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Quadruple Interview With Amiga 4.0 Developers
Mike Bouma writes: "diff.org has done an interview with some important developers involved in the development of AmigaOS 4.0 PPC. These developers also helped to realize AmigaOS 3.9 which was released at the World of Amiga show last december. AmigaOS 4.0 will be available later this summer together with the release of new PPC based AmigaOne mainboards." I'd like to see a robust OS marketplace -- the more the merrier -- but I wonder if Amiga can ever really succeed, what with the continued promises, delays, rearrangements, direction changes ...
Sure, Grandma isn't senile anymore, ever since the brain transplant. And so what if 98% of her body has been replaced with prosthetics at one point or another? Why, she now has a IQ of 200 and is an Olympic contender, and lord knows thats all that really matters. ;P
McEwen, you do us all a disservice in presuming to call your company Amiga. You look down at us as if we were just another fringe market to milk for all the cash we're worth, and if you don't even have to go to the trouble to throw us a few bones along the way, why should you care? After all, if we wanted a modern computer, a real computer, we would have switched to the Windows PC long ago. The Amiga is truely dead now, with no hope of yet another buyer who might do that name any honor. And it shouldn't be that way. Is that all you see, a trademark with brand name recognition, an opportunity to foist ill-concieved and irrelevant technologies on us? No Amiga fan that I know has ever said "Hey, if only my toaster ran Workbench 5, I could play Populous and have breakfast at the same time!". AmigaDE is a copout, some sort of lame-brained notion that since most people's exposure to the Amiga is UAE, then it's only fitting to release the entire system as some trumped up emulator. Macintosh owners have Macs, because for some reason they want them. Ditto for PC/windows owners. As a matter of fact, they are probably happy with the variety of games available to them. So what, you're marketing to developers, some sort of crossplatform development tools? Only not calling it such?
Drop AmigaDE. Drop it now. Apologize for it. Quit saying how software is all that matters, you sound like a bum making excuses about why he doesn't work. Give us first-gen neo-amiga hardware with legacy zorro3 slots AND PCI. Kill Zorro after you've had at least a bit of token continuity. Show us a computer that will never, NEVER EVER have only one CPU again. Entry level dual G3/4's, with quad cpu on the high end. Market it to power users, to computer nerds, and those who have to have the most powerful of everything. But make it the first multi-CPU computer marketed to users ever. If there was one thing Be did right, it was the Bebox. But almost as soon as they did, they changed their minds, and decided "software is the only important thing". Look where that got them. License the OS, the hardware specs, but make some yourself. Send a couple hundred freebie systems to Adobe, to Macromedia, to all the hotshot graphics companies. Offer free hawaii vacations to their programmers, if they spend those extra 15 minutes they linger at the donut table actually porting code to AmigaPPC. If it's already written, there is no reason not to sell it. You can make money off licensing development tools after you've got some apps to show for it. Give free "I resurrected Amiga!" T-shirts to shareware developers who can prove they wrote something for it. Bribe Tucows to put up an amiga section. Do whatever it takes, but concentrate on making it the system to envy. Carve out a niche in the graphics and video market, and go from there.
I come to bury the Amiga, not praise it.
In 1994, I leveraged the knowledge I'd gained using an Amiga and Impulse 2.0 to get a job creating 3D models using 3DS for DOS (R2), running on '486. I was lucky. The Amiga was a toy, Impulse was a toy, and I considered myself lucky to have a $3K program running on a $3K computer (at my client's expense) for a change.
Using DOS and WfW 3.11 for the first time, I missed the close coupling between GUI and CLI that the Amiga OS had, and the opacity of the startup scripts (compared to autoexec.bat, config.sys, win.ini, and system.ini).
All the while I'd been using Macs to do digital audio and MIDI sequencing, along with DTP and video editing and Director scripting (since version 1.0). But I missed the control that the AmigaOS command line afforded. Eventually, I discovered MacShell, a CLI for MacOS 7.x, but as a userland app it lacked the speed I craved and the power I needed. The power of "/".
Fast-forward to the year 2001, Dave.
I have a fricken' fast machine with a closely coupled GUI/CLI system...Mac OS X on a G4/466.
It's like an Amiga on steroids, and it runs Photoshop, Quark, and Illustrator, along with Apache, ftpd, gcc, and ssh.
"Nostalgia is a disease of dogs." -- Lenin
Woof.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
From what has been said of it, the amigaone board is basically a relatively pc-like board with pci slots, usb, etc., except that it uses a PPC. It seems like this is exactly what is needed as a linux platform, that is, a standards-based, non-apple, ppc motherboard. If its anything like they say, this thing might very well be my next linux box.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre