mp3 encoding, hardware 3d sound processing, and mixing 512 voices. A GeForce2 GTS does a great deal of the OpenGL 1.2 spec in hardware. SCSI controllers take a ton of I/O load off of the CPU. Decent ethernet cards take care of their own stuff. It seems to me that if Amiga could write an OS that could make full, seamless use of all of this power (even if they had to only really support a small subset of the available hardware with the rest getting comparatively minimal support) that it would really be quite impressive. I mean, theoretically, the SB Live should be capable of doing mp3 decoding all on its own, given that it's somewhat reprogrammable. Likewise, the GeForce should be able to handle a lot of display-related things that are currently relegated to the CPU. I don't see why the Amiga -can't- be a revolutionary system/OS, but I wouldn't hold my breath, either.
What do you get when you combine the best elements of all three systems? The Free Amigos (with a plethora of features)
Revolution = Evolution
Read the description of the sterotypical Amigan, I'm reminded of myself in the not so distant Dark Ages of the Mac, when some of us trancended the lines of mere userdom and joined the Evangelist. Times have changed and not so long ago the 'List ceased to exist because, in the new age of Apple, a cult is not something that's so great to have around (not to mention hard to hold together when there are so many Mac newbies invading our ranks). The Evangelista are scattered now, but if Apple ever hits another stumballing block and falls into dispare for a few years (though hopefully never as far as Amiga has fallen), you can rest assured that our little cult will return to keep the platform alive.
;-P
BTW, just to spread rummors, everyone better be watching out for the Intel version of Mac OS X (aka WinSlayer X).
-- Gordon Worley
A stereotypical Amigan is fanatical, loudmouthed, doesn't shut up about the Amiga, somewhat like me, I'm a perfect example. If you can possibly realize why we are so like that, you can see. It's like having this brilliantly cool toy, and nobody else can experience it like you have. It's almost like having a divine experience to search for words, something like this. You've got to tell everybody about it. They may not understand, but if you can get through to one more person, wow. That's them helped out, especially in the world of the Microsoft monopoly.
This statement and others like it from the article are no different from the experience of any enthusiasts dedicated to something outside the mainstream, whether it be Amiga, Linux, Karl Popper or Tottenham Hotspur.
The phenomenom is interesting in its own right, of course, but --- as seen from the outside --- the article gives no compelling reasons to be interested in the content of this particular instance of fanaticism.
I swear by Amiga OS and Computers, I swear _at_ Windows and Intel PCs. I hope to soon be able to buy a G4 card to put in my Amiga 3000T, PCs from that era are only good for boat anchors.
It IS really a shame that people believing in Linux can write such crap...
... and so on can barely dream of. But the most important things are these two:
Well, The New Amiga OS can a lot of things, other OS's like Linux, Unix, Windoze, DOS, BE
First: The kernel will have less than 35KB (Hey Linux lovers! Look at the size of your kernel!)
Only QNX Neutrino has a smaller one...
Second: The New Amiga OS will run on EVERY hardware. It's not important, whether it's your new Handy, or your WebServer. It'll run!
And it will have a complete classic emulation inside, being capable of running classic Amiga software.
Well, some of you mentioned UAE. I have tested UAE quite a lot, but it can't even emulate an Amiga 500 correctly. Amiga 500 was famous for the games being played with it. But playing games on UAE is...well...not worth being mentioned here. (Even with an Athlon 1GHz and G400!)
WHY do all those folks here hold their thumbs down before the final product can be seen?
It makes me sick, that those amigans like me being involved in community threads can read in your issues, that you folks do not know what you are talking about.
There seem to be a lot of people around here, thinking that the new AmigaOne and the New NG OS will be like Amiga was 8 years ago? Think different!
Hey folks! Wait, and see what comes. Perhaps the new OS will kick every other OS appart, perhaps it will die faster than it rose? I don't know, but I am excited to see it comeing around next corner, as you should be. And YOU don't know as well...
Sit back, and have a nice time,
EtK
P.S.: Aspect of support: I am one of thousands of programmers codeing right now apps for the new OS. There is more support for the new OS before it's out, than Linux had in five years AFTER it came out...
But they won't. These are people, haveing left the Amiga community a decade ago to join Gatesology. And now, a new Amiga OS comes out. If Amiga can develop an OS only half as good as it seems like now, it will be capable of showing the world, what crap todays OS's are.
And then, all those folks around here would have to realize, that they all made a big big mistake when leaving Amiga. Well, as you can see, They CAN not say anything positive about our beloved machine...
Honestly,
EtK
P.S.: My PC needs 2 minutes to boot. My Amiga needs 15 seconds. Just something else to think about...
Amiga's biggest hardware advantage was that it had separate "copper" and "blitter" chips for graphics coprocessing. Guess what: Look at any modern 3d card and you'll see the same stuff only pumped up for today's technology and speed. With AGP bus to plug it into the motherboard, and 32MB fast becoming a standard for just video processing memory, the old amiga style of hardware has no advantages.
We're using the same techniques today.
LAST POST
Where would you put Unix System V?
Eh...