Slashdot Mirror
CEO of Amiga, Inc. Interviewed
vlangber submitted an interview with Bill McEwen about the current state of Amiga, Inc. and their plans for the future. Bill says,
"[W]e established the concept and vision of a scalable, embeddable, multi-threaded, memory protected operating system or digital environment that would run from a cell phone to a server. This is what you are going to see us deliver."
While Amiga OS4 has been in pre-release since 2004, a final release is planned for later this year.
Amiga at the time was very well designed (aside from an unshielded parallel port that could burn out the computer if IBM printers were used). Amiga had great graphics, very clean architecture (way better than Atari ST or IBM PC/XT) and it had great sound digitizer on-board; along with many other features. Games for the Amiga in the 80s were breath-taking.
:)
And I too knew a guy named Justin that claimed Amiga was going to take over the computer world...
Whatever Amiga Inc says, it's all just vapor. Let's look at the facts.
1. AmigaOS 4 is in beta, but will not be finished until hardware is available to run it on
2. There is no hardware to run AmigaOS 4 on
3. No-one seems to be able to get licences to make compatible hardware
4. The market is fast shrinking, with the only company ever to make hardware (Eyetech) having given up
The worst thing is, even if they somehow do manage to get a final version of AmigaOS 4 out the door, what will you be able to do with it? Run the same old apps you were running ten years ago a lot faster. Sure, there are some updates, but even basic stuff isn't covered. No modern office suites. No email clients that support HTML mail, POP3 with SSL etc. No web browser that supports flash, Javascript 2.0, CSS or much beyond HTML 3.2. The last major commercial game released was Quake.
If the platform has been open-sourced years ago, it might have had a future. AROS is probably the best bet at the moment. I still love AmigaOS, but I just find it laughable when McEwan comes out with this crap. How many years has he been saying it now? For how many years has nothing happened? Remember World of Amiga 2000, when you told everyone there would be the new system and OS ready to see when in fact you hadn't even started? Show us the money Bill, or don't expect us to beleive anything.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The site amiga.org did an interview with Bill McEven a few weeks ago http://www.amiga.org/modules/news/article.php?stor yid=6955
Hyperion, who are working on AmigaOS 4 did a statement
http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2006-09-00085- EN.html
Bill McEven responded later
http://www.amiga.org/modules/news/article.php?stor yid=6970
The Amiga community - yes, ther is still a community - is pretty sick of Bill.
I loved the Amiga hardware, but after about 1991 (with PCs discovering 'multitasking', sampled audio and coprocessors) that aspect of it got old.
:-)
:-)
;-)
What remained Amiga OS's big strengths were:
1) Real-time multitasking (not a big deal now)
1a) Well-developed support for proper vblank-timed animation (PCs painfully took many, many years to catch onto this. Animation without the 'torn' look was a 'frill' to PC users.)
2) Tight developer-community cooperating to ensure runtime stability
3) Inter-app orchestration through ARexx ports/scripts (and ARexx built-into the Kickstart).
4) The DOS filesystem semantics, where each filesystem was addressed by either its DOS ID *or* its volume-name. The latter could optionally prompt the user to insert volumes on an as-need basis.
5) Integration of desktop and CLI semantics: System utility binaries were GUI, unless called from the command-line. (No they weren't near huge.) CLI invocation meant reading params from line arguments, whereas GUI invocation simply read the params list within the invoking icon's properties. The param symbol-value pairs were easily edited from any icon's "file properties" window, and they could be flagged mandatory or optional. It was a great, common-sense way to tweak the system while staying within familiar desktop/filesystem paradigm.
6) Adding a new utility, driver, etc. to the system just meant dropping the file into its system drawer.
7) ASSIGNs
8) Intelligent, named pipes that could handle blocking and non-blocking IO from the CLI (if you knew what you were doing), and had FIFO/LIFO modes.
9) Stream and block device semantics that had parameter-passing (ex: 'copy SER01:/g10/sPARITY To SOUND:/v50') including AmiTCP sockets.
10) DOS-level management of Classes and Datatypes: Drop a datatype driver into the system so that class "bitmap image" can now read/write new formats like PNG. Most apps did adopt this framework!
11) A CLI and DOS that understood dates, incl. terms like "yesterday" (instead of each command interpreting strings as times and dates).
12) Lots of sh-like scripting additions, like command substitution. Runtime system variables were accessed from the elastic RAM: drive, but mirrored to the HD when told to persist.
13) 8-second bootup times
14) Apps and utilities always knew at least the basic Intuition GUI was available. No character/bitmap mode schitzophrenia.
15) After 1.x, GUI apps behaved like proper DOS entities: Compare to Unix, where a job-management signal like SIGSTOP will freeze an X11 GUI solid. (MacOS/Aqua does not suffer this conflict.)
16) The Zorro expansion bus (OK its hardware, but it was autoconfiguring like PCI back in the mid-80s).
17) Having users up/download/read simultaneously as needed on your packet-switched (pre-Internet) Dnet BBS, while playing sampled music files, while copying files between other drives, while compressing stuff at low-priority, while editing images on a 16MHz system without missing a beat! (If you animated hires+hicolor during all this, then you would see a slowdown due to DMA bandwidth being hogged). Certain top-shelf action games could also be played while heavily multitasking, but you had to experiement to see which ones would try to halt other processes.
18) No Swap!
19) We Amiga users got laid.
Comparied to the button-down, tight-polyester tuxedo and heavy orthopedic shoes of a "PC compatible", our Macs of the time were Art History 101 elbow-patches and loafers; an Amiga was like wearing acid-wash cutoffs while swinging on a trapeze with a complement of squirt-bottle acrylic paints. Other people thought it was a pacemaker for the early multimedia industry
Queue up Bruce Springsteen. "Glory Days...!"
Did you not manage to read the entire post? I then explain that while the performance of the Amiga was surpassed long ago, only recently has the elegance of the architecture been overtaken.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Mod parent funny. That was a reference to Taligent.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Was the Amiga a hyped fanbody system in 'the old days' like this current marketing boilerplate makes it sound that it is today?
No. The Amiga was a very powerful computer for its time and was also very affordable (in comparison with Macs at the time).
It had true preemptive multitasking from the time it launched in 1985. In comparison Mac OS didn't gain cooperative multitasking until 1988 with the introduction of Multifinder.
Much like todays computers have dedicated sound and video hardware, the Amiga had a custom set of chips to offload all video, animation and sound processing.
In 1985 it had the best color graphics available. I wasn't until 8bit color boards came out in 1987 that the still screen color capabilities of the Amiga were exceeded. Even then, the cost for a Macintosh 2 with color display in 1987 cost over 4 times what a single Amiga did. The Amiga was still superior in animation fluidity as well.
When most computers were making beeps and boops, the Amiga had 4 channel stereo sound that used 8 bit digital samples.
Because of the Amiga chipsets origins as a proposed game console, it was designed to display to a TV using standard NTSC and PAL signals. This gave rise to the use Amiga's in television stations as video hardware such as genlocks were inexepnsive. The release of the Video Toaster for Amiga brought huge television capabilities to the platform, once again at an price that was incredibly low at the time.
The Amiga was also a hotbed of 3D animation software. Several 3D applications were born on the Amiga, the most popular being Lightwave which has long since been ported to other platforms.
Amiga had an excellent shell and many applications were fully scriptable via a port of the REXX language. I went from Amiga to using UNIX systems and the time I spent learning AmigaDOS was a huge help.
So why did it die such a miserable death? Part of the blame is on the marketing efforts of Commodore which were simply terrible. But another key point is that the technology that made Amiga so great, the custom chips and preemptive operating system also held it back. The chips were not easily swapped out and too many programs (most notably games) made direct calls to the hardware. Even when they did update the chipset it broke a lot of older software for just this reason. Color Macs and PCs with cheap VGA cards were also coming down in price, making the Amiga look less attractive. The operating system was also hindered by the inability to implement things like memory protection, meaning the Amiga was prone to crashes that took the whole system down (much like Mac OS and Windows before Windows 2000 and Mac OS X). There was no easy way to build memory protection in without breaking old software - the same issue that led to Mac OS X supplanting the early Mac OS.
In a nutshell, there was a time in computing history when the Amiga was without a doubt the most powerful personal computer you could get for a reasonable cost and had features which simply were not available on any other platform for years to come.
Sometimes my arms bend back.