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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."
Whom is gonna buy it? Which industry segment is going to use Amigas?
I spent the 90's and early this century waiting for AOS4 but every time I go to their website I see "coming soon" banners. The last time http://os.amiga.com/os4/ was changed was Oct 15, 2003. I'll keep looking, but in the meantime the best way I'm able to use AmigaOS is via emulation.
Even though everyone slags off Amiga, someone always buys it when it goes up for sale.
Summation 2
There doesn't seem to be a business plan or strategy in place here - just knee jerk reactions to what is perceived as currently profitable, or upswinging markets.
It's sad, but Amiga has been kicked to death by a bunch of inept owners...
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
"Kitty," the AROS mascot, was drawn by the one and only Eric Schwartz, a famous artist in the land of Amigaylvania for many a year now.. He frequently draws sexy cartoon critters, so if you dig Kitty, you'll find plenty more with a google search.. :)
I left the Amiga scene about ten years ago but it was the fact that it was a fun machine to "tweak" and play with that got me fully into UNIX/Linux & made me realise what a "boring" OS that Windows is from the point of view of customisation/optimisation.
I even picked up a couple of Amigas on Ebay a couple of years ago and still have fun with Workbench and some of the classic games like Speedball.
Sure, AmigaOS is never going to mainstream again and I'm never going to use it in preference to Linux but Amiga users were a fun community to be in, just like the Linux one is now - unlike the non-existent Windows community.
Before people criticise the Amiga, they should be reminded of a couple of things:
1. "Home computers" like the Amiga, Atari ST, etc were platforms that were costly to upgrade and, as a result, not upgraded by most users. This meant that software developers for those platforms had to push the limits of those machines as far as possible - in turn, this lead to some great feats of programming. These days, hardware is cheap so it's easier to upgrade but programming today can be done sloppily because of endless APIs and languages that weren't so available or widespread then.
2. The Amiga was a superior hardware platform to the IBM PC for many years - it had better graphics, sound and multitasking. The fact it did not take off was due to inactivity on the part of Commodore to match Amiga development to the IBM PC as well as clever marketing on the part of Microsoft to get Windows onto every desktop. Please remember that while most IBM PCs were working in a single MS-DOS shell, Amiga users were working in multiple CLIs in a text or GUI environment.
It seems to be very easy for certain readers on Slashdot to label anyone who is not part of the deemed mainstream as a "zealot" without realising that software is not just about Windows and what runs on it - it's actually about what's
usable
by a particularly person and, more importantly, what's fun to use .Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
What ticks me off is that all these companies that buy Amiga IP simply don't have a clue what to do with it. Yes, Gateway had it for a while (my guess is they wanted an easy "home multimedia center", but couldn't get their heads outta their as^H^H Windows), but dropped the boing ball.
This was the same mentality that Sierra had. They were so used to doing things the DOS way, that the total concept of multi-tasking escaped them. Amigans stopped buying their games, and Sierra (instead of learning how to program) dropped Amiga titles. Many others followed suit. I found lots of brilliant UK and European programmers as a result, though.
Believe it or not, I rarely play games (even Bill Gates refered to Amigas as "just a game machine"). I have still to find a program that does what Softlogik's PageStream does (for the money). Until I do, my A4K is still a fast and fun platform, 11 years old and aging well...
A4000 040/25 24MBram 2.5GBhd OS3.9 iBrowse YAM
A2000 030/25 9MBram 540MBhd OS3.1
3-A500s, 2-A1000s, 1-A600, 1-CDTV
(Don't get me started on the 8-bitters!)
I remember an Apple II emulator running on Amiga which performs 1.5 times better than same cpu running Apple.
;)
It was real hard to use it though, especially near impossible for warez people. Needed Apple disk drive and Apple rom chips.
I now own an Apple G5 and using OS X, with 768mb ram... Guess what? Sometimes a question pops into my mind, what would happen if Amiga Inc. was well and alive (speaking about days they ship 1200,4000 etc) with THIS kind of cpu, hardware?
I bet we would be still joking
I heard that Linus almost got an Amiga, and was gutted to get a PC instead. I guess it worked out okay in the end though - if he'd had an Amiga he wouldn't have needed to write a decent OS (Linux) to run on it.
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. It wasn't out of whack with the prevailing attitudes of much of the press at the time, as many of the more serious publications were dropping coverage of all systems other than the PC, and it had become increasingly difficult to get corporate buyers to purchase anything but PCs.
Unfortunately, however, that didn't mean that standardizing on the PC would help Commodore. The PC was already a commodity platform with decent 8088 and 8086 based clones selling for well below $500. Unless Commodore's PCs sold well, it was guaranteed to make massive losses, and they didn't sell well. They weren't particularly interesting PCs, and they had a badge on them most people associated with 8-bit home computers.
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), though arguable the ST, running GEM on top of a version of CP/M that had been make to look like MSDOS, wasn't substantially different than the PC at any time in its life except for performance. On the other hand, Apple survived, and while it spent some years doing rather poorly, it remains one of the largest computer companies in the world. Apple survived by making systems sufficiently different from the mainstream that people loved them on their merits and kept with them. Perhaps Commodore could have done the same.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Great games: Speedball 2, Alien Breed, Stunt Car Racer, Lemmings, Xenon 2, Chaos Engine
Great animations: Eric Schwartz's Aerotoons & Amy The Squirrel, Tobias Richter's Star Trek animations
Great demo groups: RSI, Kefrens, Fairlight, Rebels
Great apps: Lightwave, Directory Opus, CygnusEd
Great multi-tasking hardware: e.g. opening four CLI windows, typing "format df0:" in each one and watching the Amiga simultaneously format the same floppy disk four times over! (Try that on a PC!)
Well-written OS: e.g. Workbench took the trouble of reading file-header information and using datatypes to decide whether a file was a JPEG, GIF, ANIM, etc. and didn't care what the file extension was. (Try that in Windows!)
Good memories that I'd be happy to return to...
...but for everything else, there's Linux.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Another thing, similar in some ways to Datatypes, that I liked on the Amiga, was the XPK library: A (defacto) standard way of handling compression and symmetric encryption. Write an XPK plugin thingie (I forget what they were called) for AES crypto or some new compression algorithm, and dozens of programs retroactively/magically got the ability to use it, just like with Datatypes.
Some clock-cycle-counting uber-hacker writes a DES that is 10% faster? All your software get to take advantage.
That is the way software components should be integrated! Very good design.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I was never wowed by all the fancy multimedia hardware -- not my interest -- but I remember being wowed by the fundamental platform, which did seem to be a lot more advanced than MS-DOS or MacOS. I came from a Unix background, and I considered true pre-emptive multitasking (as opposed to bogus "voluntary" multitasking) to be a fundamental OS feature. It would be a very long time before Microsoft or Apple offered this feature. AmigaOS offered it from day one. And on cheap hardware! It was obvious to me that apps written to the Amiga API would be drastically more stable and robust than similar apps on competing platforms.
So why didn't Amiga succeed? Not a curse, not bad luck. They were just late to the party. In 1985, computers that an ordinary person could afford to own had been around for almost a decade, and the novelty had worn off. It was just a couple years too late to introduce a new platform and expect it to succeed on technical brilliance alone. In order to survive, the Amiga needed to acquire a critical mass of users that would keep the platform healthy. And quickly, because an industry shakeout was imminent. I'm pretty sure the people who created the Amiga didn't understand this. But even if they did understand, they didn't really have enough time to pull this off.
In 1986, my brother-in-law asked for advice on buying his first computer. I strongly recommended the Amiga, mainly because it had MIDI hardware that he needed, and that he'd have to pay extra for on any other system. But despite the extra cost, he got a Mac. Why? All his friends and colleagues had Macs. His publisher used Macs, and if he didn't get one, he'd have a hard time sharing files with them.
By 1986, the user base Amiga needed was already committed to other platforms.