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AmigaOS 3.9 Released At World of Amiga Show
Mike Bouma writes "A week ago a new OS upgrade for the classic 68k/PPC Amiga computer was released at the World of Amiga show. You can purchase it here.
Thousands of Amigans gathered in Cologne Germany to buy the many new poducts on display at the booths or to watch the various presentations of the 20+ attending companies. Highlight announcement for me was the return of Realsoft 3D to the Amiga. Furthermore I bought the christmas issue of Amiga Active, at KDH Datentechnik`s booth a copy of Exodus: the last War and an Amiga skin for my cell phone."
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I disagree. I like seeing Amiga submissions. What does it hurt? If you don't want to read it, skip it. /. staff feels that this information is indeed worthy, they should feel obligated to pass it along to us.
Don't turn this into another Katz type thing.
If Mike happens to keep up on Amiga and he thinks that we are interested in some of the information he should feel obligated to share it. If the
Just cause you are tired of seeing 5 articles in the last 5 months doesn't mean it is overkill. I could stand 1 a week if it was informative. I know I wade through that many for other OSes and hardware makers... and so on.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Of course, that assumes that FreeBSD, Openbsd, BeOS, Winblows, linux, etc, arent eating up all my available partitions... (stupid partition tables)
I am !amused.
And I'll bet that all 81 remaining Amiga owners attended.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
And when I "sold out" in 1996, and got hold of what I needed to run Linux, I regretted it and still do. It's not that it wasn't the "right" decision, it's just Linux, wonderful though it is, is not the platform AmigaOS is. Neither are any of the other oft-proposed alternatives that I've tried. I've used OS/2 Warp 3, BeOS, QNX, and OpenStep, and while I thought all were pretty nice, they still don't quite get there.
I'm not saying AmigaOS was perfect, it's just that it defined an environment closest to the smoothest way of working I've ever come across. From the oft-maligned screens, which with later versions of the OS were done perfectly (you could decide whether an App would run in the current screen, a new screen, a new screen dedicated to that app, etc - I've yet to come across anything as dynamic and flexible since), to the CLI/GUI integration (but Workbench should have had a REXX port), to REXX, to the pre-emptive real-time multitasking, to the microkernel 'exec' that drove the thing and made the OS design so logical and intuitive.
Currently, a group at are trying to put together a decent platform independent version of the operating system. There are plusses and minusses to the approaches they're taking, they're keen, except on some hardware API issues, to duplicate AmigaOS as closely as possible, which means all of the good things but also some nasty holdovers like non-tracking of resources and a lack of memory protection. It's still great what they've got out so far, and I'm looking forward to the point a 'Slackware AROS' installation (or something similar...) becomes available.
Above all though, AmigaOS taught me something which, at the time, was an unpopular view - that the operating system makes the machine. The Amiga in 85 was revolutionary for its hardware, but if it had taken the Atari ST approach of installing a cruddy MSDOS clone and Mac-like interface emulator over the top of that harware it would have died on the spot. Amiga's genius wasn't to produce good hardware, but to, almost accidentally, produce an environment that made that hardware sing. And most of the approaches taken when building that environment could be applied to today, on hardware that is heavily influenced by what happened in 1985.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.