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Retro Activity: MorphOS 1.0
An anonymous reader submites: "You can read it from their development page if you like to get the word from the horses mouth. 'The current version is 1.0. Feedback welcome.' Hey, if you can't revive a dead horse, whip it some more, yeah?" All the better to run programs on their "old Commodore(TM) A1000, A500, A2000, A1200, A3000(T) and A4000(T) systems as efficiently as possible." Everyone has different uses for time.
The correct expression is to "beat a dead horse" not to "whip a dead horse."
Just FYI.
All I see on that page is version 1.0 of the "MorphOS Development Reference Manual," but nowhere on the site do I see anything about a 1.0 release of the OS itself.
Furthermore, the site says that the purpose of MorphOS is to run Amiga programs FREE OF the old Amiga hardware.
OS/2 isn't dead, it's just in really weird nitch places. I believe the interface of the new copy machine at the place I work actually uses OS/2. I hear many ATMs do also
Everyone has different uses for time.
Well, some like to play with old innovative OS:es, some like to play with old rebuild monolithic Unix:es, trying to use slow X servers as desktop enviroments.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader, trying figuring out which one of those two options I find more attractive.
I know what it's like when a loved one passes away. How it feels to find that you most loved piece of hardware has passed away. For 7 years my only computer was my trusty old Amiga 500. Even when CBM went up in flames I still went out and imported a A3000 from Canida. So I feel your pain.
It's time to let go man. Just drop it and walk away, don't look back. I said, don't look back.
If you still believe you must have all the benfits of the Amiga, get your self a nice linux box. Shoot, a nice Mac will help go through the loss.
Trust me, it's for the best
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
It used to be quite popular on ATMs and in other 'fat embedded' scenarios, when IBM was backing it. I've seen it used for process-control on wave-soldering equipment (where Warp's flexibility to run realtime scheduling no doubt came in handy), and on the item-pickup kiosk at Sears, where it was struggling sadly under the load, no doubt on a 486 of some sort, the taskswitcher forever popping to the foreground as the poor thing tried to keep up.*
It's also quite common to see in Point-of-Sale environments, where the same vendor seems to be providing software for both NT or OS/2. I believe Schnucks supermarkets in IL were still running it, though I could be wrong; look for telltale UI widgets next time you buy milk.
*I should note that, not unlike *NIX with XFree86, OS/2 has certain memory requirements that must be met before it'll fly. It came before its time; on a K6-2 with 128MB RAM, it flew with memory 80% free, but by then, it was too late, and NT- an even bigger ball of bloat, being at heart a reimplimentation of OS/2's C sources in C++- was reborn as Win2k about 4 years later.
Even though I'm typing this from a TiBook, stories like this remind me how much I miss using the Amiga. My A3000 sits on a shelf just above my BSD machine, and I still have my A500 downstairs (or A0.5K as some people liked to call it :) My 3000 (one of the few softboots) was having some hardware problems, and I just haven't had the time to really work at it. At the same time, I just can't seem to find a good use for it - Linux, BSD and MacOS X now take care of my needs.
IMHO, the Amiga made using computers fun. It wasn't *what* you were doing, but *how* you were doing it (except for those ^#@! guru's) Now that Windows has taken over virtually everything, computers have become just a tool for getting work done, and it's become too routine. Linux and to an extent, MacOS X, have captured a lot of the spirit of the Amiga, and features that I had on my Amiga years ago are starting to make their return (I missed my CLI on my desktop machine!). Yet, it just isn't the same.
Off topic, SASG still appears to be active. Looking at some of the MUI screenshots, it's interesting to see how similar parts of MacOS X are - back in 1995!
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Nothing like being a devout AC. In any case, the 800's graphics were indeed sired by Jay Miner.
;)
Atari's direct competition to the Amiga was the ST, which evolved into something comparable to the Mac, but was a pretty large ripoff in its first incarnations, featuring none of the coprocessing and wait-state outsmarting that made the Amiga grand.* It made a niche for itself as a musician's machine, given the built-in MIDI interface, but it featured no grand synthesis hardware itself- just the good ol' serial port that MIDI is, which could be added to any machine of the day for about $50.
The first ST also beat the Amiga in resolution, but only on Atari's proprietary displays, which had a different aspect ratio than most CRTs of the time. The decision to leave the Amiga at 640x200NI was a sad one, and made by Commodore management to keep the displays cheap and RAM usage down (remember, the first machines had to hold all of Kickstart, the OS, and program code in the stock 256k; this was quickly remedied in the 500 and 2000, when the 'memory crisis' of those days had eased somewhat, but the damage was done architecturally, and Commodore actually designed another chip just to deinterlace the output- Amber, found in the 3000, and trickled back to the 2000 in the official delacer card.)
So, at best, you could call the machines a tossup. The Atari had its two strong points, but remember, it was no faster than an original Mac, and no more able to multitask. The Amiga, in contrast, was a speed demon, its 68k mostly freed to execute program code, with the copper around to assist. With the first multitasking OS on a consumer machine, you could actually do two things at once, like listen to MODs on the Gary chip's multivoice audio output while you BBSed.
A sidenote: Why the hideous blue, orange and white default everyone remembers from Workbench 1.x? The Amiga crew hauled in the most broken television sets they could find, back when they still thought they'd be using them for display, and determined it was the highest-contrast scheme. Woz made a similar decision in going green on the Apple II- green phosphors were the last to die on your average color TV, and who was going to buy an expensive new set just to tinker with a computer?
Ralph Schmidt of MorphOS would not know the "spirit" of the AmigaOS if it bit him in the *ss. He and I fought very hard, a long time ago, about his plans of "unix-ifying" AmigaOS. He wanted to bring in more and more UNIX features, features that do not fit well within the Amiga programming model.
I cannot go into all the details here and now, but let me give one example.
AmigaOS does linking at compile time, and not at runtime. Its libraries work with a jumptable - fixed offsets in the table contain the jumps to specific functions, and the compiler selects the right offset during compilation (rather than during loading/linking as on UNIX). This is not particularly better or worse, simply different. I don't really want to fight a flamewar here, there isn't much of a point to that.
Amiga 'devices' (floppydrives, harddisks, the shell, the network, serial, basically _anything_ that does IO in some way) are simply libraries with a pre-defined set of functions in the jumptable. In C++ terms, they are objects, derived from a pure-virtual baseclass. This is what allows the OS to load devices at runtime - it simply loads it as a library, adds it to the device list and pretends it is a 'generic device that can do IO'.
Now this mechanism relies heavily on the AmigaOS way of doing libraries, and was effectively lost when Ralph fucked it up. I am sure he has hacked in some sort of support to 'emulate' it, but what makes AmigaOS special is not the fact that you can somehow fuck around with it to 'emulate' stuff, nor its feature set, nor its API, but its sheer _elegance_.
Any OS that wants to be its spiritual successor must seek to achieve that elegance, and if it cannot then it has nothing to do with it.
As for the PPC boards in legacy Amiga's: they are a pile of shit. Sure, doing something CPU-intensive on the PPC is reasonably quick. Mine can even run Quake, without a 3D card no less. But the PPC only runs a simplistic scheduler, and the real OS still runs on the 68K, and as soon as you want to do communication of any kind between the PPC and the 68K you have to flush caches on both CPU's. Whoosh - that was the sound of your performance dropping to C64-like levels.
These days I mostly use Linux and some legacy OS for gaming support, but I am still hoping one day we will see an OS as elegant as AmigaOS (neither Linux nor the legacy OS are particularly elegant). I kinda like QNX, but it has not much of a software base so there isn't much point to running it...