Amiga Sells AmigaOS

Aaah... Amiga... by Noryungi · 2004-03-15 22:43 · Score: 4, Funny

Memories, memories. At the time, my Amiga 500 could kick any PCs ass.

This being said, I do think we'll see another Amiga platform in the future... Just in time for that new version of Duke 'Nukem to be ported to it... =(

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The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)

Re:Aaah... Amiga... by The+Original+Yama · 2004-03-15 23:17 · Score: 2, Interesting

What made the Amiga so cool? I could go on for hours, but I'll sum things up in two words: Video Toaster.

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OLPC Australia
Re:Aaah... Amiga... by pacman+on+prozac · 2004-03-15 23:17 · Score: 2, Interesting

Yea, what exactly is "should the Amiga curse continue" supposed to mean.

If the poster had been around at the time, they would clearly remember the amiga A500, at a stonking 4.7mhz, running on a TV that would shit all over any PC at that time. Start looking at the A1500s and A3000s, PCs took a while to catch up.

Of course the PC's at that time were 286's and earlier, but I still remember laughing at my cousin for spending 5x as much on a PC that went 5x as slow and had a crappy desktop OS that looked about 5 years older.

Amiga curse indeed, well I guess if you consider anything high performance and not a PC a curses, you're right.
Re:Aaah... Amiga... by squiggleslash · 2004-03-15 23:55 · Score: 4, Informative

The A500 ran at a little over 7MHz. The A1500 was a version of the A2000, both of whom were essentially the same hardware as the A500 but with Zorro-2 slots, drive bays, and a nice three box design. The A3000: now that was a definite cut above anything that the PC market had for a while, with a 25MHz 68020, the fastest SCSI system around, and display hardware that output all of the Amiga's graphics modes at VGA refresh rates.
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.

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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:Aaah... Amiga... by Ilgaz · 2004-03-16 00:40 · Score: 2, Interesting

IMHO its also the amazing coder scene... They made never updated Alice sound chip 8 channel via coding while its 4 channel.

Realtime mix stuff you know...

Also remember the Newtek (if I remember right) "abusing" the machines backmasking(?) to open hundreds of lines of ham screens and show 4096 colours at hi res (not ham) mode...
Re:Aaah... Amiga... by zakezuke · 2004-03-16 01:01 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Re:Aaah... Amiga... by squiggleslash · 2004-03-16 01:23 · Score: 3, Interesting

Thing is, however badly marketed the Amiga was (which it was in the US, but was actually very well marketed in the UK and Germany - the former as the ultimate games system, the latter as the ultimate business system), that entire division was profitable. It made some errors, such as with the CDTV, but in general it did very well. Even the much maligned CD32 was selling like hot cakes and probably would have been one of the world's best selling consoles had C= not gone tits-up just after its launch.
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.

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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:Aaah... Amiga... by zakezuke · 2004-03-16 01:40 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

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Re:Aaah... Amiga... by squiggleslash · 2004-03-16 02:08 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Just noticed this. FWIW, I ordered the Amiga's SDK in 1992ish and got a four disk set for about 25GBP ($35ish) which must have been, considering the handling involved, close to cost price. The biggest pain wasn't the cost, it was knowing it existed - until one of the Amiga magazines published a name, address, and price to buy, most of us didn't know the thing existed.
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.

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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:Aaah... Amiga... by grahamlee · 2004-03-16 03:33 · Score: 2, Interesting

The 68020 definitely was worth complaining about, as the NeXT cubes had the 25/33 MHz 68040 processors in 1989. Now there was a UNIX workstation! Oh, and there one is, right in front of me with /. open in OmniWeb :-). The Amiga 3000UX was a very nice machine, pity I never had one. My trusty A600 is still going twelve years on though; little 80Mb HDD purring away. The A1200 gets a little more use, and the A500's been consigned to the attic :-(.
Re:Aaah... Amiga... by funkydom · 2004-03-16 05:37 · Score: 2, Informative

The Amiga 500 CPU clock ran at 7.14 mhz.

I'll get back to counting these beans...

there's always AROS by Richard+Stallionman · 2004-03-15 22:43 · Score: 3, Informative

AROS

Re:there's always AROS by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-15 23:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

"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.. :)
Re:there's always AROS by martingunnarsson · 2004-03-15 23:58 · Score: 2, Funny

Yes, just like it says in the fsking notice!

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Martin
Re:there's always AROS by tverbeek · 2004-03-16 01:56 · Score: 2, Informative

There's also MorphOS, which is (give or take) AmigaOS for PPC then taken further. Not open-source, but it's an option.

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Dawn of the Dead by Danathar · 2004-03-15 22:45 · Score: 3, Funny

The Amiga isn't Dead its UNDEAD.....

and this happens at the same time as "Dawn of the Dead" released in theaters? Coincidence? :)

Re:Dawn of the Dead by Borg453b · 2004-03-15 23:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yes it does seem to come back to haunt us periodically. I have fond memories of the amiga, but somehow these wild claims of "the next big thing" annoy me. I've done the amiga-zealot thing and I've grown out of it. The platform I mocked ended up stomping my previous platform of choice.

It's like fond childhood memories brought to life, though you know it isnt right: it'll never be the same. Yesterdays Amiga is a thing of the past - a fond memory. Perhaps it's just because I dont believe in the concept. Am I resisting a future platform move? I cant tell

--

- Mad, ingenous - they've both left you puzzled -
Re:Dawn of the Dead by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-15 23:09 · Score: 2, Funny

Jesus will bring the new Amiga with him when he returns.

Just wait... by Serious+Simon · 2004-03-15 22:47 · Score: 5, Funny

...for KMOS, inc. to announce suing AROS users because of "millions of lines copied from the AmigaOS source code"

Re:Just wait... by Mister+Transistor · 2004-03-15 22:51 · Score: 4, Funny

It says they licenced the Source, all rights, etc. Well, what about derivative works? :P

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"classis amigaos" by MartinG · 2004-03-15 22:48 · Score: 2, Interesting

I wish they would release the old amiga os versions into the public domain.
UAE would benefit from being able to ship the roms with it.

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Re:"classis amigaos" by bhtooefr · 2004-03-15 22:55 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

Even with new owners... by superangrybrit · 2004-03-15 22:48 · Score: 5, Interesting

Whom is gonna buy it? Which industry segment is going to use Amigas?

Re:Even with new owners... by baelbouga · 2004-03-16 00:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

I'd have to agree here. I can't see any companies making notable purchases of this OS. Looking at the Amiga site, I don't see anything that tells me why I should run the OS. We currently have three (or four) major desktop OS's. MS Windows, Apple MacOS X, and Linux (and *BSD). Solaris and HP-UX are commencing the slow death. Businesses still prefer MS Windows in the majority with Linux, in all it's flavors, making some major inroads. MacOS X still maintains a solid hold on the graphic industry and probably will never lose it due to very solid hardware, very solid OS, and the stylish nature that Steve Jobs gave it in it's creation. Other than creating another hobby OS that you have to pay for, I don't see where AmigaOS will fit in. I feel it would have been better for the AmigaOS to have opened it's doors and intergrated with the OpenSource world. Enhancing the development of XFree86 and Gnome/KDE would have been a much better choice. They could have their own distribution and style to a *BSD or Linux. And they wouldn't have had to fight a (STILL!) crowded OS market. - Baelbouga
Re:Even with new owners... by GregWebb · 2004-03-16 00:47 · Score: 3, Interesting

Reading their description of KMOS, I suspect they're trying to sell to mobile phones and the embedded market. For which AOS is pretty well suited - small, fast, proven. No memory protection or virtual memory are advantages in those markets because they also drop the lower overhead.

In any case, though, I think it's very sad to think that Windows _or_ Unix is the peak of OS evolution. Speaking personally, I'd rather deal with _neither_. AmigaOS has features that I miss to this day and neither OS seems to be growing in a direction that makes me think I'll get them back any time soon. BeOS, Plan 9, Smalltalk, Oberon, AmigaOS, Neutrino - all interesting platforms that have things to teach us and move things forwards.

My strong suspicion is that nothing will happen in the consumer market and that this is the final nail in an already pretty solid coffin. I hope I'm wrong, though, because there are so many nice things that can be done with OSs that aren't being served by current trends and look extremely unlikely to ever be so served.

Oh well. If anyone knows where I can get voodoo dolls for Irving Gould or Medhi Ali.... ;-)

--
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Re:Even with new owners... by Bitsy+Boffin · 2004-03-16 00:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

AmigaOS has features that I miss to this day
Ok, I'll bite, name one feature that you miss today from AmigaOS. I was a long ime Amiga user right from the original soft kicked A1000 with the "signature lid" to an A3000 kitted to the hilt with coolness (and still soft kicked actually), and I can honestly say that I don't conciously miss anything now that I had then (admittedly, it's been quite a number of years now).

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Re:Even with new owners... by wheany · 2004-03-16 01:23 · Score: 2, Insightful

Assigns, datatypes, arexx.
Re:Even with new owners... by zakezuke · 2004-03-16 01:25 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'd have to agree here. I can't see any companies making notable purchases of this OS

GEM os seems to have something resembling a nitch market. I would think that AmigaOS wins out over other choices because of it's very small CPU and memory requirements. As a desktop machine, I'll agree it's crowded, but as a handheld device it would hold some promise.

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There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Re:Even with new owners... by Bitsy+Boffin · 2004-03-16 01:40 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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Re:Even with new owners... by mdwh2 · 2004-03-16 01:59 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Even with new owners... by FromWithin · 2004-03-16 05:39 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
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.
Re:Even with new owners... by hesiod · 2004-03-16 07:47 · Score: 3, Informative

> 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.
Re:Even with new owners... by OneFix+at+Work · 2004-03-16 09:39 · Score: 3, Informative

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...
Re:Even with new owners... by jafuser · 2004-03-16 10:32 · Score: 3, Interesting

I miss the "multiscreen" paradigm. I could very quickly flip between screens at different resolutions on the Amiga. On windows/linux, you can flip, but there's usually much hard drive gnashing and window redrawing, and even then some things don't always refresh right. It's getting better, but it's not there yet.

Arexx. A monkey with not much more programming knowledge than basic could use it to script various core functions of running applications together. A lot of applications were supporting Arexx and it was fun to write batch scripts that affected programs that also had a GUI frontend.

I also liked how the filesystem worked. I could do an "assign MUSIC: dh0:media/sounds/music" and then during the remainder of my boot session, I could just type MUSIC: to instantly shortcut to that directory. There were a lot of nice standard assigns too, like C: for your command line programs, LIBS: for your DLLs, S: for your config files, etc. You could create a device driver which mounted new "drives" on your system. One of my favorites was TCP:, which let me open a connection and read/write data to it like a file (I did this often in arexx).

I also miss the "demos". Sure, we have demos on the PC now, but one of the advantages of having a fairly standard hardware chipset was that people could make some assumptions in their code and take advantage of them to push some impressive effects.

What don't I miss?

I don't miss the flicker =P And 24-bit color is nice. I know there were peripherals to remedy both of these, but they were expensive, and by the time I could afford them, my work required me to move on to the wintel architecture.

I just think Commodore should have hired Eric Schwartz to make Amy the Squirrel the Amiga mascot; maybe that would have increased sales =P

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Most sold technology EVAR by ozric99 · 2004-03-15 22:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

Way back in the mid 90's, when I was accessing the net on my souped-up A1200, Amiga had already been sold a couple of times. Didn't Gateway have a hand in it for a while, then Escom and god knows how many others. I understand that this time it isn't a complete company sell-off, but seriously, how many companies has Amiga (or major assets of) been owned by in the last decade or so?

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.

Re:Most sold technology EVAR by amigabill · 2004-03-16 04:24 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

Re:Better to have GPLed it by vidarh · 2004-03-15 22:58 · Score: 5, Informative

Better for us, I'm sure. Better for Amiga Inc. shareholders? Not in a million years.

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).

New Amiga OS by turgid · 2004-03-15 23:02 · Score: 5, Funny

Elvis and his rock 'n' roll buddy Roy Orbison, with help from ultra-karmic George Harrison, are rumoured to be working on a new Amiga OS. So radical is its design that it's being developed in the closely-guraded, and officially non-existant, Hangar 18 at Area 51, and incorporates innovative Aleph-1 algorithms developed bby the Greys. Bob Lazar is skeptical. "Without an abundant supply of ununpentium, I don't see how it'll get past single-user mode. And the threading model is too much like the NT kernel to be taken seriously." Jesus was unavailable for comment since he was taking his new trans-dimentional hyper-warp saucer interceptor out for a test run.

--
Stick Men

Let...it...die...peacefully... by ScottGant · 2004-03-15 23:03 · Score: 3, Insightful

I was an Amiga zealot back in the day. I owned two Amiga's. I absolutely loved them. They introduced me to 3D graphics/animation and photo retouching.

But their day is gone. The Amiga was great in it's day because it did some things no other computer could do at the time, but not anymore. Some people, a VERY small number of people, are trying in vain to hang on to this platform. You just have to know when to let go. You have to know to say goodbye.

Let the Amiga go...let it fade into computer history. It's time to pull the plug and take off the feeding tube. Yes, it's sad to see it go, but all good things must end.

--

"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.

Re:Let...it...die...peacefully... by Mobster · 2004-03-15 23:25 · Score: 4, Funny

"Let the Amiga go...let it fade into computer history. It's time to pull the plug and take off the feeding tube. Yes, it's sad to see it go, but all good things must end."

They can have my A4000 keyboard, when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

(With apologies to gun toting red necks everywhere)

--
---- You have been programmed by the Illuminati to not see the word ""!
Re:Let...it...die...peacefully... by Dogtanian · 2004-03-16 01:00 · Score: 3, Funny

Let the Amiga go...let it fade into computer history. It's time to pull the plug and take off the feeding tube.

In reality, that happened years ago. However, there are people out there who believe that the Amiga is still alive and working in a supermarket in Albuquerque.

--
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Re:Let...it...die...peacefully... by mdwh2 · 2004-03-16 01:17 · Score: 3, Insightful

Let the Amiga go...let it fade into computer history. It's time to pull the plug and take off the feeding tube.

This doesn't make sense. If no one is using it, then it will die naturally. If people are using it, then there is still interest and it shouldn't die. Telling ppl to "let it go" doesn't make sense - who are you to dictate what computers other people should use?

If the above was posted to any other article (eg, saying that people should let Mac die rather than ressurecting it with OS X, or saying similarly to any of the really obscure OSs that sometimes get posted about on Slashdot), I can't help feeling it'd be flamebait, but posting this on an Amiga story appears to be instant Karma.

Prediction by guacamole · 2004-03-15 23:04 · Score: 3, Funny

The year is 2018. The Amiga ethusiasts can't wait for the long awaited AMIGA OS release 24 years after the last release by Commodore. The Amiga Inc. promisses to start shipping the final product at the end of year after some unexpected delays.

The AMIGA's Real Legacy..... by Danathar · 2004-03-15 23:07 · Score: 3, Insightful

The REAL legacy of the Amiga OS and its platform is NOT the hardware or software. It's the PEOPLE! It's programmers and users and enthusiasts!

Many people in the Open Source/LINUX/BSD community came out of the Amiga world. Learned their programming skills and attitudes from hacking the Amiga. I'm sure what those people learned have had an effect on the LINUX and BSD worlds. And of course there is one important person we should never forget who was a fan/programmer of the Amiga...

Linus Torvalds

Would LINUX exist or how would it of evolved differently if Linus had learned to program on DOS or a Mac?

Re:The AMIGA's Real Legacy..... by EricTheRed · 2004-03-15 23:48 · Score: 2, Interesting

I think you are correct. Quite a few of us either started out programming on the Amiga, or like myself found the Amiga the best thing at the time to pickup languages like C, Rexx (ARexx was a brilliant scripting language) etc after hacking in assembly on earlier machines.

Even now, I still occasionally code in exactly the same way as I did back then, mainly because it works so well.

I still have 3 Amigas, but sadly don't have time (or room) to use them :-( One of these days I'll dig one of them out, just for a bit of nostalgia...

--
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
Re:The AMIGA's Real Legacy..... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-15 23:59 · Score: 5, Informative

Nope, Linus learnt to program on a Vic-20, and later a Sinclair QL.

Kernel guru Alan Cox is a former Amiga hacker however...
Re:The AMIGA's Real Legacy..... by nickos · 2004-03-16 00:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

And so it goes... by Mobster · 2004-03-15 23:11 · Score: 2, Funny

Yes, once again something of the Amiga dynasty has been sold off. Hopefully to a better place where it'll get it's due.

I still have Amigas and use WinUAE. I look forward to OS4 coming out. And I plan on buying the new mobo too. The fact that Amiga IP has changed hands more times then someone with OCD changes their underwear, doesn't bother me in the least. I have faith and that's all I need. IMHO, many skeptics will be proven wrong.

--
---- You have been programmed by the Illuminati to not see the word ""!

Incredible isn't it? by Rik+Sweeney · 2004-03-15 23:11 · Score: 4, Interesting

Even though everyone slags off Amiga, someone always buys it when it goes up for sale.

--
Summation 2

It all gets even more interesting here... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-15 23:16 · Score: 2, Interesting

http://www.mindrelease.net/amiga-thendic/

Scroll down to the bottom and check out some of the stuff dated March 15/04.

Somebody wanted the OS (not the HARDWARE!) real bad already, and it looks as if that isn't going to happen as he envisioned it.

No way to run a business by PorscheDriver · 2004-03-15 23:18 · Score: 5, Interesting

I was an Amiga fan many moons ago, but Commode et. al. always seemed to have been to the business school for the hard of learning.

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."

Come on guys by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-15 23:26 · Score: 4, Insightful

You really didn't believe there was going to be an Amiga OS `Next Generation`??? I gave up hope when Commodore gave up hope. Sure it was a great machine with a great OS - in its time. Move on.

Re:Nope. by MartinG · 2004-03-15 23:27 · Score: 2, Insightful

Because everyone should benefit from anything whether they have contributed to it or not UNLESS doing so would otherwise have a detrimantal effect on society.

--
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz .@adgimnoprstu

GPL Impossible by tmk · 2004-03-15 23:28 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

Re:somebody explain the amiga curse? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-15 23:29 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Not again! by jonr · 2004-03-15 23:37 · Score: 2, Funny

Why let it die? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-15 23:41 · Score: 5, Insightful

Every time any news of AmigaOS reaches mainstream news portals, there is at least one person crying "Just let it die". Well, if you don't want to use AmigaOS, then don't, but its my main operating system, and I love it.

I love using it, I love developing for it, and it doesn't bother me that I can't play the latest games. I use it for the internet (web, irc, email, msn, web development, etc. etc.), programming, music composition, graphics, all sorts, and i'm not alone.

If we want to use AmigaOS, how does that hurt you? If companies want to invest in it, its their money not yours. If anything else, it provides an interesting soap opera.

I'm one of the beta testers of the new version, and I for one am happy that my OS of choice is undergoing continued development by a small, but highly skilled team.

Re:somebody explain the amiga curse? by Trurl's+Machine · 2004-03-15 23:42 · Score: 4, Informative

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).

Re:Nope. by BiggerIsBetter · 2004-03-15 23:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

As opposed to Cloanto who did fuck all with it? C'mon, do you think they had anything to do with the 1.3 ROMS for gaming on the A500? It's a joke. Just another game of pass the parcel, with an OS trapped inside that is dead by the time the game is over. Like another poster said, Amiga and it's OS is dead, and it's companies like Cloanto and it's predessors that have killed it.

--
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.

Has anybody checked........ by MrIrwin · 2004-03-15 23:45 · Score: 5, Funny

If there is any Amiga source code in the Linux kernel;-)

--

And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)

Late 80's to early 90's... good time Amiga users by sdo1 · 2004-03-15 23:57 · Score: 3, Insightful

The late 80's to early 90's were a fun time for Amiga users. In college, it was Amiga vs. Mac vs. PC vs. Atari ST. The Amiga could do things those other machines could only dream about. There was a thriving online community dedicated to the thing. BBS's had tons of REALLY GOOD shareware available for it. And games? The Amiga was THE gaming platform of the time. PCs were for those who just wanted a glorified typewriter. But the Amiga was for those who really enjoyed computing.

Sigh...

The better technology doesn't always win in the end.

-S

--
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?

I've Not Understood The Amiga Strategy For Years by pandrijeczko · 2004-03-16 00:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

Firstly, in answer to all the "Amiga dead" comments that have been posted so far, what's wrong with playing around with old software and hardware?

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.

Re:somebody explain the amiga curse? by NSash · 2004-03-16 00:10 · Score: 2, Funny

Atari returned now in big style

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.)

The good old days... still! by banzaikai · 2004-03-16 00:13 · Score: 4, Interesting

Yeah, my Amiga 4000 ('040/25) can still pop up web pages faster than most PCs, email, play mp3s, and the like. Let's see ANY 486/33 (or Mac 040s) make that claim. If you look at where we've been, you'll see everything we're doing now either started or was sharpened/perfected on the Amy. I've even heard that Dave Haynie had been developing a controller that would use a "serial scsi" protocol, allow daisy-chaining of, maybe, 256 devices, and be hot swappable. Sound familiar? Nowadays, we'd call it "USB". Dave was working on his version in 1993/94 - years before USB got rolling.

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!)

Between the lines by MADCOWbeserk · 2004-03-16 00:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

A spokesman said the sale would have no adverse affect on the release of a consumer version of AmigaOS 4.0 later this year.

The same "later this year" Amiga OS 4 has been due out is since 2000.

Clear Demand? Really? by Dogtanian · 2004-03-16 00:17 · Score: 4, Insightful

The curse of the Amiga is how it could go for a full 10 years, bouncing from owner to owner, without actually coming back to the market despite the clear demand.

Who was the "clear demand" from? The hardcore fans or the public?

I remember that, by the start of 1993, *before* C= (Commodore.. I'd almost forgotten that pictogram) went bankrupt, the focus had shifted to the PC. People at my school were exchanging PC games, not Amiga ones.

Well, I'm no Amiga expert, but it seems that if C= had come up with something like the A1200 circa mid-1990, they might have stood a better chance. The momentum towards the PC was already significant by the time the A1200 was announced, and good though it was, I don't think it was revolutionary enough to make people change their minds back.

I don't understand what they were playing at with the moronic A600. The A500 Plus had pretty much the same OS, and although the A600 had a better spec in some ways, it was also *worse* than the (essentially) 5-year old A500 in certain respects, so was no better on balance, but couldn't use half the A500 peripherals.

In short, in a Red-Queen world where you have to keep moving forward, the A600 was a step backwards, and a pointless diversion from the A1200 6 months later.

They should also have included the A1200 technology in the CDTV (Amiga-based rival to Philip's CDi)... but would that have justified UKP 500 (US$750 or so at the time)? No.

So, was there really a massive demand for Amigas when C= went bankrupt? I'm not convinced. I saw the light when Escom wanted to charge *more* for the new A1200s (same spec as the year before). *No-one* was going to pay that for an aging machine in 1995 except the core fans.

If whoever owns the Amiga rights comes up with something cool, then good luck to them, but I'll judge it on the basis of something new.

--
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).

Re:Clear Demand? Really? by jayminer · 2004-03-16 08:37 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

The deal is already one year old! by rpp3po · 2004-03-16 00:42 · Score: 5, Informative

Hi, have you read the press release (Link).

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

Oh shit! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-16 00:43 · Score: 2, Funny

You know what this means, don't you?

KMOS
l
Microsoft!

Still, it'd be at least one non-crappy product that they'd own.

Remember we joked with Apple, Amiga people? by Ilgaz · 2004-03-16 00:45 · Score: 3, Interesting

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 ;)

Re:Remember we joked with Apple, Amiga people? by zakezuke · 2004-03-16 01:12 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

The hardware is what counted by nurb432 · 2004-03-16 01:55 · Score: 2, Interesting

Both for the atariST and amiga scenes, it was that the hardware was so far ahead of its time.

Each respective OS was nice in its own way ( personalites were different ), but were eventually surpassed, just as the hardware was.

However the requirments for the OS/apps also increased, almost negating the advances in hardware.

Its sad to see how little we have advanced over the years.. when you look back at what we did with so much 'less'.

I myself keep an old ST around just to show the 'kids' how things used to be. ( and an old 8080 to show even farther back... ) History is good for you.

--
---- Booth was a patriot ----

dCop/dBus by bluGill · 2004-03-16 02:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

KDE has dCop, which nearly all apps support. dBus is coming along that GNOME is likely to support (I think they have their own version already COBRA or something?) Combine that with scripting language of your choice (python has KDE bindings so that might be easiest) and you have must the same thing. There is even a REXX port for Unix somewhere if you like REXX.

Mind I've never used an Amiga so I'm not sure if they are used the same, but they could be.

Re:I've Not Understood The Amiga Strategy For Year by realmolo · 2004-03-16 02:06 · Score: 3, Insightful

What really killed the Amiga was the price. By 1992, when the new AGA Amigas finally came out, PC clones with hard drives and VGA cards and everything were getting pretty damn cheap. But Amigas were expensive as hell. Plus, about 1992 is when the "cool" games started being released for the PC, not to mention the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Once the Amiga was no longer the best game platform (and even the AGA Amigas were only about equal to a Super Nintendo for gaming ability), it was all over.

I just built a 68060 Amiga 1200 tower, so... (pix) by blakespot · 2004-03-16 02:36 · Score: 2, Interesting

I am not saying I'd use the Amiga for my main machine - I have Mac for that, but I just put a 66MHz 68060 Amiga 1200 tower together from almost entirely unused parts for games and demos and just messing around.

Pix:

Good stuff...

blakespot

--
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com

Given how many companies have owned Amiga... by allanc · 2004-03-16 03:00 · Score: 3, Funny

When is it going to be my turn to own the rights to AmigaOS?

--AC

Story submissions by Swarfega · 2004-03-16 03:37 · Score: 2, Interesting

Huh? My submission of this story (under the title 'Amiga, Inc. sells the family silver') was rejected about six hours before this one hit the main page! Different editors? Submission history (rocketjam has 17 successful submissions, Swarfega has 0 - and I've only ever submitted two)? I dunno!

The Legacy Of The Amiga by pandrijeczko · 2004-03-16 03:39 · Score: 3, Interesting

Some of the damn fine things the Amiga and its community bought to the world:

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.

XPK by Sloppy · 2004-03-16 04:47 · Score: 3, Interesting

Yep, datatypes were cool. Amiga web browsers were the first to support PNG. Someone (Cloanto, I think) wrote a PNG datatype, and then old versions of AMosaic (ewww...) magically could display inline PNGs. It was that easy. Last I heard, a certain company in northwestern USA is still working on getting their browser to handle PNG .. about a decade late.

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.

Re:Which OS has pull down screens like the Amiga? by Psion · 2004-03-16 05:02 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

No curse by fm6 · 2004-03-16 05:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

Five years older? I was working with OSs that were more advanced than MS-DOS ten years before.

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.

A600 == Neither fish nor fowl by Dogtanian · 2004-03-16 09:36 · Score: 2, Informative

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.

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Check out AROS by bferlin · 2004-03-16 10:27 · Score: 2, Interesting

Amiga bites the dust again eh? I hope Hyperion had something in the contract about this one.

Hey, you might have noticed the shot to aros.sourceforge.net.
It's actually pretty nice! Actually reminds me of booting up Workbench!

-- I downloaded a recent snapshot ISO and burned it. It booted great on my PC, and I was able to play a bit. It looks like it would make an awesome development platform for anybody! -- they've created something called 'ZUNE' that it a lot like MUI...

For those of you who hate programming for GUI's, amiga was the only system I programmed for that I didn't feel like I was muddling through to make GUI calls work.

It's 15 megs, download it and give it a try!

Click here if you're lazy

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Dynamic-sized RAM disk by Sloppy · 2004-03-16 11:25 · Score: 2, Informative

Ooh - one more neat OS feature that lots of people forget. AmigaDOS always had a ram disk - and it was dynamic. It was called RAM: and you could put anything you liked in there (as long as you had memory) - if there was nothing in there it didn't use any system memory. Thats something even the most modern release of OSX or Linux don't have.

Yes, a very neat farure. I missed for a long time (OS/2, Windows, and Linux 2.2 can't do it), but finally with Linux 2.4, you can essentially do something just as good. There's a filesystem called "tmpfs" which you can mount anywhere (like oh, say, /tmp) and it uses no significant space when empty, but can expand up to the full virtual address space.

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.

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Re:20 years later and still arguing :( by uglyduckling · 2004-03-16 12:35 · Score: 3, Informative

The problem was that, except for a few unimportant exceptions, the ST GEM was a single-tasking OS: when you launched an application, the desktop disappeared. My parents had an STE, and I didn't understand what all the fuss about the Amiga was all about until I bought a second-hand one myself.

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.

DefIcons, not datatypes. by GQuon · 2004-03-17 09:52 · Score: 2, Informative

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)

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