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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.
I used to work with a guy who was obsessed by Amigas. He kept prediciting they would take over the world. I hope he hasnt been holding his breath all this time like I told him too
another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
Can it do the old Amiga trick of grabbing the menu bar and pulling down to reveal the window below it, which could actually be of a different screen resolution?
This may sound like a small, silly thing to stick on, but it does work to remind me that the Amiga was a unique combination of clever programming AND clever hardware at a special time in computing history - What makes this new Amiga an Amiga beyond just sharing a name?
I hope it's not Guru Meditations...
They are attacking the problem as the underest underdog. But just from the quote in the summary, I can predict they will need to change that guy before they can succeed.
No company ever got successful with a single product that was applicable to all levels of possible applicability. Microsoft is successful because it makes ubiquitous desktop software, not because Windows XP is modular and its kernel lightweight and fast and embeddable. Sun makes a great VM that really runs well on servers, but it's not exactly a common language among the masses. IBM's AS400 is a pretty neat system, but I wouldn't want it as my mom's computer.
You need to pick your niche and carve it out before you go about trying to make your product ubiquitous. Success comes when people see your product and know immediately where it is applicable. Growth comes when you get them to see it applicable to their domain as well. However, if they don't see the first part, they won't accept the second part.
I knew a photographer who was pretty decent at any sort of photography that a client could dream up. From detailed macro work to poster-quality landscape work, this guy did it all. He had to do it as a hobby because he couldn't get enough work from his clients. He decided to nail down what his acceptable project type was and decided on industrial equipment photography. He can't take a vacation or spend his millions of dollars in profits because his phone is always ringing with new offers for work. By limiting his range of work, he became much more visible to those people who would hire him. Until he did that, he was just another guy among the crowd.
Amiga is just another guy among the crowd.
Feels very strange to look at their web site though, somehow to me the name just doesn't click in the modern era. Here's what Commodore are doing today. As I understand it, a company bought all rights to the name and launched themselves as Commodore. Via the Retrobits podcast I heard an interview with a US salesman for them - apparently they're quite serious about the Commodore name, and want to revive the spirit and attitude of working rather than just the name.
Having read about the way Commodore worked I'm not especially certain that's a great strategy, but it'll be interesting to hear what happens.
Cheers,
Ian
a hardcore Amiga fan back in the day. So were all my friends. I loved my Amiga 500... it got me through a CS degree when there was little to no chance of getting enough time on the departments own systems to do my project. And wow what an operating system... it made Windows 3.1 look positively stupid. The Amiga defined and fit the zeitgeist of that time perfectly and will always hold a special place in my heart. Then there was the day Amiga corp. died (to the tune of bye-bye Ms. American pie). All us CS nerds felt like Elvis had just died. I stayed with my Amiga for years after, even though the parent company were long gone. It had a special place for me as it had unfailingly been there for me when I needed it and we had been through some of the best times of my life together. However eventually it was beyond impossible to deny any more that my little buddy had seen his day and I sadly moved over to PC.
However, now is not then, and we're all grown-up now with our business laptops. Where on earth can Amiga find a market now? They're not even close to being the same company or attempting to appeal to the same market. Is the market demnographic that defined the original Amiga buyer even still there?
Even the Amiga vision and sense of community has been fulfilled by Linux, which has unassailable advantages over Amiga Os and any other commercial product in that you can download for free and install on the hardware that you have already. I would love to see Amiga OS on sale again but I'm not sure even I could really find a need for it other than some misplaced sense of nostalgia, which would probably fade as soon as I booted it and realised I didn't recognise the new AmigaOs at all. Another nice OS with no third parties writing apps or games for it? If I wanted that I'd buy OS/X.
Hey guys, it's me, Justin. I just wanted to touch base with you guys and give you a heads up! Listen, this whole x86 computing thing is just a fad. Amigas are still taking over the computer world. Just give it more time, you know? You just have to wait until like, um, 2009. Okay?
- Justin
P.S. You bros are the best! My mom says hi.
For me, the Amiga philosophy was picked up more by MorphOS and Pegasos than this new so-called "Amiga".
http://www.morphos.org/index.php3
http://www.pegasosppc.com/
However, for familiarity I run linux on my pegasos box (a loaner from work, noone else uses it).
I'll fess up to being an ex Atari ST fan. I'd have bought an Amiga if I could have afforded it. It was better, just out of the reach of my limited budget.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I have to agree with that.
This is actually a very real, very strong, case for RMS's controvertial opinions on the morality of proprietary software. Commodore/Escom's death didn't have to be the end of AmigaOS as a viable platform (it would, today, in my view be unrecognizable if it had continued to be supported, but that's another issue.) People relied upon the various owners of Amiga to provide the resources to ensure it remained usable: every single one of those owners from Gateway onwards have been failures. And all previous owners, Escom, Commodore, and Hi Torro, failed to plan for the possibility of commercial failure.
There was a movement to get AmigaOS open sourced in the late nineties. It was widely criticised by many, including those within the Amiga community, who decided that it was in some way wrong to allow Amiga technologies to become free enough that they might help bolster rival operating systems. The sheer mindlessness of that position is readily apparent after Gateway's decision to instead sell the technologies to private consortiums who had anything but freedom and openness in mind when they bought it.
Now, two years behind schedule, AmigaOS 4 is still in a state where it'll be finished "RSN". Public betas have shown no dramatic improvements over the original. It's tied to licensed PowerPC hardware because of Amiga Inc's nned for profits, a need that is opposite to the operating system's users need for future proofing and reasonable expectations of support.
AROS is no panacea, and it too has little advantage, beyond portability, over the original AmigaOS. But it at least keeps alive something. AmigaOS and AROS are beyond the point that they will ever be relevent as modern day operating systems - even on lightwieght systems, their lack of a credible security model limits their uses in a modern networked world.
The Amiga's prime purpose these days seems to be as a little noticed warning to others. If you invest your time and money into someone else's proprietary platform, even if it's the best platform there is (and, arguably, the Amigas were, for a very long time, the best platforms in existance for machines costing less than $5,000) you do stand a serious chance of being screwed over. The same lessons were apparent from the BeOS fiasco. The same lessons, learned in reverse, were apparent from the Atheos story (the developer quit, but because it was non-proprietary, others were able to pick up where he left off.)
As a "paranoid crackpot leftovers from the waning days of Amiga", I find it sad and such a waste that that's where we are.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
20) Virtual folders that unify two or more real folders.
...
:-)
21) File-change notifications
22) The WINDOW: device... create and manipulate windows as files. The parameters would be passed like: open("WINDOW:0/0/400/100/Window Title"); which specifies window location, size and title. Also SPEAK: could accept parameters for voice synthesis.
23) The whole disk-based portion of the system was located under one abstract assignment, SYS:, which could point almost anywhere
24) Each filesystem had its own root. The root of the current path would be accessed with a simple colon prefix (instead of VOLNAME:). The CLI would remember previous dirs and take you back to them with 'pcd'.
25) Escape codes could be used to draw bitmaps within console windows, although this was an unintended feature.
26) DOS had pattern-expansion that at the time was between globbing and regex in richness. Pattern support, as I recall, depended on the program intentionally passing the pattern string through an AmigaDOS expansion function which returned a linked-list of files. This has the advantage of not needing 'xargs' due to fileset size; but you had to use an xarg-like utility for certain commands because they did not internally support expansion (these few commands were written for single files, so these cases were rare).
27) A Unified bitmap and scalable (Agfa) FONTS: location, and I recall that rendering functions were later unified. This was more Mac-like and way ahead of the PC (which had balkanized fonts upto Win95). The bitmap fonts could be 32-color and also animated like GIFs. The first PC OS to handle loadable font-display through GPU coprocessing (the Blitter).
28) Each filesystem was 'bisected' with the allocation map and main dir in the middle of the partition, and each new file assinged to grow on one side or the other. Supposedly this kept head thrashing minimal in certain scenarios.
29) Most commands were 're-entrant' and could be configured to pre-load and link in memory to perform as if they were internal to the CLI. Since each command was equal to the parent CLI process, no process-creation or other overhead was incurred, and it saved memory and instruction cache as well.
30) Programs (apps) were often just the main binary plus the matching "binary.info" file (which defined the icon and params). Ones needing libraries, AV data and such were simply played inside of a 'drawer' (folder) to keep everything together, so installing a program often meant copying its folder onto your HD (wherever you liked) and install wizards were kindof rare.
31) CLI escaping and quoting were powerful but very clean, and much less likely (IMO) than bash to lead to misleading code (especially when pattern expansion was in the mix). Adoption of Unix-y features was very selective, and the OS as a whole was probably more true to the everything-as-file concept than a typical Unix workstation.
32) Event-handling in the standard devices was sophisticated enough that daemons were rare.
33) The core OS (scheduler+DOS) knew the difference between a thread, shell-bound process, user-facing GUI process, a handler/driver, and something called a "commodity" which is similar in function to OSX Dashboard widgets. Many tasklist utilities would display them quite distinctly as a result, and just show the apps by default.
34) Racter: 3rd-party app that combined an Eliza-like engine with an animated 3D metalic female face (circa 1986).
35) Diga! Also about 1986, a multiplexed VT-100 app that could (with two Amigas) transfer files both ways while chatting, with resume, CRC etc.
and
42) Had both NIL: and NULL: devices that functioned differently.
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.