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Happy Birthday, Amiga
Sebby writes "Today is the Amiga's 20th anniversary. Commodore officially introduced the Amiga 1000 with much fanfare at the Lincoln Center in New York on July 23, 1985. It was the most advanced computer of its day. The Amiga 1000 was originally conceived a few years earlier by a small California company called Amiga, Inc. and was financed by a group of Florida doctors looking to invest in a killer game machine."
It was the most advanced computer of its day.
Funny, I always thought the Cray-2, also released in 1985, held that title.
Trolling is a art,
I can only dream :-)
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
I broke-out my commadore 64 w/ 300 baud connex coupled connection just to post this. The graphics are surprisingly good.
I can remember back with the old systems like the Amiga. I was completely amazed when I first got to use one, and I thought that computers had reached perfection. Now if I was to show someone one they would laugh and think it was something a high school kid built in his garage.
Voice your opinion!
Now, my 3000 is relegated to playing Settlers once in a while.
I would expect many here to know, but people still do run Amiga hardware. In fact, when the company that made Fusion, a Macintosh 680x0 emulator, first started making a PPC emulator, they wrote it first to run with Amigas that were upgraded with PPC chips.
I don't get it.
Wow. Twenty years.
I remember playing with an Amiga 1000 after it got out. An Amiga 500 was my 4th computer, and one of the finest machines I ever owned. I am getting old!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The real problems that plagued the Amiga was the lack of cheap hard disks from Commodore, Later in the Amigas life the lack of memory protection started to plauge the users too... If they actually released, standardized the platform perhaps it would have helped...
On the otherhad the killer is that everyone that has bought the IP has either died, or promised to do something with it, and done nothing.
As a plus Amiga's gave rise to smart GPU's, offloaded IO & a better less cpu centric design of cheap computers.
Somehow I just started thinking of Monty Python.
Oh well, if it's celebrated, I guess it's still alive.
Happy birthday, Amiga!
What I liked best?
Debugging. Coolest system error name...
Software Failure. Press left mouse button to continue.
Guru Meditation #0100000C0.000FE800
Sigh.. had they marketed it right, we'd not be talking about MS Windows at all. A machine and OS far ahead of its time.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
..the Amiga was a nice machine for its time. I remember checking an A1000 out at a friends place many, many years ago. The graphics and sound on the machine were quite amazing, compared to what was available on the market. Sad that the Amiga never got the recognition it deserved.
20 years huh? Wow, I didn't realize it's been that long.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
It's not a birthday, it's a birth anniversary. Do you wish people "Happy Wedding Day" twenty years into their marriage?
Amiga 4000 and the Video Toaster still used in video production today. Once we go 100% non-linear, maybe it will go away.
My first computer game job was at a company that had a bunch of former Amiga freaks working there. One of the company's tools was an old sprite tool that only ran on the one Amiga left at the company. All the dev work for our Sega Genesis project was done on a x86 DOS machine - a complete piece of shit to work on.
However, the few times I had to use the Amiga for the tool I couldn't wait to get back to DOS. What a ugly piece of shit OS the Amiga was. The Amiga computer hardware and desktop have to be the clunkiest and ugliest system I've ever encountered.
And I say this as a foaming at the mouth, ready to piss on Microsoft's grave, DOS/Windows hater.
Amiga. Shudder.
Amiga, how I miss you. I think I'd be disappointed if I got another Amiga, though; the world has moved on.
-Rich
To this day I still pull out the old Amiga ROM kernel manuals to look for inspiration. Beautiful design. Way ahead of anything else at the time and still a good design in many areas even by todays standards.
The Amiga version was the best version of Simearth ever made. The pc version looked like crap by comparison. Also the original Simcity was best on the Amiga.
If commodore had stayed in business Id probably still have an Amiga.
Man, the red and black Guru Meditation screen is probably the creepiest error message I've ever seen. No soothing blue or green to be found there. :)
The most "advanced" computer at that time depends on what your criteria are. The systems from Cray and Amiga are very different, yet still both very advanced.
While the Cray-2 may have been the most efficient number crunching computer in 1985, the Amiga was the top of the line when it came to multimedia and workstation applications. So while the Cray-2 didn't offer the amazing multimedia capabilities of the Amiga, and the Amiga didn't offer the pure crunching power of the Cray-2, it isn't correct to say that either is more "advanced" than the other in all ways.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
In fact, I still have both my A1000 and my A4000/040. I've thought about trying to sell them on eBay, but I just can't seem to give them up. I have my old 1080 monitor hooked up to a DVD player in the bedroom and use it for watching movies while I'm falling asleep.
See my blog at Who's Who
Ah, the first proper computer I had was a Commdore 64-something. It had a 3 1/2 inch drive to the side of the keyboard and an external floppy. The problem was, I still didn't know how to use it before it was whipped away and I was given a Windows ME with a 666mhz celeron and 64meg ram. I think that the Amiga crashed less.
I don't know if they all had this, but my Amiga 1000 (the one in the room in the original box) had signatures on the inside of the plastic cover. I recall a little dog footprint too.
I'm not sure what I'm saving the machine for though...if only I could get a variant of Unix to run on it...but its lack of a MMU made the 1000 ill equipped for modern OS's.
This poses another question- how long will a system last boxed up like that?
(This was from the site above -but I remember doing this on 1.2, with an original 1000).
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
Since I put my Amiga 2040 into the basement years ago, I'm wondering what the name of a specific game is. It's about a jumping ball and you had to collect keys for locks. The ball jumped up and down all the time and you where able to direct the ball left and right. I don't remember its name, but maybe one of you know it?
I rember using an Amiga in art class. Back in highschool (class of '97). We had one amiga in our computer art class because despite more modern software on the mac and pc, the amiga still had some software that enabled us to do things that photoshop and illustrator didn't... Particularly in the use of fractals. And to think in high school it was already 13.
Amiga Faithful: We're closin' for lunch.
Common sense: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this computer what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Amiga Faithful: Oh yes, the, uh, the AmigaOneG3-SE...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
Common sense: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
Amiga Faithful: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's gathering his resourses and making plans for a comeback!
Common sense: Look, matey, I know a dead computer platform when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Amiga Faithful: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable computer, the Amiga, idn'it, ay? Beautiful 4092 color graphics!
The Amiga always seemed to he the rich mans Commadore 64. I have no idea why but them little disks always seemed to be in the hands of rich kids where as us "normal" kids had tapes.
:)
Then again maybe that's just how I bitterly remember it because everyone with an Amiga had Lemmings and all I had was Flimbo's quest. Although it was quite impressive when it stopped working after an entire year of 12+ hours use a day..
I like muppets.
I loved my amiga 2000. I also sold it when I realized I needed a PC to stay current... and I got myself a 386. I hated that piece of shiat. I also hated my 486, started to like my pentiums a bit. Now I love my AMD running Linux.
Meh.
...should be marked as the Amiga's deathday. The Amiga was great, but Commodore blew it, from the way they advertised to the shabby way they treated dealers. Long live Amiga, death to Commodore-Amiga.
In my opinion, the most advanced computer of the 80's was the MSX:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
I remember seeing the demo model of the Amiga 1000 in a local "mom and pop" computer store before the production shipment. I was blown away. It was so much more advanced than any other home computer at that time, both graphically and OS (AmigaDos). I got on the waiting list for months, and I payed full list price, I believe about $1300. I needed the new high density floppies (1.2 MB) and payed $49.95 for a box of 10 floppies!! For a laugh, I still have that box with the price tag still on it. And I still have the Amiga 1000 sitting in a box somewhere. Later I added a 2 MB memory expansion which was another $450. Ah, the bad old day, which seemed so good 20 years ago.
I used to own an Amiga500 back in the day, and got me a A1200 when they were released. Everyone I knew who were into computers had an Amiga, PC:s were more or less unheard of and generally ridiculed as clunky, ugly and unsexy (to a bunch of greasy-haired computer nerds anyhow :) ).
...and you know, everything was a hell of a lot more fun back then. ;)
It always bugs me how the Amiga is forgotten when media - mainstream as well as trade press - do pieces on the "history" pf home computing. Back when no one outside universities and the military had heard of the "internet", and computers were considered wierd and anti-social, we were cruising BBS:s on our 1200 baud modems.
It is interesting to note that parts of AmigaOS were written in BCPL, due to its derivation from TRIPOS. BCPL was the predecessor for C, for those who weren't aware.
AmigaDOS was later rewritten in C for Kickstart/Workbench 2.0. Indeed, it is quite interesting to see that they could create such a fantastic workstation OS (often unmatched feature-wise until the late 1990s by Windows and Mac OS) in a high level language, and running on lower-end hardware.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
(Chiming in with all fellow retrospectives)
I grew up on an Amiga 500. It, as well as a friend's A2000 which I bought of of him some years later when I was making the switch to PC, are still sitting in my parents' house somewehre. =) (In fact, probably in almost pristine quality with a snapshot of the BBS that I was running on it some years later until the fateful day I decided to pull the plug and make some more desk space for the new Mac that had infiltrated and upstaged.)
My first introduction to computers was actually the QNX/Unisys ICON system in elementary school (yep, a networked system running a Unix-like operating system... something that *also* ahead of its time, well, kinda). Following that, the Commodore PET and 64 on which I learned BASIC and got my start in software development. =) A few years later, I was back to the ICONS where I started learning C in about grade 8, but through that time we had an Amiga in the house.
Ours was an A500 which Dad bought from the local Canadian Tire (!) and revealed as a surprise family Christmas gift in 1987. It was a phenomenal machine. I can still recall the school-yard conversations with my 286- and Mac SE-toting friends about how many simultaneous colours their computers could display ("16, eh? Howzabout FOUR THOUSAND NINETY SIX, foo'").
Ahh, good times.
Truly a revolutionary force in its day, though. The intervening years (death of Commodore, slow atrophy of the Amiga brand and innovation) were painful but inevitable to watch, kind of like a withering tree you know is past its prime and on its way.
-b
myselfmusic
Commodore was not the only company either. When the IBM PC came out there were several computers that were better imho. The business community all went with IBM though. It's like they thought all the other computers were toys.
As I recall, the Radio Shack TRS-80 (affectionately known as the Trash-80) was quite a competent business machine.
IBM had the name, anyone could develop for the PC and, thanks to the Technical Reference, anyone could build a clone.
It was the only girlfriend that the geeks of 1985 could look forward to having. I miss her.....
"The Amiga 1000 was originally conceived a few years earlier by a small California company called Amiga, Inc. and was financed by a group of Florida doctors looking to invest in a killer game machine."
It sickens me when I hear that people only want to invest money in killer games. 1980s, 1990, 2000s, it's all the same violence, only the "FPSs" are of higher quality. I believe that children are not inherently evil and they will love any game that they are forced to play. Wo why not invest in nice and healthy games like Super Mario? Wouldn't you love Super Mario fully exploiting your hardware? I know I certainly would. And that is exactly the problem with Amiga. With all the colors unknown in the era they could have been the #1 platform on the kids marked and they wasted it trying to sell violence. And what do we have today? Terrorism. Do we have any good games? No. What is the bottom line? Exactly.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
If you own a Pocket PC, the popular Amiga emulator UAE was ported some time ago.
a did=4561
More details at http://www.pocketgamer.org/showthread.php?s=&thre
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
I loved my Amiga 1000 and even did some professional development for it. I kept it running for a great many years before it finally gave up the ghost. There were many things that contributed to it's demise, but one of them has to be it's over specialized hardware.
Part of what made it so awesome was how incredible it was at graphics. How perfectly tuned it was to making a video signal. Unfortunately that limited the design of the hardware, the speed of the processor. Even if you had a faster processor for it, everything had to slow down to 7.xxxx MHz (IIRC) when you hit the video interface.
Then the PC got better video cards, and I could just upgrade that one part. The Amiga was always playing catchup with custom designed chips tuned to the hardware. After a while it felt like they were always a day late and a dollar short. It was still an amazing machine for video, but for a general purpose system it had seriously lost it's luster.
Still I miss it...
What do you know I wrote a novel
I had two A-1000s when they first came out. I remember writing AD&D character generators and dungeon programs using that Microsoft Basic that came with them.
The Amiga was an awesome box. Too bad Commodore wasn't able to keep innovating. They had a real shot at long-term market share, and blew it. The accompanying article is a great lesson on how NOT to run a technology business.
Tougher Rules Needed For Airpsace Incursions?
that was the days! :)
You know I tried to play on an Amiga the other day, and damn, I was still really good to some of the games. I kicked ass in Speedball 2, and my hands just seemed to remember all the good moves. Likewise in some of the other games (Kick off etc)
I wonder whats else of hidden and really useless skills my bodyharddisk contains
The Amiga 1000 officially introduces you!
I grew up playing a 3d space sim/shooter called elite on my parents amiga. It was the first computer game I ever loved. It's here. What a good game.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
I used an A3000 up until late 1999, when a near-miss (near-hit?) lightning strike blew out its I/O (and the external modem, and melted the phone line). The A2000 I sold to a friend was in use even longer. Still have an A500 and A1000 (and the dead A3000) in the basement. In the 1980's I used the A2300 Genlock a fair amount (always wanted a NewTek Video Toaster), and then there was the Lightwave software, and the PPS Framegrabber video capture units (still have two of these). These were the heady days of early DIY video, and there was simply nothing remotely similar on any other platform at the time.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
The only disappointment is that this version came without Basic or Rexx so there was no programming capability. Talking of which: is there a PC->Amiga 500 cross compiler?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I had an apple and then went up to the amiga.
It had "HAM" graphics (hold and modify) so you could finally have real pictures (lots of porn of course).
It had true multi-tasking (not sure if windows has that yet- I think it got it with win2k). By true- I mean if one process dies, the machine didn't hang- that process did and everything else kept running with it's preemptive slice (come to think of it my win2k machine still hangs up for over a minute sometimes in azureus or when the virus scanner runs so win may not have preemptive multi-tasking yet).
It had an incredible battlemech game that we just played to death (probably helped some guys fail college).
It had a great networked tank game where you drove around a city blowing it up and hunting for your buddy's enemy tank- but the atari had one with smily faces that supported more people.
I wrote a shareware game for it (Spaaaaace Aaaace!) which was a space war clone with cool graphics and hit location- got a cease and desist order from "Bluth Enterprises" - they had a video tree game with the name B(. It was right about then that game started requiring 10-15 people to produce (since you needed real artists and musicians and the programs were so large you needed multiple programmers)
I got my first virus on the amiga. My buds didn't believe me until it happened to them- it spread via floppies but tended to make the floppies crash. It said
Something wonderful is happening
Your Amiga has come alive!
Great computer that commodore ruined.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Is this kinda like how we still celebrate Shakespeare's birthday? Even though he is dead.
we had a club of all army guys that would meet once every 2 weeks on base. everyone would bring their games (on 3.5" disks) and some guy would sell stacks of blanks - 50 for $20 i think. and we would spend literally all day copying each other's games. i usually came home with 400 floppies to try out, and usually about 50 new good working games. there were also a few companies that listed every game in their catalog and sold "backup copies" including documentation for as little as $2.
i guess in a way we helped drive them out of business by not supporting the software developers but i made $600 a month. if i had to buy software for $30/title, it just wasn't goign to happen. i DID buy a few titles, mainly from psygnosis, who released just AWESOME games that were a decade ahead of their time. and other guys in the barracks saw me having so much fun, they went and got amigas too. these were totally computer illiterate guys who had never heard of a mouse, back in 1990.
we would set up very rudimentary LAN parties with 2 or 3 amigas connected by serial cable and play roller coaster racer all night... amazing fun. i remember the first time i saw populous. it was at about 8pm, and next thing i new it was 6am and time for exercise. i was tired but excited all day :)
i'm not surprised IBM won the PC race but i am sad and disappointed that the creativity and genius that went into games 15 years ago seems to be gone now. there used to be 20 or 30 new games every year that were totally original. now 1 original game like katamarcy darcy comes out and everyone talks about how great it is :( if only they knew...
actually i just played a (PC port of) an amiga game a couple days ago. i was surfing around and somehow saw a reference to Overlord, which was a great game for the amiga, really fun and creative graphics about taking over planets. anyway i googled around a little and discovered i could download and play it for free! the sound is PC speaker beeps instead of midi quality music and sound samples the amiga had, and the graphics arent quite as good but it still brings back fond memories :) http://www.mirsoft.info/gmb/music_info.php?id_ele= MTEyMDc=
We created a game for it called the Zen Meditation game. The object was to sit in lotus-position on the Joyboard and move as little as possible for as long as possible.
Sounds great, where can I get a copy of this fun-fest?
I should have bought an Amiga.
It was 1986, and the IBM PC-class machines were expensive and boring. My home PC was a PDP-11 with 8" floppies and a VT52-compatible terminal. Time to upgrade. The Macintosh was out, but far too right-brained for my taste -- I liked a keyboard more than a mouse. Plus I didn't dress well enough to fit into the Mac world. No, Amiga was the slick machine. Nice Motorola CPU, graphics, sound.
But hey, there was this other machine, the Atari ST. The original 520ST (half megabyte of RAM) had an external floppy, but the followup 1040ST had a nicer package. Color or b/w monitor. A lot like an Atari, it seemed, but at least $100 cheaper. Being based on the same CPU as a Mac, and having a WIMPS GUI, its nickname was the Jackintosh, after Jack Tramiel, Atari's grand high poobah.
But it turned out to be less of a bargain. Atari didn't have Amiga's or Apple's software skills. Instead, it turned to CP/M producer Digital Research, who adapted GEM to the Atari, under the name TOS (T for either "The" or "Tramiel"). TOS was in ROM, under a soldered-down RF shield. And it was way premature. So it crashed a lot. Did I mention the shield was soldered down? No trivial project to upgrade.
Not that an upgrade came out within a reasonable time. And the successor TT was late, if it ever happened. Atari went down the tubes, leaving a rather less devoted user base than Amiga's. But that's a long story of its own...
So there are still efforts to revive pieces of the Amiga, but the ST is little more than a footnote to computing history. And the PC steamroller ran them all over, except the devoted Mac users.
It's kind of sad that so much computing history has been obliterated by the PeeCee. Still, european amiga users mostly jumped ship to Linux.
m emprotect:amiga-memprotect)
I remember the [Euro]Demo scene of the early 90s. Good Lord Lir, there were some amazing women into coding on the Amiga. You'd head off to some scandinavian computer camp for the weekend, and be surrounded by 5'10" brunettes who could make an Amiga raytrace in 64K - and they mostly weren't men in drag! (boy, I checked!).
Good times.
Linux could stand to learn a lot from AmigaOS - handling of removeable media being #1.
If you're looking for modern-day "Amiga successors" there are a few choices - Linux+KDE (== NewIcons+ClassAct) or Linux+GNOME (==MagicWB+MUI), obviously, but also:
AROS: http://www.aros.org/ - AmigaOS, but on x86/x64. All the coolness and failings of AmigaOS (i.e. no true memprotect. preemptive-multitasking:co-op-multitasking::full-
DragonFly BSD http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ - Matt Dillon, author of THE Amiga compiler, DICE C, turns his hand to OS design. Like Amiga, only without historical resource-constrained decisions. Message-passing everywhere.
AMIGA ROCKS ON!
I'm going to have to get my 1200HD out of the closet and go for a quick spin again.
I was in the military overseas when I got a loan to buy a new computer. The BX had the new Amega 1000's and I wanted one badly, but couldn't afford it. So I settled for a C64 and didn't regret it, but a guy in my barracks had one and I spent a lot of time playing with it. It was truely way ahead of it's time in terms of graphics. To say it was the most powerful computer at the time isn't quite true, but for the home market it had the best graphics of anything out there.
Nothing has ever beaten Amiga for sheer elegance of design, and the beautiful integration of hardware and software. It was like a Beethoven masterpiece rendered in plastic, metal and silicon.
Superseded now in power, yes, but not in design so far. And STILL far, far, far better designed than anything Intel, Apple, or Microsoft have served up.
I finally ended up throwing my A1000 and A2000 away last year. Had been sitting in the closet for many years. Thought about trying to find another home for them but figured no one would know what to do with them. And I did not want to put them in a garage sale and have to answer the question "Does it come with Windows" every time someone looked at them.
I opened up the A1000 to look at the signatures on the inside of the case one more time. Then set it out on the curb along with the A2000. Got many years of work out of both systems. Ran UUCP and was pulling a partial USENET feed during much of that time.
I still laugh at times thinking that back then we had a system that could do full multitasking with a fantastic winowed operating system in as little as 256K of memory. And the system was stable, ran them 24x7.
Earl Weaver's Baseball.
Best. Game. Ever.
I still miss Turbo Silver. It was "easy" but full-featured 3D animation software.
So who else has one here, besides me? And do you have an extra monitor cable?
...
Yeah, but did it run Windows?
here is a list of the Computer Chronicles references to the Amiga. For you young whipper snappers out there, Computer Chronicles was the way we got to see all the neat computer stuff we couldn't afford, provided we could pick up the PBS station with the antenna.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
http://www.modarchive.com/
:)
I loved MOD music files. Thankfully, winamp can play them, too!
The amiga could do 4-channel music with sampled instruments, when PC's could just do bleeps and tweets. I still wonder why PC sound cards didn't emulate the amiga sound chip.
I hope you're a troll because those two computers were worth serious ca$h. An A1000 with signatures is an original edition. Antique computers are worth real money second hand.
Spanish for "friend who is a girl".
Also a computer that many boys and girls became deeply emotionally attached to (like real girls). An amazing (at the time) computer of the (AD) 1980s. Featured a mediocre (but none the less astronomically friendlier asm than x86) CPU, but offloaded most processing-intensive tasks to other silicon - just like a PC of today. Said "other silicon" was the ne-plus-ultra (seriously- nothing will ever surpass Amiga 2D graphics, it was the logical ultimate of what one can achieve with a 2D canvas catering to trichromatic hom.sap.) of 2D Graphical computing, and began to enroach on 3D Graphical computing (with the "Akiko" chip) just when parent company was going belly-up.
Had true pre-emptive multitasking, but never made a song and dance about it (reaction of user community to Win95 was "Er. What? You mean the other desktop platforms _haven't_ been able to do more than one thing at once? My god, we just assumed they could...")
Had an OS that merged GUI and unix-style CLI computing. In 1985 or so. It took 15 years for the computing "mainstream" to catch up. Only things more advanced available were "Lisp Machines" and "NeXT Cubes" - both of which were 10x - 100x more expensive than AmigaOS.
Amiga's main purpose was to serve as a lesson to others, unfortunately. Amiga illustrated that business incompetence (shoot Medhi Ali on sight) would trump technological excellence every time. The executives of Commodore Business Machines killed the Amiga. The Amiga core team had a Sega-Saturn comparable "triple-A" (AAA) chipset waiting in the wings, and it was killed to avoid hurting the over-priced, under-specced CBM-PC line. The CBM execs lived it up in the Bahamas while Amiga descended into some sort of horrible Zombie living-death.
After the Amiga debacle, most european hackers decided they would never again invest intellect and emotion in a closed-source platform, beholden to the whims of a vendor. Hence the irrevocable commitment to open source espoused by European Linux folk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just packed up my amiga. The cost of upgrading the 4000 was too high. But I still play with it with UAE the wonderful amiga emulation. The prgrams at version one and run faster than my 4000. And runs AmigaOS 3.9. I run it on my laptop so I can say I have an Amiga laptop :)
I bought it on July 1, 1988. I remember that day like it was yesterday...
It was so cool at the time, being able to display the raytrace of the rocking chair and the "El Gato" anim. It impressed the hell out of my friends and relatives. The PC's at the time were all green screen DOS boxes that were only good for running Lotus 123.
Amiwest is going on today (23rd) in Sacramento, California.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
ok, i'm way too uninformed. apparently amiga produced a version of the A3000 that came with UNIX System V. this was the A3000UX, shown here and here. If someone has any bits of information in recollection of this machine could you inform us all. This is very interesting, I never knew this existed.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Man, I remember doing green screen video compositing on my Amiga almost twenty years ago. That is hard to believe.
Happy to say I am buying a NewTek TriCaster. They were the Adobe to the Amiga back in the day. They still make a hell of a product.
I think I'll go pull out my Amiga right now and play some Walker by Psygnosis (the Bungie to the Amiga in the day).
I remember getting the A1200 as a replacement for my Amstrad CPC 464 and what a jump up it was. I've fond memories of spending whole summers playing the best game ever released for Amiga, and possibly the best game ever full stop. The PC version looked nowhere near as good as the AGA version. The game? Frontier Elite II of course. WinUAE is great, but without the AGA version, it's just not as good as I remember on the old A1200...
It took the PC at least 5-20 year until they 'catched up' and had a similar virus thread
Already posted :
0 82837
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156062&cid=13
Your faithfully,
Zorro.
It's in a box in the basement, but I have it. I fired it up a couple of years ago when I was reminiscing about the F/A-18 flight sim. I was remembering it as super-realistic, extremely responsive, and smooth to play. I fired it up, and got was looked like a 320x240 ascii art rendition of the Bay Area. Funny how your memory plays tricks on you.
Still, I remember spending/wasting hours/days flying around san francisco in a fully loaded F/A-18 - flying under the golden gate, buzzing the airport, carpet bombing alcatraz... those were the days...
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I'm still using my A3000 with a network card to save stuff on a bigger disk, I turn the thing on once a week or so to use a few programs I've written that I haven't ported (they're in assembler).
Amazing Amiga advantages, circa 1986:
Boots quickly. 4096 colors. A1000 had a color NTSC video out as well. Vast 8M memory space. Shared libraries. Ram disk. Annoying empty floppy disk click. Programmable video hardware. Great SCSI implementation (in later models). DMA graphics and audio processing. Preemptive Multitasking OS
allowed for Interprocess communication and other great tricks. Developed IFF data formats, which were very flexible.
After Amiga died, I went on to NeXT, which died also, until it became Mac OSX, and then BeOS, which died and has yet to resurface completely. I'm used to it - I also worked on Vaxen.
I remember a demo of the Atari next to the Amiga. The Atari was playing a little SID-chip type tune (now rather popular). The
Amiga then played a hi-fi stereo excerpt of the Grand Canyon Suite. Very impressive, even at 8 bits.
Had they put in a built in MIDI port, it would have been able to get further into the music market; as it turned out, it became a power supply for the Toaster card.
-- Real Stupidity is the Artificial Intelligence of the 21st century
Where do I begin? The whole thing seems like it was so long ago, that it was more like a dream than anything...
I was professionally involved in the Amiga industry for many years. I did a TV show on a local cable station when I was in highschool where we introduced the Amiga with our local Commodore rep. I published newsletters for local Amiga groups. I coded for the Amiga.
But I really started to get involved from a professional standpoint near the end of the Commodore's life. I took a job as the CTO for a small Ottawa-based firm doing Amiga sales. I hired a few developers, and we purchased some Amiga technology which we enhanced. We were responsible for the following titles (that I can remember):
DesignWorks 2.0 (Structured drawing package -- I used to work at Corel) We purchased the assets of New Horizons and DW was the product that we first worked at improving. We worked 80 hours a week for months on that product. It was *way* cool.
KB-10 (a device that allowed you to use a PC keyboard with an Amiga)
?? - I don't even remeber what it was called. We added disk cacheing, DPMS screen blanking, HD spindown, and cool screen savers to the Amgia. What was that called? I can't remember... Ah, thank you google. It was called "PowerManager".
Tsunami - We had turned the CD32 into a set-top box, WAY before they existed anywhere else. I still have the prototype in storage... A STB in 1994... Maybe the world's first?
Of everything, the KB-10 was the most popular, and it was our own from beginning to end. You know you've got a good product on your hands when a german company comes out with a copy called the KB-100... I saw one for sale on e-bay recently. I thought about buying it because I don't have any more of the originals.
Ah, memories...
You know, I still have schematics for all of the original Amiga computers up to the A3000 in storage (spirited away from Commodore's Toronto office while they were busy collapsing)... Every year I bump into them and think about throwing them out, but just can't bring myself to do it...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
I still have my A1000. Can't bring myself to part with it.
The Amiga was a fine example of the persistent techie belief that "better" should always win. It doesn't. We whacked our heads against that one for years in the Amiga market.
So we started out trumpeting the advantage of sound (few PCs had sound; the guys who eventually successfully marketed the original Sound Blaster were refugees from the Amiga market) or color (remember, VGA was rare and expensive when the Amiga was released) or video compatibility with deep color (Targa cards were rather static and very expensive) or windows (GEM? Windows 1.x?) or video manipulation or color desktop publishing or 3D animation or emulation (we had Mac, Win, DOS, Atari, etc.) or persistent RAM drives or hypertext help systems or any number of other whizzy features, and the PC and Mac marketroids would *successfully* say "Who needs that?". Rinse, lather, repeat.
The distillation of my Amiga market experience came from the lips of a drunken Amiga dealer at a party in 1992 or so. Of course, a popular topic of conversation at these events was discussing why the so-obviously-superior-to-us-annointed Amiga wasn't outpacing the Mac and PC in sales.
This dealer said of the past few years (at that time) that "It was like we were all from five years into the future, back in the days of radio."
I did say this guy was drunk, didn't I?
But he was right. It was as if we'd all seen what television was like, but we were trying to sell to people who really liked radio and couldn't imagine the value of audio plus moving pictures.
We all knew they'd want television someday, but it was always hard to hear they didn't want to buy it.
I have a developer A1000, serial number 36 or so.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
I have often said that had Apple been selling the Amiga, we'd all be running offshoots of that platform, rather than the PC. It was ten years ahead of its time, and I mean that almost literally; it wasn't until 1994, running Linux, that I could get even CLOSE to what I could do on my Amiga in 1985.
In looking back, it is amazing the number of things they absolutely nailed wih the Amiga. It was the first machine to use fully-programmable custom chips for sound and graphics support. That hardware was immensely powerful; it could do memory copies (the blitter), palette shifts (the "copper", and I don't remember why it was called that anymore), sprites, collision detection, four-channel stereo sound, and probably many other things I'm forgetting, without even using the main CPU at all. (well, except to set things up, at any rate.)
The system could display separate programs with separate resolutions and color palettes on the same screen at the same time. You could literally grab the Workbench screen and drag it down, revealing some cool demo running behind it..."Boing!" in the top half, Workbench in the bottom. This was done by some clever copper tricks... on the fly, over the space of about two scanlines, the copper would shift the entire display mode and palette, and start displaying screen data from a different arbitrary program.
Later, a variant on this technique was used to create the best graphics the Amiga could manage...Sliced HAM, or S-HAM. The default 'high color' graphics mode, HAM, could have any 32 base colors out of the palette of 4,096. Any pixel could either have one of the base colors, or it could H)old the color of the previous pixel A)nd M)odify either the red, green, or blue component. S-HAM took this a step further, and swapped the base 32 colors on *every scan line*, so that you could have many more colors available. Some of the S-HAM pictures were absolutely stunning. It did, however, put a huge load on the graphics hardware... the machine really crawled when running that mode. So it was really only useful for slideshows... you couldn't animate that mode, to my knowledge.
Then, on top of that, they mostly nailed the OS. There were three major components to the AmigaOS; Exec, Intuition, and AmigaDOS.
Exec was the multitasking core, what we'd probably think of as the kernel in Linux land. It was immensely efficient. The task switching method that RJ Mical came up with was so fast that it ended up going into the Motorola programming manuals. I can't find the numbers offhand, but I believe the Amiga could task switch in less than twenty clock cycles. Whatever the actual number was, it was FAST.
Intuition provided the windowing libraries; it was what kept windows properly layered and coordinated, and routed user input. That would be roughly the equivalent of X, though much simpler. Workbench, the built-in graphic UI, was an optional load; you could stay in 'console mode' if you wished. The Amiga had no true text-only mode, however. Even if you had just a single CLI window open with nothing else, it was still drawn in graphics mode. (scrolling on the Amiga was never very fast because of this).
AmigaDOS, I believe, did all the disk and file I/O. It was rather Unixish, but it was very slow and had an absolutely horrible user interface. (Fortunately, it was easy to replace the DOS programs with better ones, and most people who really used their machines did so.) Filesystems were abstracted too, which was a good thing.... the early filesystem on the Amiga was very fragile and very slow. Later on, the Fast File System was introduced, which sped things up a heck of a lot. With FFS, hard drives were quite comfortable, but floppies were never very good. There were many special custom loaders that sped things up (much like on the C64), but the floppies were always slow, no matter what.
Of the three major components of the OS, AmigaDOS was the weakest, and was responsible for a lot of the early (justified) griping about the pl
Sometimes I wish that I had kept at least one of my Amigas but I threw away Amiga 2000HD a year and a half ago and gave my CD32 to a local thrift store.
My progression in computers went from MSDOS->AmigaDOS 1.3-3.1->Windows 95-XP->OS 10.2-10.4.
The Amiga platform is dead but I will always have a warm place in my heart for those days.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
A4000 with an accelerator card, both a 68060@50 and a PPC 604@233 MHz mounted on it.
SCSI disks, BVision. Haven't upgraded the audio stuff yet, but due to the nature of the Amiga, I can still play 16-bit sound etc(That was one nice way to get PC users to shut up, playing their 24 channel 16-bit XM music on a bog-standard A500....)
Ah, so many fond memories....
The Amiga was a good system but so was the Atari ST. The only problem was that both were designed to compete against each other, not the PC and MAC. It didn't matter if the Amiga or ST had superior graphics or sound or multitasking the Mac already had its share of the market as well as the PC.
I owned an ST and had no problems with Amiga owners. Both systems had great applications as well as games. But the PC ended up as the one who took the games crown from both even though it was inferior for its time.
I still use my ST and I hope all those Amiga users with Slashdot use their systems as well. We have a good history to look back upon as well as a lot of fun!
It took me a few years to work up to throwing them out. But I kept having to move them around in the closet and finally got tired of that and realized I would never start them up again.
:)
I would like to know how much the other person that replied would pay for those systems. A quick check on ebay and A1000's are apparently going for less than $50.00. I don't call that real money.
Not even worth the trouble to post it to ebay.
Note the .sig, eh?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
AmigaMagic introduced some concepts that were, like the Amiga itself, ahead of their time. Take a look and let me know (alex at owonder dot com) if you ever got to play with this at is was only available to UK dealers but included some fun (but creative and useful) demos and a very web like animated scrolling page with hyperlinks to the individual applications.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Dentists, not doctors, you nitwits.
Does anyone remember the option in Worbench 3.0 (maybe in others) where you control the on-screen cursor by holding down a key and using the arrow keys to scroll. Very useful if the mouse died, or if you couldn't be arsed to use the mouse when you had the amiga on your lap (Amiga 1200 in my case). I wish you could do that on modern computers, there a program out there that does it?
Rock is Dead! Long live Paper and Scissors!!
Had a friend that I met through the Amiga that developed Disk Mechanic for the Amiga. Eric Quackenbush. He was independent before he went to Greater Valley Products to develop for them. He was a HELL of a programmer. Last I heard he was doing things for OS/2 but this had to be 10 years ago.
I remember I had lured some guys from Pixar to a Chicago Amigafest to see if they wanted to port Renderman to the Amiga. The Amigafests were small affairs compared to the Apple or Microsoft ones back then, but I got a guy to fly out to it. He was nice and everything, but you could tell he thought it was kinda small-time. He was polite and suggested that we just make a Renderman compliant renderer for the Amiga. And looking back he was right, the Amiga just didn't have the horsepower to run Renderman at the time.
This was when Alan Hastings had just come out with Lightwave for NewTek...having hired Alan after his Videoscape 3D was a semi hit. Videoscape had competition from Sculpt-Animate 4D and Turbo-Silver 3D. But it was Lightwave that really broke through. This was in the days when it was a single guy doing all the programming/developing for the product. Remember them? Alan had very little help when developing Videoscape and I believe he had a partner join him in making the first version of Lightwave. Newtek was the center of the Amiga universe at the show with the VideoToaster and Lightwave.
I miss that really. It was a small group of very rabid fans that loved this machine. I used to go to Amiga user group meetings and met a lot of really friendly people. But all good things come to an end. I just wished the Amiga had a more dignified death.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Though it has been years since I fired mine up, don't know if the boot floppies still work.
I remember this as the heyday for games by Psygnosis. "Shadow of the Beast" blew my mind in those days. I can still remember the flute based soundtrack.
I remember some insane vertical scroller that played syth rock and was a total blast to play.
Many years ahead of its time, but the Evil Trammel left it to stagnate.
I still got my A1200 sitting here not doing much but it does work :-) Damn, I really miss coding on it. I wasnt too keen on BOOPSI but its much better than anything I've done on Linux or Windows.
That was a terminal program of sorts that let two users transmit files both directions at once, while chatting. Modems were well suited for it, being full-duplex.
This was 1986 I believe. First example of packet-switching I encountered.
The example you gave really shows where coprocessors complemented multitasking.
If you want to pick the most innovative computer shipping in 1985 that had the biggest impact on the market, there is only one obvious choice: the Macintosh.
Having used Macs and Amigas in 1985 I'd say I thought Amigas were better 'til 1990 or so, I don't recall the Mindset. At that tyme I played with an Amiga that not only ran AmigaOS but also MacOS and PCDos/Windows 3.X. Commodore's problem was that they were terrible in marketing. After Commodore died the Amiga went through more owners who had finanical problems discounting the Amiga, or in the case of Gateway, they didn't do anything with it. At first I was excited about Gateway buying the Amigas and thought they'd revive it, so I was so disappointed when they didn't do anything as I was looking foreward to being able to get a new Amiga.
I do like Macs though, after the Amiga the're my favorite and for my next computer I plan on getting a Mac Powerbook, I've been using PCs mostly the last several years..
FalconShould there be a Law?
Does anybody remember when Amiga was the premier platform for computer games? There was a stretch of several years when all the best games appeared first on Amiga, the Atari ST was often right there with it (or a close second), and then some of the games eventually trickled down to MS-DOS PCs. The PC in that era didn't have the graphics or audio capabilities to match Amiga, or even the main processor power for that matter (i.e. 68000 versus 8088).
Somebody told me a story about going to a computer show and seeing all the PCs struggling to run crummy CGA/EGA games. There were Amigas at the show. . . but they were forbidden from running games! Commodore thought if Amiga was seen running games, it would ruin their reputation with big business customers!
Amiga users got the first crack at classics like Shadow of the Beast, Populous, The Settlers, Lemmings, NY Warriors, Battle Squadron, Stunt Car Racer, Turrican II, Cannon Fodder and too many other great games to list.
As time went by, and Amiga hardware became more outdated without any meaningful upgrades, the PC gradually caught up. I think Wing Commander was the turning point. It was on the PC first, and your basic Amiga couldn't handle it. From that time on, the PC was the top dog of computer gaming, while Amiga and Atari ST faded away.
Yeah. Psygnosis' golden age. I had the black tshirt that came with Shadow of the Beast for years - they just don't make games like that anymore.
Active panning stereo sound, in the mid-late 1980's - that system kicked some serious ass.
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I used too love the amiga. And still do too some degree. And still use some of the tools and games it had too offer.
If you want too try how the amiga was( or try again) I suggest you try the amiga emulator at:
http://www.winuae.net/ [winuae.net]
It pretty much emulate the amiga perfectly.
If you don't have a old amiga it might be hard to find the ROM's needed too get it too run, but they are out there.
If you really want too see what the amiga was capable of try:
http://aiab.emuunlim.com/ [emuunlim.com] (amiga in a box) which enhance the workbench in ways you newer thought was possible.
This forum is most likely the best place too find anything amiga legacy:
http://eab.abime.net/ [abime.net]
It is amazing that your post was deemed interesting but it just shows how Slashnot has become a travesty and a covert front of MS cronies.
Funny, I see people saying mostly that /. is populated by mostly Macheads and Penguins.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If only commode-door had any sense in how to market and advance the Amiga, it might have been the dominant computer...
They didn't know if it was supposed to be marketed as a game machine, or a video production machine or a business machine. Sadly, the advance of 3D graphics on the wintel boxes put the final nail in the Amiga coffin.
I loved using my Amiga in the late 80's and early 90's, but by '93-'94 timeframe, the writing was on the wall...
Nobody here has mentioned the coolest feature of the AmigaOS: the assigns!
Assigns were a way of giving a name to some directory, and worked kind of like symlinks on steroids. You would have several assigns made automatically for the OS itself, like say, "FONTS:". This might point to "System:Fonts" and "System:" would point to "DH0:", your first harddrive.
That's all fine, you say, so what? Well now, suppose you have a second directory with some fonts over in DH1:Downloads/fonts.. Well, you do an "assign fonts: dh1:Downloads/fonts add" and try "dir fonts:". You get a listing of the contents of FONTS: which contains all the files and directories present in both directories, as though they were all in one place. Hey, add some more directories, too! If you copy a file to FONTS: it goes to the last directory in the assigns list. Neat, huh?
Assign was so nice and useful. Symlinks are great for what they do, but I still miss that old Amiga ability once in a while.
.. real cool 3D Animation stuff, that was rendered on god ol' Amiga Boxes and made ppl. all over the world happy!!!
:)
We'll never forget our old girl-friend
The Amiga was certainly the most advanced mass-market computer of the time, but to compare it with a Cray is like comparing a Mercury to a McLaren.
One of the best things I liked about Workbench (the windowing interface) was the way that application menus were hidden until you pressed the right mouse button, and they always appeared in the same place (top of the screen, ala Mac).
:(
But most of all I liked the way you could make multiple menu selections by keeping the right mouse button selected, and clicking on multiple menu items with the left mouse button. I haven't seen any other windowing interface pick up this feature, and it was really neat.
I also remember my first Hard Disk for my A500 - it was 10MB (yes MB), SCSI, and cost me over AUS$1000
Take a look at this page for other Amiga easter eggs.
The easter egg fiasco caused some major problems. RJ Mical told me that Commodore recalled all unsold machines in the UK and replaced the ROMs, resulting in a 2-3 month delay.
I knew full well that the A500 was limited to 32 colors in 320x200, but I marveled at how games like James Pond II: Robocod could take this limitation and, as if working with a cranky old genie that could do untold wonders if you asked just right, use Copper tricks to create vivid HAM rainbow backdrops, run different palettes for different parts of the in-game screens, and layer wonders of psychedelic parallax over each other in something that made even the first Super NES games look rather dull and lifeless in comparison.
It was called "banging the metal," if I recall, and it was what truly set the Amiga-only titles apart from the multi-platform releases.
I still have my Amiga. It works great. Heh, I fire it up sometimes to play a game of Dune2. My PC is called Amiga. Waiting for 'Supreme Commander' by Chris Taylor, Total Annihilation's spiritual successor from Gas Powered Games.
My fav units are dead Mavs
This allowed me to run IBM pgms for work, and still have an incredible graphics system. 3M of memory, bridgeboard with 1M (4.77mhz),20M SCSI drive (partitioned, 10 IBM, 10 Amiga.) 2 floppies. Anytime any PC user explained how much better Windows was, and how it could run multiple programs simultaneously, I'd grab two floppies and format both at the same time.
Me and two others bought Amigas for our university work in 1986 for $A2500 - a special price from Commodore Australia for developers. One of us was looking to use it for remote sensing image analysis and I was interested in multimedia and education. When tax time came around we had a query from the Australian Tax Office asking us to justify that the mouse was a necessary purchase. The Amiga mouse came with the computer but some tax assessor thought it was an optional extra like with M$-DOS and so not deductible.
For awhile there the Business School was going to standardise on Amiga. The Visual and Performing Arts school did for teaching animation and the Science school used them extensively for GIS and medical imaging.
I still have my original Amiga 1000 though it has been upgraded with something called Phoenix.
Squeak http://squeak.org/ over AmigaDOS would have been a killer combination for education.
Actually, what was really cool was that the Amiga Exec's multitasking wasn't just fully pre-emptive, it was a true Real-Time Operating System.
Also it was the first computer I ever bought that listed audio THD and stereo separation as system specs on the side of the box.
I can't help it. It calls to me. hehehe
:)
I still use my Amigas. My main system these days is an Amiga 4000, and I have a nicely accelerated 1200 as well. Dig these pages:
http://alan2.rateliff.us/a1200flash
http://alan2.rateliff.us/a4000flash
http://df0.info/
http://dh0.info/
Anyway, my systems these days:
A1000, 40MHz '030, 8MB FastRAM, FastPALs, 1GB HDD
A2000, 33MHz '040, 64MB FastRAM, 2MB ChipRAM, 9GB HDD, XSurf II
A2000, 28MHz '040, 12MB FastRAM, 1MB ChipRAM, 512MB HDD, Ariadne II
A4000, 40MHz '040, 128MB FastRAM, 2MB ChipRAM, 18GB HDD, XSurf III
A500, 50MHz '030 w/'882, 32MB FastRAM, 2MB ChipRAM, 1GB CF
A1200, 60MHz '060, 48MHz FastRAM, 2MB ChipRAM, 1GB CF, LinkSys PCMCIA network
All but one of the big-box (the slower 2000) have CD-ROMs, a few have SCSI ZIPs, and one of the 2000's has a HD floppy.
I love my 'Miggies'. With my networked units I can SSH and Remote Desktop into servers as needed. They could literally replace my office PC desktops.
I like Miami as a TCP/IP stack, unfortunately you cannot seem to buy new registrations from Holger Kruse. I've tried BSD5 on the 33MHz 2000, and it was pretty nice. I'm considering taking one of the 2000 boxes and making it a small server, just so people can look in the colo room and say "WTF is that?!"
He said updated. 4p looks like it hasn't been updated since 2002, and the latest version only exists as a mockup.
I remember being an Amigan but I'm now a Mac user
Once a loser. Always a loser. Why don't you get a BeOS machine? That'll make you a three time loser. Ha, ha!
OS/2 is the wave of the future, man. This Linux thingy shows promise but it won't be ready for primetime until sometime around 2011. Until then I'm stickin with VAX VMS.
I wonder why you needed HD floppies, Amiga did not support them even in later models. Sure it formatted floppies to 840/880KB, but it used DD floppies.
This is hard to get across unless you followed personal computer developments in those days, but there was a definite excitement surrounding the release of entirely new home computers in those days. The Atari 800, the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Commodore 64, the Macintosh. Think about it: the Amiga had a brand new OS, brand new graphics and sound hardware...it was stunningly different. That's nowhere near the same thing as an incremental video card upgrade that still works through DirectX or a Dell that just has some different numbers in terms of bus speed, CPU speed, memory, etc.
The mid-80s were exciting times. In 1984 the Mac was released. The Atari ST and Amiga in 1985. The Apple IIgs in 1986. Then the color Macintosh in 1987.
The last time I felt this in regard to consumer-level computers was when the Be-Box was first announced. Since then it's just when new game consoles come along.
And amongst the anti-virus tools there were the boot block protectors, which protected the boot sector of your disks by installing it onto each disk you inserted. Identical behaviour to all the viruses around as it wrote over non-standard boot sectors too, making the disk unbootable.
:)
I remember finding what I thought was probably a virus on my amiga. I did a hex dump of the bootsector, but it was clean. Then I powered off the machine, and tried again. Aha, there it was, it intercepted reads of the boot sector and pretended there was nothing interesting there to see.
Having that info, I showed it to the virus scanner software and told it that it was a virus (you could give most virus scanners new signatures). But the next disk I put it, which I knew was infected, showed up clean. Not only did the virus intercept boot sector reads, but it actually changed itself around every time it wrote itself out (just xor 'encryption' from memory).
There were also many rumours of viruses that could write to disks with the write protect tab in the write protect position, but I don't think it was true.
Oh the memories
Actually, KDE has very complete scripting support, which gives similar power to the Amigas' AREXX. It's called DCOP. Just open a konsole, and type dcop, which is the command line interface to it, or kdcop, which will let you browse it. All in all, KDE is the platform which feels closest to Amigas for me (and I've searchedhard!) It's quite fast (relative to other non-amiga OSes, at least) and there are a lot of nice features in it, when you really get to know it. Highly recommended.
To all the people that use "was" in their sentence, please use "is". "AmigaDOS is", "Workbench is" ...etc.
0 05-07-22
AmigaOS is still living. As a very small example see here:
http://www.hyperion-entertainment.biz:8080/news/2
anyone still intreested in these systems should check out the current line of Amiga systems, AmigaOne's - and AmigaOS 4. You might also want
to check out the PowerPC AmigaOS3 compatible (MorphOS) PegasosII systems. Both systems come as G3 or G4 varieties and have enough compatability to run most older software - and a 68k runtime emulator for the nastier stuff.
I remember attending the Boston Computer Society presentation of Amiga.
The demographic of the audience went from the most technical users to the business computer user/department "guru" (how's that for 80's talk?)
Everyone was impressed. Everyone wanted one. But for the business user, who was trying to justify computer in the office, the lack of business software for the relatively pricey Amiga was a problem. There was a package that would let you run DOS software. Still, no real business need for a multi-tasking, gui based computer with real sound. Hmmm I wonder if there ever will be.
When we had a user group we where writing GUI's AREXX, AMOS games and other scripting programs that nobody could or even can do on your winbloz machines. My A3000 just keeps on going and going and going. It never goes on line never crashes and does the job it does better that any overbloated machine out there!
If the Amiga can be credited with just one achivement it has to be the SFX in Babylon 5. Amiga 4000/040's with lightwave brought our last best hope to life (with a little help from the render-suras granted).
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
I still think that the Cygnus editor (for Amiga) is by far the very best text/programming editor that I've ever used. Does anyone know if it's available or has been ported to any other platforms (Win/Linux)?
Happy Birthday Amiga!