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.

Comments

Breathe out Justin

[InfoHighwayRoadkill]

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

The old screen pull down trick?

[joetheappleguy]

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...

Re:The old screen pull down trick?

[Burz]

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...!"

Uphill battle, I'm afraid

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Commodore are back too

[mccalli]

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