Slashdot Mirror
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
rocketjam writes "Amiga, Inc. announced today that it has sold the Amiga Operating System to KMOS, Inc., a corporation which 'develops and distributes enabling technology.' The deal included 'all of Amiga's right, title, source code, and all versions, from the "Classic Amiga Operating System" through AmigaOS 4.0 and all subsequent versions.' A spokesman said the sale would have no adverse affect on the release of a consumer version of AmigaOS 4.0 later this year. Amiga said it made the move in order to focus on the growing mobile market. The long saga of AmigaOS 4.0 continues."
Reader Da writes "there're always other options should the Amiga curse continue. Also mentioned on OSNews."
AROS
AFAIK, there's a difference between Kickstart and AmigaOS. Kickstart is the BIOS, and it's written for your version of AOS, but the AOS is a big problem too. AIAB (Amiga In A Box) is a project to create an AmigaOS install on top of WinUAE very easily. They're having to ask for an AOS Workbench 3.0 or 3.1 disk image to be fed into the emu upon bootup, because they can't distribute it.
As for doing "great things with the OS", while Amiga OS still have some great features, you'd be much better off adding [insert favorite AmigaOS feature here] to existing open source software. The Amiga OS as most of us know it was very intimately tied to an architecture without memory protection for instance, which doesn't really make it easy to bring up to date.
That said, if you want "open source Amiga OS", take a look at AROS. Aaron Digulla and a few other people have done a great job at writing replacements for almost all parts of Amiga OS, and you can run it under Linux (or stand alone if you prefer).
AmigaOS includes too much copyrighted material from third parties. It was not well documented. Although there were serious doubts, if the complete source of AmigaOS is still available for the owners.
The Amiga curse is pretty simple.. Any company that is connected to the Amiga will die shortly thereafter.. The originating company, Amiga, Inc. died quickly.. Commodore was healthy to begin with (C64 sales!) and so survived for quite a few years before succumbing.. Escom AG filed for bankruptcy protection a few years back; Gateway bailed rather quickly but still looks to have gotten a good enough dose to be in financial trouble.. The last owners' finances were a joke..
In addition to the various owners, there were several 'licensees' announced during the Escom period: a set-top box company (RIP) and a couple of resellers (at least one of which is RIP, I don't know about the others..) who were lined up for new A4000Ts......
In short, the Amiga operating system should probably have been open-sourced yaers ago, so that companies would have had an excuse for not making any money. Heh.
Forgive me if wrong, wasn't Amiga cursed by the BladeRunner curse? Are these the same thing?
No. You must mistake it with Atari. In "Blade Runner", we see many advertisings of companies really existing in the early 1980's, and indeed most of them went into dire troubles in mid and late 1980's. First of all, Coca-Cola entered the whole mess of the "new Coke", that even the company itself calls now "marketing infamy. And that's an euphemism, actually. Then there was Bell (antitrusted just after the theatrical release of Blade Runner), Pan Am and Atari. However, the curse seems now to be extinct. Atari returned now in big style, Coca-Cola is no longer in trouble, and even Pan Am returned (in a way). There was also one excemption from this curse - TDK (a huge TDK advertising is a backrop to the death of Roy Batty in the BR's finale grande).
The curse of Amiga has to do with the history of the thing. With the exception of a short period of maybe 2-3 years around 1990 it was beset by setback after setback. Commodore went backrupt twice during its production, the second time never recovering. Escom, who bought the entire Commodore operation, subsequently went bust due to a major cashflow crisis. Gateway then bought the Amiga name and technology, only to suddenly get into financial difficulties meaning it couldn't spend much on the Amiga operation, assuming it ever wanted to. After much argument, with somewhat obnoxious Amiga fans furious that Gateway was dumping AmigaOS in favour of an OS from QNX, they cancelled their plans and licensed the Amiga technologies to yet another group without the resources to really make much headway.
It's a big shame. If Commodore hadn't been so PC focussed in the early 90's, they probably wouldn't have gone bust, and we might even still have the platform - in some modernised form - around today.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Nope, Linus learnt to program on a Vic-20, and later a Sinclair QL.
Kernel guru Alan Cox is a former Amiga hacker however...
Another company buying the Atari name hardly counts as Atari "returning." (If you believe that, then I can arrange for you to meet with Martin Luther King, Jr. Only $500, plus whatever it costs to get my name changed.)
While the identity of a human being is quite well defined by law, corporate identity is more vague. Just by changing your name to Martin Luther King, Jr you cannot claim, say, royalties from the reproduction of his speeches. To the law, you will still be Martin Luther King Jr, formerly known as NSash (and if you got a parking ticket in your previous identity, you sill have to pay it under the new one). With companies, it's entirely different. British carmaker Jaguar is now owned by the BWM - but it's still Jaguar. Merges & acquisitions can kill or resurrect brands.
This deal has already happend in April 2003!
Great information politics, Amiga Inc...!
Their only capital is the trust of some spirited, hard core nostalgians. These politics trash this completely..
rpp3po
It's Amiga so it can't be as simple as just a plain sale.
Check out the press release. Amiga announced it sold the property on April 23, 2003, not yesterday.
Note the name Garry Hare as CEO of KMOS in the press release. Then look at this scan of his Amiga Inc. CEO business card dated April 29, 2003. http://www.amiga.org/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid =970
There was some discussion back in April 03 about Mr. Hare replacing Bill McEwen who according to this press release was still CEO this week. Or at least thought he was, whilst the person in charge of ordering business cards was the only one who actually knew he was out. :-)
I hadn't heard about the whole "is he or isn't he CEO" news until this slashdot artile prompted me to check out what's happened in the Amiga community in the last few years. Enough strange things have happened that it's like a bad TV movie. Who is going to play Al Haig in the movie?
It's a big shame. If Commodore hadn't been so PC focussed in the early 90's, they probably wouldn't have gone bust, and we might even still have the platform - in some modernised form - around today.
So PC focused? near as i'm aware they only released an xt, an AT, perhaps a 386sx or so. I still own a commodore b&w vga monitor that I bought from the only amiga shop in town. I guess I honestly don't have any details as to how much in the way of resources they put into the project. Were they like gateway and dell selling getting cheep pre-exising motherboards or did they go full swing and try to make an ibm compatable from the ground up.
I think the usual complaint I find easier to believe was marketing. Right about that time period, web-tv style devices were getting into vogue. Commodore had their CD32 system I believe it was called. Even a 68020 would make a decent internet terminal, and all the software to do it was freeware at the time. And what better way to sell your higher end machines then selling a base model game machine / internet terminal, well assuming they even thought to make one net ready.
Another drawback was the fact that microsoft gave away much in the way of development kits upon request, where commodore would charge you lots of moolah for the same damed thing. Say what you will about microsoft, but I found commodore as a company to be a bigger bastard tward those who wished to actually support the platform where microsoft seemed to actually WANT people to write for it. Commodore seemed to communicate the attitude it was a privliage to write for the Amiga.
But the primary power PC application between 1985 - 1990 was word processing. Not to dismiss the video toaster or other newtek products, nor postscript support. Mac and PC had word perfect, and they both had word. I forget what the last program I used on the amiga with my apple laserwriter, but while I could get 3rd party applications to create bitmaps to import into my word processing app on the amiga, it was a hell of alot less painful to use objects in word. Hell, most people would have prefer the lisa to get pie charts in their documents.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
It [apple II emulation] was real hard to use it though, especially near impossible for warez people. Needed Apple disk drive and Apple rom chips.
That's because the woz thought it was a good idea to use a tape drive controler on the floppy disk drive. Actually i'm sure circa 1970s this was a cost effective means of actually getting disc storage, so I excuse him for this faux paux. What annoyed me was the simple fact that once disc drive controlers lowered in price they never bothered to upgrade the apple II floppy drive.
As far as the apple roms go... I don't think they were popular enough to be pirated.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
It's hard to tell what would have happened had C= not gone into the PC market. Atari went bust (though Atari did make one failed attempt to enter the PC clone market too)
Not as bad as Atari's attempt to enter into the VME market.
Commodore ploughed absurd sums of money into a PC division which, as you say, launched pretty laughable systems. It believed that proprietary systems such as the Amiga only had a finite lifetime after which only PC clones would be taken seriously
Which in reality, one reason to get a PC clone by the time the 386 was released was upgradability and standardization lowering production costs. Even back in 1990 you could get an AT case for about the $50 spectrium where an amiga case cost you a fair bit more. Same with the Amiga keyboard vs an AT keyboard.
I have to agree their PC clones were pretty piss poor as far as bang for the buck. I actually wanted to support Amiga at the time, I was willing to buy one of their clones, but they cost about $1000 where I got a VIP 386sx16 system for under $600... circa 1989/1990 or so.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Have to go back through my memory for assigns, as I recall (and correct me if I'm wrong) it was used to assign a 'drive' to a particular location in the filesystem (eg, assigning SCRIPTS: to the startup scripts directory). If I'm remembering correctly, that's just like doing a symlink in the root really, so 0 points on that one.
Can't remember datatypes at all (well, I can remember there being 'datatypes' but that's all), guess I could go dig out my manuals and remind myself but I wont. I'l give the benefit of the doubt on this.
Arexx, well, yes, that is one thing that was usefull, not in the language itself (I only dabbled in arexx, I don't remember it being hot as a language) but in the ubiquity of being able to connect to an apps arexx 'port' to automate things (inter process communication). That was handy on many occasions and all the half decent apps supported it. I guess there is a loose analagy in communicating through unix/ip ports nowadays, but I don't think it's really as tight as the AREXX ports system, and certainly not a common thing in applications. So I'll give you 1/2 a mark for that one.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Ok, I'll bite
And I'll bite back:
- Datatypes (OS standard way of loading files in any format): From a user point of view, you can add support for a new file format to all your programs by installing a small file. From a developer point of view, you can add support for all OS supported file formats just by using this functionality. On Windows, I having to code support for simple things like BMP/PCX myself, or rely on 3rd party libraries (which means abiding by their licence, and supplying large DLLs with my programs).
- Decent GUI toolkit in the form of MUI (yes, it wasn't OS standard, but until MUI is ported elsewhere, it's exclusive to AmigaOS - though I have a feeling that the OS standard Reaction toolkit seems to work similarly): This is programming GUIs the way it should be - just say you want, eg, three objects in a row, and let the toolkit worrying about resizing; it's actually easier than programming with so-called "visual" editors, and has the advantage that windows/GUIs are always automatically resizable, so you don't have to worry about that (similarly you don't have to worry about things like changing font sizes). It's ridiculous that some GUIs are still written with hardcoded x/y coordinates.
- A side benefit of having decent GUI toolkits (MUI and others) for the user is that it's very common that windows are resizable as standard, and the contents resize to fit. There's nothing more enfuriating to see a tiny window on Windows with a small textbox or whatever inside, and I can't resize if (or instead, I can resize it, but the contents don't enlarge!)
- Assigns: Shortcuts basically. Windows only gets halfway with its shortcut - I can't include the shortcut in a filename, I can only use the shortcut on its own (eg, c:\shortcut\dir_inside_shortcut) - was this fixed in XP?
- ARexx: OS standard scripting language. It wasn't anything special in itself, but it was OS standard, so commonly supported by most applications. Which means you don't have to learn different scripting languages to support different applications.
- Screens: Multiple workspaces, done dynamically. Why do OSes like BeOS (and Linux window managers?) bother to implement workspaces, but then only stick with a fixed number?
Just a few off the top of my head. Also there are things which aren't exclusive to AmigaOS, but are still improvements over Windows (and since I use Windows, it still counts as features that one might miss):
- Doesn't make GUI mistakes that Windows does: It's much quicker to find menus at the top of the screen, and using the right mouse button means you can select (or unselect) multiple options with the left button, without opening the menu several times.
- Decent command line interface: I don't mean the commands/syntax, but things like being able to resize it, having a non-fixed number of lines (I can't believe I'm still having to tell Windows how many lines I want by buffer to be - did they fix this in XP?)
And not quite an OS feature, but I still miss the email client YAM.
Of course, if you wanted more than the SDK (Lattice C, for instance, or membership of their developer network - literally a network, based around UUCP) then the costs went up. But just getting the SDK, to plug into your favourite C compiler (eg Matt Dillon's), wasn't that bad. And the SDK was excellent, included complete documentation, an abundance of examples, etc, etc.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The timeline goes something like this, though I don't remember dates anymore:
1. Amiga - made the Lorraine prototypes and developed the custom chipset
2. Commodore - added an OS based on TripOS after screwing up CHAOS (Commodore Amiga OS)
3. Escom - German company that did more buyouts than they could handle, but did produce my own Amiga A4000T that I still use today.
4. Gateway 2000, now just Gateway. Nothing really happened here though there were lots of unfulfilled ideas.
5. Today's Amiga Inc. previously called Amino or something like that until they purchased the Amiga name from Gateway. These are the guys that just sold AmigaOS.
6. KMOS Inc. I know pretty much nothing at all about these guys. Hopefully they will do better with everything.
There had also been an attempted buyout by VisCorp, who not long after that went bust, I don't remember if they were competing with Escom for Commodore's remains or if they were competing with Gateway for Escom's remains. The guys running this now run a company called Genesi and are developing the Pegasos, another PowerPC motherbard and an Amiga-alike OS called MorphOS.
Also, Dell had submitted a bid to buy out the remains of Commodore, and supposedly made a higher bid than Escom did, but some political shennanigans left it in Escom's hands. Dell even made a small number of floppy drives for Amigas, high density things even (a rarity on Amigas), from some spare external laptop drives they had laying around. I have one such drive connected to my A3000 at home right now, and it's pretty cool. Don't really know what they had in mind for buying Amiga, but rumors were they wanted the Zorro expansion bus patents that they might have leveraged to own PCI.
This might have also been why Gateway wanted it, I believe they still own all the Commodore/Amiga patents and just licensed whatever patents to Amiga Inc.for the AmigaOS to be kosher.
That's funny...I had a bunch of Amigas, none of which were ever hooked up to a TV for more than a few minutes, and yet I did that all the time. The ability to manage a collection of screens individually was a function of the graphics co-processor.
The Amiga 500 CPU clock ran at 7.14 mhz.
I'll get back to counting these beans...
No, no. Quite different to symlinks, but can be used in a similar fashion, sort of. Devices on the system have a device name and (for drives) a volume name. The device can be accessed using by using either name, followed by a colon. If you accessed a device that didn't exist, a requester would pop-up asking you to insert that volume in any drive. In this way you could name floppies/CDs/whatever and access files across the system using the volume name, causing it to ask you for the relevant disc/disk when necessary.
An assign is like a virtual volume name. You could assign a name to a folder (or drive, or device), and access that folder through its assign name followed by a colon. If your program accessed everything through the assign, and it hadn't been assigned, it would ask you to insert the volume (as the name might be a removable drive). So you could copy all of your floppies to your hard drive, and assign their volume names to the same folder. They would then be accessed transparently. The system doesn't actually care where the file is, as long as it finds it via <drive/volume/assign>:<path>/<filename>
Another good thing is that if it couldn't find a volume, it would pop-up the requester asking for it, at which point you could open a shell and assign that name to a folder containing the file you wanted, then hit retry. It would carry on as if nothing happened.
There were other uses you could put them to, but the above example is the most common use.Assigns fit into the overall design of the system very well. I do miss them a lot.
> Can't remember datatypes at all
Sure you do, you just don't remember them being called that. Let's say you downloaded a GIF file that had no file extension. Workbench would recognize what the file was & open it, instead of the stupid three-letter filename extensions. It did not rely on a filename to determine an appropriate program to use. You could even open a file called "jumper.txt," and if it was really a GIF, it would still open it in the right program to view the image.
That and the pull-down screens (the RAM disk was pretty cool too) were the two primary things that I loved & Windows cannot do.
A600 was a good machine, but it broke software compatibility. (The chipset was changed.) The chipset in Amiga (The PAD, with their old names, Paula, Agnus and Denise) was very important. The chipset was intelligently designed (thanks to Jay Miner), so that good old MC68000 would not cry under heavy pre-emptive multitasking.)
It was also born dead, as it had no numberic keyboard. It had very good interfaces (with native IDE interface and the legendary PCMCIAish slot on the left)
Also a very interesting thing I think many are unaware: It was also the first Amiga produced with VLSI.
A600 was a good machine, but it broke software compatibility. (The chipset was changed.)
How many of these changes had already happened with the A500 Plus (released late 1991)? (Yes, I know that machine wasn't released in the USA; but they could have)
My point isn't that the A600 was crap per se- it's that it was a pointless and stupid Amiga variant for the time. It came out 7-8 months after the A500 Plus. Yes, it had new interfaces.... which meant that a lot of the old A500 peripherals no longer fitted.
Then (IIRC) when the A1200 came out (which is what the A600 should have been at its price), many peripherals for that didn't work with the A600. Piggy in the middle. Why did they release a new incompatible machine that was *broadly* no better than the A500 series?
As you say, it had a nice IDE interface (good point), but no keypad. This last point is very telling; I heard that the motherboard was stamped 'A300', which was meant to be C='s "budget" Amiga. From that perspective, the A600 would have made more sense.
My point is this. The A600 was more similiar to the A500 than the A1200; the A500 Plus introduced AmigaDOS 2.0 etc and upgraded chips, but was sensible to keep broad compatibility with the A500, because it wasn't an "all-new" Amiga. That "all-new" Amiga was the A1200.
The A600 was a different-but-not-new-and-improved enough distraction at a time when the A1200 should have already been out.
As I said before, in a market moving forward very fast, any significantly new machine with compatibility issues has to be significantly better on balance than the machine it replaced. The A600 wasn't.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Lots, but I'll start with 2...
Dynamic RAM disk: Just stick whatever you wanted into RAM: and as long as you had memory, it was resized whenever it was needed...
Recoverable RAM Disk (RAD): A RAM disk that could survive a reboot...also could be made bootable...
So it's just as good as AmigaOS' RAM disk, but uses virtual memory so it can even grow beyond the amount of RAM you have. Score one point for Linux.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Uh.. Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1984. Memory protection not much later via "Enforcer". Virtual memory in 1989 or so, with a third-party patch called VMM, though you had to upgrade you CPU to one with an MMU for memory protection or virtual memory (easy enough, but costly, because "big box" amiga CPUs were on "daughterboards" and "compact" amigas had a "trapdoor slot" that could take a new CPU).
Actually, using Enforcer illustrated where most of the performance of the AmigaOS came from - the fact it used message-passing-by-reference. When you turned on Enforcer, it had to copy memory a lot more, and became as sluggish as a PC...
I had never played with a properly multitasking OS, and I was amazed to find that I could pull down the application window and find the desktop sitting there underneath. The Amiga had better graphics, better sound, and a real OS.
Little touches on the Amiga Workbench made it a joy to use: it tracked which disks I had inserted and put icons for them on the desktop, and told me when to swap, by name (the ST GEM had a kludgy 'please insert disk B into drive A' system); applications had proper icons (the ST had a bizarre icon for all apps that looks strangely like a Sinclair Microdrive cartridge). The only plus for the ST was the built-in PSU and midi ports.
I remember going to use my parents STE after a few months with my Amiga and realising how far behind it was.
What you describe is the DefIcons system. A very nice system that was packaged with NewIcons.
DefIcons would, as you say, recognize file types without relying on filename extentions, and open the correct program for the file. (If you hadn't done some daft reconfiguring opening text files in DPaint.)
DefIcons was, from AmigaOS3.5 included in the OS.
Datatypes are really an easy way for programs to access files of different types.
Let's say I'm writing an image program and the user opens file xyz.
The filetype of xyz is not internally supported by my image program, but luckily I've written it with Datatype support.
If the user has a installed a datatype for the type of file xyz on his system, my program will open file xyz right away. Some datatypes even allows saving in the new format. (IIRC)
Irene KHAAAAAAN!