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Mini-ITX AmigaONE Board
bhtooefr writes "When I was checking Mini-ITX.com, I found this little gem, info on the AmigaONE Lite board that will be coming out. It's a Mini-ITX compliant motherboard, so you'll be able to throw an Amiga in a Cubid case. Pictures are here (first two - first is without CPU, second is with)."
Including one of those four propeller helicopter things sitting on his desk as a toy but never uses, an equally usless gift that costs far too much and has been used a total of once, the mini-ITX Amiga board!
now if you could just rig it so OS X would run on one of these babies...
moox. for a new generation.
Compare it to itself. There are PS/2 ports, 100mil spaced jumpers, 3.5mm audio jacks, etc etc.
I think the next time someone links a pictures page, a paypal donate link should go right beside it, in order to pay for their melted server.
:)
Those poor hardware sites just get pounded
Not quite. There is nothing "Amiga" about this board other than the name. But, for an embedded Linux box, it seems decent. But, I would sooner go for the Pegasos 2 and pay a fraction of the cost.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Some choice quotes:
During the deposition of Mr. McEwen, he admitted Amiga was insolvent. It currently has outstanding debt of 2.2 million dollars
McEwen has testified that Amiga's bank account balance is currently "about a hundred dollars"
There's a lot more detail in the file, but given the history of the company in general, and what seems to be a fairly consistant lack of producing an actual product, I'd be wary about actually spending any money with them (note, I'm referring to the OS, not the hardware linked in this article).
Incidentally, this is not a troll. There was a time when I was as fanatical an Amiga user as the next person. Personally, I got sick of all the "we'll have something next year, no really" promises about 6 years ago. Glad I didn't wait, frankly.
Of course, if you're a true die-hard fanatic, there are other products that might be of more interest.
I think it's Amiga users getting attached to the name and the 'image' and the what-it-stood-for more than what it actually IS.
The Amiga brought a lot of new ideas to the front. Preemptive multitasking in a consumer OS. Coprocessors. Good quality sound and video.
The thing is, now every machine made in the last 5 years barring some real tragedies have all that. We are all using the Amiga's legacy. About the only thing left is the extremely small efficient OS. Why it's only being made to run on certain hardware, I don't know.
How about the fact that it runs the Amiga OS 4 and is compatible with old Amiga software? That must count for something...
I really don't understand why these amiga stories keep coming up from time to time. No matter how good the original was the platform is hopelessly antiquated, and any new product will surely be a nearly complete redesign. It makes no sense to attach all that work to a quaint rebrand.
I was thinking roughly the same thing, but then I thought of a few positive points:
1) The PowerPC has a much cleaner architecture than any of the Intel Pentium chips and AltiVec blows the doors off MMX (in hindsight, IBM should have gone with the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8086 for the original IBM PC).
2) According to the article, the first production run will run PowerPC 750CXe and maybe the G4, but think about it. If they're successful, there's no reason they shouldn't come out with a G5 version in a year or two, perhaps even a dual-G5 version (mmm, yummy).
3) For you Linux fanatics, here's a platform without an entrenched operating system to go with it. Guess what most people will chose to run on it.
All in all, I think these are all good reasons for all you good little geeks and nerds to buy one of these boards, slap it into a cheap case and help port your favorite apps to it.
Honestly, I think it's because the manufacturers realize there's a lot of profit to be milked from thin client sales. They're not really interested in getting in big price wars with them - because despite the advertising talk about how inexpensive they're supposed to be, they know they've got a niche market that will keep paying the higher prices. Discounting the thin clients isn't likely to increase that market very much.
I worked with the Netier thin clients for a while (now bought out by Wyse Corp.), and they provide centralized management software for them that helps get users "locked in" to buying more and more of their thin clients. Why? Well, you have to go to considerable effort to build update packages that their software can push out to the clients, so software in their flash memory can be modified. If you spent a whole day building a package to, say, update the Citrix ICA client on your thin clients, you're not going to be too happy if it only gets used to update 15 or 20 systems. You'd rather have it do all 200, 300, or even 1000 systems in your company, right? So right there, Wyse knows you'll be back for more thin clients - whether they cost $600 each, or $150 each.
The majority of people I've seen using a freeware solution like LTSP are on tight budgets to begin with, so they're generally using it as a way to recycle old, existing computers - as opposed to shopping for bargains on new thin clients.
If BSD is dead, what the heck is AmigaOS? It was a great platform for it's time, however. Please don't misunderstand me to be an "Amiga Basher".* Who else was preemptively multitasking with a desktop OS back in 1990? No one, at least not on a commercial scale so large. And let's not forget AMIX, the Amiga Unix! The integration with video and sound was unprecedented. ASTOUNDING, even! Sexy machines they were way back when. And those CHIPS! Those wonderful lusty CHIPS!!!**
;)
;) I tell you what though, those chips are *FUN TO PROGRAM* even in this day and age.
But, alas, it would seem a decade's worth of lack of software and hardware development renders it about as irrelevant as you can get.
And since Amiga OS 4 is Linux based, why do we need to PAY for Linux based "Amiga" OS? We can just cut out the middleman and run Linux on the hardware. But the new Amiga hardware is sorta spendy, so why not just buy an Intel box and install Linux there? And you can emulate the Amiga environment on top of Linux just fine to boot. Which is really what they're doing with OS 4 , I'm afraid!
If you're a real Amiga enthusiast out of a sense of nostalgia, there's always eBay. I think nostalgia is a perfectly fine reason to be collecting hardware, I can totally appreciate that sentiment. What I would most definitely *NOT* do is try to use this old hardware to get any real work done. I know what time it is!
But is this new Amiga hardware really "Amiga" just because a buncha German folk are saying it is? To me, what makes an Amiga is chips. Chips that are highly specialized and each of them doing their jobs very well, robustly and with gusto. Does this new Amiga board have modern analogue of those wonderful old chips? I have to say, I really have an honestly hard time understanding a country who can't stop using an outmoded computer brandname amd who considers David Hasselhoff to be a major pop music sensation! I think I can actually understand the odd French peoccupation with Jerry Lewis a tad bit better than either of those two traits.
*Despite the fact that bash does run under OS 4.
**And so were the names of the chips. Denise, Paula, Amber, Alice, Gayle, Lisa, Akiko, Grace. Those names had style. Even Gary and Budgie and Ramsey had class, tho not "sexy" names per se like the aforementioned.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
the same kind of people who use C64s, program games for atari 2600s, vic 20s, ti99 4a's.....
-- troutsoup.com
Just like you can sell a G5 based machine running OSX and call it a Mac, or a Pentium 4 / AMD XP based system running Windows XP and call it a PC.
The Amiga just skipped the inbetween stages.
Sure it doesn't have chips named Agnus, Paula and Denise and it doesn't come with a Zorro slot. But then again, how many Mac's come with a Nubus slot and are powered by a 68000? and how many PC's still have ISA and a socket for a 8087?
Who's to say that if the Amiga's development hadn't followed a more 'normal' path, that what we would have seen today with is anything different from the Amiga One?
I'm only 21, but I grew up on AMIGA's. I lived in Holland till I was 10, so it was only natural. I didn't have a PC clone untill I was 12.
*deep nostalgic sigh*
As far as I can tell, the AMIGA really was just about the perfect computer. I can't even imagine what computing would be like today if Commodore still ruled the ring... (Remember - they really did in the late 80's in every place but the US)
Sig.i>
And Arexx. The language is a nightmare, but having almost every app scriptable with a common scripting language, letting you "remote control" one app from any other was heaven.
And Screens. Even thought splitting the screen with multiple resolutions isn't really doable on modern hardware, it would still be nice (though I think some version of Enlightenment supported it for X).
And placing the application menubar at the top of the screen - frees up so much screen real estate.
Deluxe Paint, or a similar quality SIMPLE paint program (sorry, Gimp just doesn't cut it - not even remotely - Photogenics sort of works on X, but it's bug ridden)
Datatypes!
Assigns, though that is FINALLY making an appearance of sorts in X based desktops with multi rooted virtual filesystem support.
A quick, responsive GUI - my 2GHz x86 based PC with a GeForce, and 512MB RAM is still less responsive most of the time than my Amiga 500 was...
AsmOne, now that actually made assembly programming pleasurable (of course 68k assembly was a dream compared to the horrible hack that is x86)
And DiskMaster II or DOpus...
And Workbench. It's embarrassing that file managers under X either are slower, or is a nightmare to work with compared to a basic file management interface that's didn't change fundamentally after '86.
Damn, I want my Amigas again now... Maybe it's time to give Aros a spin :)
The world as it used to be:
Musician: "Atari rocks!"
Gamer: "Amiga rocks!"
Designer: "Apple rocks!"
Accountant: "PCs are the future!"
All others together: ROFL
*Sigh*
Back in 1992 I had a megaST with a 40MByte Harddrive and two screens, color and b/w. That machine looked really cool, even better than the apples from back then.
While were at it: What really rocked my world was the Atari Portfolio. I could never afford one so I got one on ebay a few months ago. Its serves as a really neat terminal for configuring firewalls and stuff via a serial conn.
So, do you think that current MAC:s are not MAC because they are so different when compared to original MAC computers ?
Or do you think that current PC's are not PC's because they are not like opriginal IBM PC ?
Why should amiga be always like original A1000 ?
Amiga can change as much as other computers.
And AmigaOne doe run OS4 and Amiga software. "If it feels like Amiga, if it runs newes AmigaOS, if it runs original and new Amiga software then it IS an AMIGA" So AmigaOne is as much Amiga as A1000, it just has modern hardware.
Pegasos is basicly the same computer as AmigaOne, no matter if it was designed by the different people.
I don't run around saying that Pegasos is not Amiga: I don't go as low as you. But if you really think about it then Pegasos is what can't be called Amiga, it can't even run newest AmigaOS 4.