Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Amiga Sells AmigaOS

Posted by timothy on from the sco's-in-the-market dept.

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."

28 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Aaah... Amiga... by Noryungi · · 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... =(

    --
    The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
    1. Re:Aaah... Amiga... by squiggleslash · · 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.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. Re:Aaah... Amiga... by zakezuke · · 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.

      --
      There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
    3. Re:Aaah... Amiga... by squiggleslash · · 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.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  2. Just wait... by Serious+Simon · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:Just wait... by Mister+Transistor · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      -- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
  3. Even with new owners... by superangrybrit · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Even with new owners... by baelbouga · · 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

    2. Re:Even with new owners... by Bitsy+Boffin · · 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).

      --
      NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
    3. Re:Even with new owners... by mdwh2 · · 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.

    4. Re:Even with new owners... by FromWithin · · 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.

  4. Most sold technology EVAR by ozric99 · · 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.

  5. Re:Better to have GPLed it by vidarh · · 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).

  6. New Amiga OS by turgid · · 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
  7. Re:Dawn of the Dead by Borg453b · · 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 -
  8. Incredible isn't it? by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    --
    Summation 2
  9. No way to run a business by PorscheDriver · · 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."
  10. Re:Let...it...die...peacefully... by Mobster · · 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 ""!
  11. Come on guys by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  12. Re:somebody explain the amiga curse? by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  13. Why let it die? by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  14. Re:somebody explain the amiga curse? by Trurl's+Machine · · 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).

  15. Has anybody checked........ by MrIrwin · · 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 ;-)

  16. Re:The AMIGA's Real Legacy..... by Anonymous Coward · · 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...

  17. I've Not Understood The Amiga Strategy For Years by pandrijeczko · · 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.
  18. The good old days... still! by banzaikai · · 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!)

  19. Clear Demand? Really? by Dogtanian · · 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).
  20. The deal is already one year old! by rpp3po · · 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