AmigaOS 4

Second five-eighth writes "The Amiga is alive and sort of well (you can get the OS, but not the hardware), and Ars Technica has a review of the final version of AmigaOS 4. New features include limited memory protection, 3D display drivers, an improved suite of applications (the bounty for porting Mozilla to AmigaOS has yet to be claimed), and much better 680x0 emulation. Perhaps most telling, the reviewer was able to move his daily writing workflow from Windows XP to AmigaOS 4.0: 'Not only was it possible to do this, but having done so I feel no urge to switch back. It is nice to not have any distractions when working — there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications, no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop.'"

Comments

Spaceballs?

[Loconut1389]

FTA: "this brings things up to ludicrous speed."

Prepare for the jump to ludicrous speed!

Re:Spaceballs?

[huckda]

Sorry Captain, they've jammed the hardware...

Re:Spaceballs?

[alamandrax]

Raspberry! I hate raspberry! Even more than I hate Yoghurt!

Seriously though, you'd go through all of that rather than stay on Windows XP? Man Windows XP must suck! Why don't I know/notice that? Is it because I grew up using this thing and have learnt to live with it's quirks and whims that I've become desensitized to its treatment of me?

Am I like the kid Devlin kidnapped? That's scary if I think about it.

Re:Spaceballs?

[somersault]

I grew up with an A500, A600, then A1200, and various Macs. There is just something 'boring' about using a Windows PC. That's not being elitist or anything, I genuinely just enjoyed using Amigas and Macs more. The Amiga really did switch tasks immediately, I'd forgotten that. The multitasking was way ahead of anything Windows had at the time, and probably even has now. I've not been keeping up with Mac OS for a while (since we got a PC in 98), and the fact that Apple is more associated with iPods than computers these days kinda turns me off the idea of getting a Mac again. If they brought out Amiga OS for x86, or at least made it runnable on non-Amiga PPC hardware, I'd get it.

I think I read this article last night (thanks Firehose :p ), and someone mentioned that they should port it to the PS3. That would be awesome.

Seriously, as a lot of people point out, Amigas were way ahead of the competition, but Commodore's management were a bunch of morons and squandered what they had. I stuck with Amigas for ages, and I still wish they'd make a comeback, but it doesn't seem likely does it? Though I had the same hope with Linux and it's doing okay now :D Hehe

Re:Spaceballs?

[thebdj]

So..."They've gone to plaid"?

Re:Spaceballs?

[Dogtanian]

The Amiga really did switch tasks immediately, I'd forgotten that. The multitasking was way ahead of anything Windows had at the time, and probably even has now. That's true; the Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking in 1985. This was vastly better than the co-operative multitasking in "on-top-of-DOS" versions of Windows prior to 95.

I remember using telnet under Windows 3.1; when it was unable to connect to the remote machine, you had to wait for the connection to timeout before you got control of your computer back, because telnet didn't cede control of the multitasking. This was a PITA.

Hate to say it though; this OS release is likely wildly irrelevant from a mainstream perspective- one for the diehards only. The Amiga OS was fantastic in its time, but things have moved on and the serious users and applications migrated- never to return- a *long* time ago.

From that perspective, it'd have to build a reputation from scratch. And given this, great though Amigs OS was in its day, I think it would make more sense to build a new OS from the ground up, rather than remaining compatible with the old Amiga OS and its software. Of course, that's from a mainstream perspective; if this new release gives the hobbyists pleasure, that's fine by me.

Re:Spaceballs?

[somersault]

There's no reason that a completely new OS can't remain compatible (through emulation). Apple has done it a couple of times already, and in a limited way you could say that Sony do it with their PlayStation! I think it's a pretty useful and effective thing to do. Of course I'm not sure how much OS4 differs to earlier version, as it does sound like they just took Workbench and built some 3rd party modules into the core. That isn't necessarily a bad thing though, I guess. If it had a decent web browser and office suite then it's basically ready to work in an office environment, and if it runs faster and more stable (though it doesn't sound spectacularly stable from the review, and I did tend to elicit guru meditation in my Amiga days, though maybe that's because I was messing about with the OS too much or just coding poorly :p ), and also runs on cheap hardware, why not? It's like Linux - it can be used, it's 'better than Windows' but it's just not as well known so it would take a lot of effort to get everyone to switch.

Re:Spaceballs?

[Eideewt]

"Is it because I grew up using this thing and have learnt to live with it's quirks and whims that I've become desensitized to its treatment of me?"

I'm going to go with yes. All the major OSes have their own WTFs, but Windows takes the cake in my opinion. It's the only one that makes moment-to-moment tasks difficult (mostly by being extremely slow to start programs and switch between them and by not offering basic window management features -- in other OSes you don't switch between programs so much as you use another one for a while). OS X is second for its mind-bogglingly bad window management operations, and Linux third for its hairy "easy if you already know how" configuration.

Re:Spaceballs?

[poot_rootbeer]

Hey, *I* was going to be the one to mention Spaceballs!

Except I was going to refer not to the movie, but to the Amiga demogroup of the late 1980s and 90s.

Does AmigaOS 4 run those old demos?

Re:Spaceballs?

[Dogtanian]

There's no reason that a completely new OS can't remain compatible (through emulation). Apple has done it a couple of times already, and in a limited way you could say that Sony do it with their PlayStation! I was thinking more of the OS architecture and calls than actual hardware emulation. But either way, it's possible of course, it'd just be pointless for a mainstream OS. As I said, all but the diehard hobbyists had migrated away from the Amiga by the end of the 1990s. Those getting nostalgic for their Amiga days could use an A500 (or whatever) standalone emulator program; that would probably be better given that many games used brittle hardware tricks that bypassed the OS anyway. Those requiring access to Amiga data would likely have it converted to a modern format (though they've probably done that already).

it does sound like they just took Workbench and built some 3rd party modules into the core. That isn't necessarily a bad thing though, I guess. It sounds fine if you're an Amiga hobbyist, but everyone else would expect something *much* more modern. And since most people wouldn't be bothered about Amiga compatibility, it'd probably be better to build a new OS from scratch.

If it had a decent web browser and office suite then it's basically ready to work in an office environment, and if it runs faster and more stable (though it doesn't sound spectacularly stable from the review, and I did tend to elicit guru meditation in my Amiga days, though maybe that's because I was messing about with the OS too much or just coding poorly :p ), and also runs on cheap hardware, why not? It's like Linux And that's the nub; Linux is well-established, open, and can take advantage of modern hardware. What advantage does Amiga OS offer over it?

- it can be used, it's 'better than Windows' It depends what you're looking for. Windows XP (and certainly Vista), whatever its advantages and disadvantages, isn't Windows 3.1, the Amiga's inferior contemporary. I'm sure Amiga OS 3 was much more efficient for the hardware it ran on, but that's beside the point.

but it's just not as well known so it would take a lot of effort to get everyone to switch. I'm torn between being polite and expressing myself with the bluntness I want to use here....

You're living in cloud cuckoo land if you think anyone is going to switch back to Amiga OS after all these years without a compelling reason. Since you said yourself that the new Amiga OS seems to be the old one with some third-party modules, what is there? An OS that hasn't seen any significant mainstream development for at least 10 years. Sorry, but that's how I see it.

Since compatibility isn't an issue for mainstream users any more, the Amiga OS would offer no advantage over a "developed from scratch" OS (and look how many of them have fallen by the wayside). But if you're going to do that, it's not really an Amiga OS, is it?

On the other hand, maybe that's not an issue. I'm still struggling to see what that "Amiga Anywhere" Java-based platform thing had to do with the "real" Amiga, besides the name...

Re:Spaceballs?

[Listen Up]

If your last experience with a Mac was in 1998, then you should definitely give OS X a try. Apple is not centric on iPods, etc. or whatever Slashdot kool-aid you have read, but is using the various accessories to bring more people to OS X. A currently successful and opposite strategy than Microsoft. OS X is by far the best OS I have ever used and after using DOS/Windows for almost 20 years and Linux for almost 13 years now (as well as other various Unix's), I checked out OS X and never looked back. Unix with a Mac interface, perfect. I also used NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP for a brief period of time, which was interesting to think about when I was checking out OS X.

Give OS X a serious try. I'm pretty sure you'll love it.

Re:Spaceballs?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Commodore's management were a bunch of morons and squandered what they had

Not morons. Moron. Irving Gould took over the company and got in a fight with its manager Jack Tramiel, the sole survivor of a Nazi death camp who had worked hard for many decades building Commodore up to the PET-2001, VIC-20 and Commodre-64 days. Tramiel's pet project was to buy Amiga Inc. and migrate it to a Unix core, but the fight with Gould persisted and so he said the equivalent of "fuck it" and quit, bought the entire Atari brand-name for a reported $45K and then tried to buy Amiga, Inc. by himself. When Gould threatened him, he hired a smart Indian engineer to throw together an Amiga knock-off (AtariST) knowing damned well it was a dog because the four years (then) needed to fabricate the custom chips to give it Amiga-like magic had not yet passed. But as Bill Gates had already demonstrated to the world, being better is not a requirement for market success and so Tramiel's AtariST attacked Amiga on all fronts, marketing wise, despite the fact that it was a dog. Irving Gould responded by changing his presidents a few times, convinced his problem was leadership --and each successive president proceeded to take the Amiga in a different direction. In the end, the Atari and Amiga became a "blur" in the marketplace and what's more, all of those Baby Boomers who were just taking over Corporate America at the time had grown up with the term "Atari" being equated with Pong on an Atari 2600 or PacMan at the local arcade/bowling alley (there were even pop-music disco hits in the 1970s featuring PacMan noises), etc. --and in a world where the moto was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", not many were willing to risk their career and professional integrity on bringing in Atari/Amiga/whatever "video games" --no matter how much better they were than the IBM PC/XT and PC/AT. Add to this Gates decision not to support Word and Multiplan on the Amiga and, well.. both platforms were doomed. Ironically, the Commodore 64 kept Commodore going for several more years before their management essentially died out. The creator of the wonderful Amiga custom chipsets which were squandered in the battle between Gould and Tramiel also died. The GUI developer on the Amiga went off and built cheap interfaces for early pocket-sized PCs. The technology was lost. Those who had guru-level knowledge of the Amiga Kernel (cough) had to basically stand up in their day-job cubes once per day and say "My name is and I am an Amiga programmer." hoping for the obligatory "Hi " possibly followed by hugs and affection from colleauges in the surrounding cubes. Meanwhile, Tramiel eventually retired, of course an his sons reportedly run whatever Atari is or isn't doing today.

An interesting parody to all of this, was that after the Pepsi-drinker took over Apple and drove Steve Jobs to leave and start NeXT, he hired some older French guys to takeover engineering. Deep underneath 1 Infinite Loop they reportedly had a secret lab where they wore surgical masks and performed experiments removing features from an Amiga 1000 and adding them to this hacked together program-monitor they inherited from Jobs' original crew back in 1979. That program-monitor, which debuted to the world the first week of 1984, eventually came to be known as Mac "OS" until Jobs came back two decade later and killed it. Some of the early tech from the Amiga that showed up in the French guy's version of Mac OS: Amiga's GfxBae = Mac OS QuickDrawGX, Amiga's built-in Speech Synthesizer = Mac OS PlainTalk. Zorro bus = NuBus. Amiga ARexx = MacOS AppleScript.

Re:Spaceballs?

[somersault]

One guy at work did have a Powerbook (or iBook or whatever they are!) with OSX, and was trying to get access to some network shares. I knew that you can do this using Samba, just using SMB:// on linux, and was suprised that that was the method you use with OSX too. Kind of weird that they just use a 3rd party tool for it, but also pretty cool that it's the same as Linux.

Since I currently have a Windows XP laptop from work anyway, I'm probably going to stick with it for a while, though I could install Linux on it. If I ever think I need a new laptop (I'm the IT Manager so I could probably blag a new laptop if I wanted). I had actually switched to using Linux for almost everything on my desktop (mostly web browsing and photo editing, and I did try a few games over WINE, though I ended up switching back to Windows occasionally for GTA:SA!), but then started using the laptop more just because it was more convenient to be able to roam etc. The PSU on the desktop fried last year anyway and I haven't bothered to replace it, so I've been Linuxless for a while again.

Anyway, I probably should try OSX.. if it has a Remote Desktop client then I'll still be able to perform most of my administrative duties, though I do very occasionally need to run stuff like AutoCAD. I'd also prefer to use Outlook, or a suitably worthy alternative - Exchange and Outlook are one of the few useful MS products I've used - not perfect when it comes to things like security, but pretty good when it comes to usability. Since the new 'Macs' are Intel based anyway, I guess a lot of my potential complaints would be moot, since I could just have a dual boot setup with Windows anyway.. wow I'm in a verbose mood today.

Re:Spaceballs?

[somersault]

Yeah I'm totally nostalgic, though I don't honestly see someone switching unless the only work they do is basic office productivity, I just think it would be 'nice' if that happened! I was there in the days when Quake and Heretic II were being ported to Amiga (though I was just a high school student and couldn't afford to get a powerful enough Amiga to run it). I managed to accept that the Amiga was dead eventually, and was wanting to switch to Macs (we'd had Macs too, but usually pretty old ones, like pre-G3 ones, can't even remember the processor names), but my dad was a developer and pointed out that if I wanted to be a developer too, I'd be better off just going with the largest market - x86/Windows, so I accepted, and we got a top of the line Dell XPS T500, Diamond Riva TNT2 V770D with 32MB RAM, 512MB main RAM (I think), etc etc.. hehe.. *sigh* I loved being able to play the latest games like Half-Life, but the experience of doing anything else with the computer hasn't ever felt the same, even after I've grown accustomed to the Windows interface (and now know it a lot better than your average Windows user - I've used 3.1,95,98(including SE!),NT4,NT Server,Win2k,2k Server,2k3 server, XP...).. it doesn't compare. I'm an Amiga fanboy sure, and I owe a lot of my basic computing knowledge to Amigas and especially Amiga magazines, so I'm totally biased, but I know that we're not where we would have been had Commodore not been such a bunch of dumbasses. I accept that we 'lost', but I can always live in 0.0001% hope that Amigas can still go somewhere, the same way that I hope that the world will switch to Linux rather than be led to believe that the only thing out there is Windows, or those computers by the guys that sell those funky iPods.

Re:Spaceballs?

[mypalmike]

[Tramiel] bought the entire Atari brand-name for a reported $45K and then tried to buy Amiga, Inc. by himself.

According to Wikipedia: "In July 1984, Warner sold the home computing and game console divisions of Atari to Jack Tramiel, the recently ousted founder of Atari competitor Commodore International, under the name Atari Corporation for $240 million in stocks under the new company."

Tramiel eventually retired, of course an his sons reportedly run whatever Atari is or isn't doing today.

Atari was bought by Hasbro Interactive almost a decade ago, which was then bought by Infogrames, which essentially renamed itself Atari.

Re:Spaceballs?

[Dogtanian]

Heh... sorry, for a minute I did mistake you for one of those rabid fanboys that thinks OS 4 really will mark a comeback for the Amiga.

Your Linux dream isn't entirely implausible; I doubt the US will ever lead the charge, but there are many developing countries which might deploy it widely enough. Personally, I don't think Windows will go down the tubes in the forseeable future, but there *may* be an end to its monoculture dominance, which is the important thing.

Re:Spaceballs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unix with a Mac interface, perfect.

Well, it would have been. Unfortunately, what Apple delivered is neither Unix nor Mac.

Not Unix, because it still has all the weird un-Unixy cruft: the filesystem isn't case sensitive, breaking all sorts of stuff, and they even had to provide special Apple alternatives to basic commands like "cp" in order to cope with resource forks and the like.

Not Mac, because in their eager rush to make things flashy, they broke them; the Dock is a user-interface nightmare that does away with fundamental principles like drag-and-drop semantics, while the OS X Finder is still, after four or five revisions, nowhere near as intuitive or convenient as the old Classic Finder.

It's not Unix, and it's not MacOS; it's OS X, and all it really has going for it is that it's better than Windows - but what isn't?

Re:Spaceballs?

[SamLJones]

Outlook works just fine in a VM of Windows :-) Or in Crossover.

For Remote Desktop, I believe the rdesktop client runs on Macs; runs on Linux, anyway.

On top of that, the next iteration of OSX (5, i believe) is supposed to have built-in support to run Windows natively, no VM or WINE needed. Even with hardware 3D acceleration!

Guy next to me at work has a Mac... I'm jealous.

Re:Spaceballs?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Since you said yourself that the new Amiga OS seems to be the old one with some third-party modules, what is there? An OS that hasn't seen any significant mainstream development for at least 10 years."

you're completly wrong. amiga os 4, while its based on original aos source code, a completly new os, with a new and modern kernel, memory protection (still new and not full), fully ported to powerpc (and a few other processors in labs to see its possibble), no 3rd party hack included but almost everything in the core os has written from scratch excusively for os4 in native code.
the look and feel is similar to the old os3.x (like win 98 to xp, or os 9 to os x), but under the skins everything is new and improved a lot. of course os4 is still amiga, still has some of original aos limitations and advantages. the only problem is the lack of serious apps and hardware (wich is of corse connected). the os itself still stand as a single-user desktop os, easy and fun to use - until you can do everythnig you need:)

i have no os4 system, only classic amiga and morphos, which is another successor of the amiga legacy, a similar new ppc os based on amiga experience. i've used windows (3.1, 98, now xp), mac os (8, 9 and x), tried to use linux, but its really but fun, dont like it (but the newest ubuntu looked promising when i tried the livecd...). used all these os'es i can tell you that the amiga os was far the most user-friendly and lots of fun to use and i think its still really one of the best os out there!

Re:Spaceballs?

[Jarlsberg]

Most demos written for the A500 utilized hardware specific features, so no, most demos won't run.

Re:Spaceballs?

[Dogtanian]

Okay; I was only going by what I heard. As I said, if you and other diehard Amiga owners enjoy using it, that's great; I just don't think it'll have any mainstream impact at all.

Re:Spaceballs?

[bryan1945]

I grew up with an Apple II+, then upgraded to an Amiga until college. Been with Windows since, but my wife just bought me a Macbook Pro Intel for Christmas, and I just have to say you need to check out OS X. I don't want to sound like a fanboy, but this stuff just works. I've ordered WinXP so I can dual boot (hasn't come yet) so I make sure everything I do is compatible, but I'm starting to cringe when I have to go to the desktop (XP) to do anything. Just doesn't seem as... smooth would be the best way to put it. OpenOffice is a bit clunky, so I bought Office for Mac, plus iWorks, and they work very nicely.

And I don't own an iPod, so there is no association there. My laptop is reminding me of how nice Amiga was, and how much crap I have to do with Windows (updating virus protection, running the protection, etc).

Plus I like the glowing keyboard at night when the wife is sleeping! :)

Re:Spaceballs?

[somersault]

:) 2 people recommending I get OSX now... I wonder what my managers (who just so happen to be my uncles too, but if I sucked at my job I'm sure they'd have someone else running things ;) ) would think if I told them I wanted a new iBook right after I've getting a company mobile and a company car.. if I ever leave my job I'm not gonna have any of my own possessions! I don't think I can justify buying a laptop for personal use just now, since my girlfriend has come over from Canada (so whereas I used to mostly use my laptop to chat from her, I now go out with her instead), and if I need a laptop I have my work one..

But if I have the opporchancity for a new machine, I'll definitely try for a new Apple!

Re:Spaceballs?

[Anonymous Coward]

its ok, i dont think that either.
but dont judge based on a "what-i-heard-fom-someone-fact" - at least not on the first time:)
while it probably never returns to the mainstraim (which i dont think is a bad thing...), it can be good, as good as a mainstraim os, and it has a chance for not having to be a die-hard amigafanboy to like it and use it. as i said its only matter of apps and hw.
you was questioning the meaning of its exist and usability, and thats why i tried to correct you.
a bit frustrating when ppl talk on somethin what they really dunno nuttin' bout, ya'now:)
peace

Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that a brand new platform isn't cool but work desktop?

It is nice to not have any distractions when working -- there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications, Dude, buy more RAM. RAM is cheap.

no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions It's a new OS, of course it's got bugs and exploits. But hey! Security through obscurity.

and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop. But you've lost all your work?

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

There's sticking it to the man and there's just being a dork. Guess which one this falls under.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[ewhac]

Dude, buy more RAM. RAM is cheap.

Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?

Schwab

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[AKAImBatman]

It is nice to not have any distractions when working -- there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications,

Dude, buy more RAM. RAM is cheap.

It doesn't help with Windows. Its *#$@! VM system is still tuned to machines with far less memory than we have today. Run anything memory intensive and I guarantee that you'll start seeing swapping and thrashing. On the bright side, at least it doesn't swap everything out to disk when you minimize the application. It used to be tons of fun working on local J2EE instances after accidently minimzing the console. :-/

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Brian Gordon]

Since when is $150 for a stick of SODIMM DDR2 cheap? I just bought a GB for my thinkpad and I can't help but think of the 30 hours of minimum-wage cashiering it took to enjoy a little extra memory...

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[cheater512]

You lose all your work on Windows too but it takes 2 minuites to get a working desktop again. :)

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[heinousjay]

Welcome to the economy. Work a shitty job, enjoy fewer perks. It's not fair, but you can change it with determination.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

You and I are experiencing the same problem, it's $200 CAD for a 1gb SODIMM around here, part of me yerns to go from two 256mb sticks to two 1gb sticks. Making ten dollars an hour on the other hand, says I'll be waiting a long while.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[misleb]

Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?

The point is that you really shouldn't be swapping to/from disk just to switch between applications. There is being efficient with memory... and then there is being a total cheapass who refuses to upgrade beyond 64MB of RAM.

-matthew

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

> Since when is $150 for a stick of SODIMM DDR2 cheap?

Uhh... since fall 1999, when $150 wouldn't even get you 128MB of any RAM?

Seriously, you need to remember where we've been before you bitch about RAM prices.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[misleb]

Since when is $150 for a stick of SODIMM DDR2 cheap? I just bought a GB for my thinkpad and I can't help but think of the 30 hours of minimum-wage cashiering it took to enjoy a little extra memory...

If simply switching applications causes thrashing, you're probably not on a system with expensive memory. You're probably running some PC100 based system with 32MB of RAM or something.

-matthew

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[TapeCutter]

"Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?"

What water? The guy next door refills his swimming pool every 10ms.

Lack of memory for my 500TB database that contains all known implementations of "Hello World" is definitely a hardware problem.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[fyngyrz]

From your eulogy:

To be honest, not even Amiga can lay claim to that title ["inventor" of microcomputer-level multitasking], as OS-9 was running on the TRS-80 Color Computer well before Amiga's release.

Actually, OS-9 was running on 6809 based GIMIX and SWTPC systems well before the Coco ever saw the light of day. I still have working SS-50 systems that run it (and FLEX.) They also ran OS9 a lot better than the Coco could, because the Coco's hardware was uber-cheap compared to the (literally) gold-plated machines from GIMIX, not to mention that the GIMIX machines could support a lot more RAM, which, as we know, is definitely an issue in a non-VM multitasking system. :)

The Altair/S100 and SWTPC/SS50 machines started everything, pretty much.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[julesh]

Not that a brand new platform isn't cool but work desktop?

He's a writer. As a writer, I'd happily switch back to DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, if it wasn't for the other applications I need to run for other things. Writers have very basic requirements. The most important thing is that the computer doesn't get in the way of the work. Anything that distracts you from the words can cost a lot of time.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[vhogemann]

See, the article author does have a point.

At the early 90's Amiga was an amazing platform, with even more amazing software. A desktop publishing software was crammed into 1.4MB, two 720KB floppies! And you had an almost perfect alternative to Word 6.0 on less than 720KB, and spell checking was only another floppy away from you.

I had an Amiga 600, with 4MB RAM and 40MB HD, and I never managed to use half of the space. Why software is so bloated nowdays? I understand that now we have multi GHz cpus, with loads of RAM... but yet, we waste too much resources using poorly optimized software. For an example: OpenOffice.

I understand that now software do a lot more, we have higher resolutions and color depths... But does it justifies the lack of performance, the bloat? I mean, OpenOffice will crawl on a machine with less than 256MB, and a average Amiga had no more than 4MB of RAM!

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[vidarh]

As much as there are valid reasons to use much memory, most of what we waste memory on now is purely bad software engineering. I used to have no problem running lots of different apps at once in 2MB RAM on my Amiga. Now, lots of apps will need more memory for good reasons - if I open hundreds of tabs in a web browser of course the documents will take a lot of memory - but that doesn't change the fact that we've gotten extremely complacent, and it comes at a cost. I'm writing this on a laptop with 1GB of memory that's at the moment extremely sluggish because of swapping. I'm not running much - certainly nothing justifying swapping just to change applications, but it does.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[comradeeroid]

Dude, buy more RAM. RAM is cheap. You know what the philosophy that it's the user that should upgrade not the programmer who should optimize brought us? That's right, Windows Vista.

Now if you want to shell out money (even small ammounts) for the privilege of using bloated shit, I'm not about to stop you. But you must realize that you look pretty silly ridiculing those who actually go for the smarter option.

Even if RAM cost as little as 1$ per GB I would still prefer it if programmers optimized their prodcts.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

I've always thought this as well. Just because we have faster processors and more RAM doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to be efficient. Okay so it's maybe stupid to be optimising a word processor in assembly or something along those lines, but really - all these people who have just grown up with Windows have no concept that something so old could in fact be better. It's like the DEC Alpha or whatever the processor was called - lots of potential, way ahead of the competition, but the management made mistakes (probably totally generalising and getting things wrong here). Consumers need to be better educated :/

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[deroby]

Yeah, but in 1999, 128Mb was A LOT !

It actually made your Win9x pc a lot faster as it could hold more stuff in memory.
Now you buy 1GB for that price and I'm under the impression that it only helps marginally.

IMHO : relatively spoken, it's just as expensive as it was back then.

(I currently am running on a 1GB RAM WinXP box and the Commit Charge has somehow magically reached 2.5Gb !!)

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Tony Hoyle]

..or vista (seriously.. that thing hits the disk constantly.. it just assumes swap is there and uses it, even when you have 2GB of RAM).

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anubis350]

'xactly! One of my former highschool teachers who was a writer on the side used (and still uses to this day I believe) a mac classic to do his writing on, he had a beefier machine (really his wife's) for anything else, but his writing was done on that, he liked it better (less distractions)

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[YttriumOxide]

A desktop publishing software was crammed into 1.4MB, two 720KB floppies! Actually, on a Classic Amiga that'd be 2 880KB floppies, for a total of 1.6MB... Not that I've used floppies on my Amiga in a LONG time. My MicroA1 (same type as the author of TFA) has a DVD writer, an SD slot and a CF slot, but no floppy (if you're wondering, no the SD and CF aren't "standard" Amiga things - I've got it in an Antec Aria case which has those on the front, but they work perfectly of course).

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[LiquidCoooled]

The thing is, its NOT wrong to optimise a word processor using assembly (or any other process).
If an efficient algorithm is found to handle one atom of the text then that benefit only grows as you write more text.

You have to weigh up time versus benefit though, a person won't normally notice something running slowly in a WP because it has to respond at the speed of the typist.

I think .net has taken this too far, and now EVERY application written in it feels sluggish, you can do lots more easily by simply linking elements, but each addition takes more CPU time.

The underlying .net code needs some very specific object lookup and handling routines hard coded in assembler to make full use of the cache and pipelining available on specific processors (it might even be beneficial for AMD/intel to start looking at custom object routines hard coded into silicon - like the java chip from back in the day)

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

..or vista (seriously.. that thing hits the disk constantly.. it just assumes swap is there and uses it, even when you have 2GB of RAM).

Well, give Microsoft some time to work out the bugs before they ship it to the CD pressers for Christ's sake! It's still in a beta stage last time I checked. I think they're targetting Q4 2007 for release of SP1 which will finalize the release of Vista. ;-)

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[badspyro]

So true
My mum was put off OOo when it hogged systems resorces on her old laptop (although admitedly it was from the age of windoze 98 origonal, and this was in 2002)
Open Office is a massive systems hog, and there does need to be optimisation of systems resorces in all software anyway, becase there is going to come a time when RAM prices start to increace due to lack of suplys and other factors.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

It's interesting to think whether it's a waste *not* to use the extra CPU cycles and memory we have these days, by coding efficient apps, or whether we should push a system to use every resource it can, for example by having the computer handle all memory issues instead of the programmer (I've never liked the idea of Java handling memory cleanup, when the programmer should just be doing his job properly.. not that I've done a lot of C++ coding for a few years now, and haven't used Java much either). I guess the thing is, that if you're running one application only, like a game, you want it to be using all the resources it can, but when it comes to word processors and browsers, you want them to have as small a footprint as possible. When it comes to the OS, you reaaaaally want it to hardly use any resources for its own nefarious deeds - having the system need a 128MB 3D graphics card or whatever just to run the interface as it's meant to be, seems a waste. In the future it will probably be common practice, but right now, I think Microsoft are just taking things too far... unless the interface really does improve the functionality of the OS in a useful way.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Cruise_WD]

It is arguable that this is a major failing of many modern programmers designing games. Who are the two biggest names in 3D graphic engines? Epic and iD - two long, long time PC games companies, who were pushing technical boundaries back when 1Mb of RAM was a lot. If you cut your teeth coding in an environment where every byte counts, it's hard to lose that tendency - I still write my loops to count down, where I can because it produces less assembly instructions (or used to - I can't imagine an optomiser would be willing to reverse a loop's direction so it still would I'd think).

Today's programmers are lazy (if my co-workers and www.thedailywtf.com are anything to go by) - people expect and don't seem to mind a little slowness anymore, "That's just the way things are." Stuff like this shows it doesn't have to be that way.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[rufty_tufty]

How this got modded insightful, Mods only know!

I write this on a laptop with 2GB of memory - sum total of applications running:
Outlook (yes I'm at work, we do what we have to)
Several gVim sessions
Firefox with 6 Slashdot tabs and 1 gmail tab
Acrobat Reader
VNC session
Winamp

as I alt tab to winamp, watch the hdd light flash and the delay in re-draw.
I kid you not, that with the exception of tabbed browsing, I used to do all of this on my Amiga 4000 with 16MB of ram without swapping. my old A1200 only had 4M of ram and i used that as a desktop for a couple of years and that didn't even have the concept of virtual ram!
Now maybe this is the price of progress, but seriously, how much ram do you suggest I need to buy in order to stop this swapping?

As an collery, my desktop at home at 4GB runs Ubuntu and that swaps in similar situations too. Maybe this is the price of progress, but if this article only reminds us that there is another way then I'm all for it.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[squiggleslash]

So do most modern operating systems. GNU/Linux and Mac OS X will also make full use of swap if available, even if there's "enough" RAM.

Here's the thing: Most computers are using the file system almost as much as regular "malloced" memory, with the same files being processed over and over again, or so goes the theory. So all modern operating system kernels use RAM to cache disk blocks even at the expense of having to swap memory used by processes to disk.

In theory this is faster, over all, even if it means applications do not always seem as responsive. In server space, where files are being opened and closed all the time (think web services), this is an optimization that yields massive rewards. I'm not so convinced on the desktop, though it's certainly true that your file manager type app would seem a hell of a lot slower without this type of optimization running.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[thebdj]

Since when? My last three linux installs have all used RAM first, and not filled up any swap space until it was needed. There are plenty of reasons for an OS to NOT write to a swap. The most important reason being SPEED. Of course, by writing a lot to the swap a system can guarantee faster "hibernation" states and offer some degree of protection from power failure or system crashes.

I am looking at KDE System Guard on a SuSE 9 (amd64) installation. It current is using almost 1 GB of memory and 4 K of swap. Go figure, the OS is writing to the memory that is available. This system has 2 GB of RAM. My other SuSE 9 installation (for x86) is using 296 MB of RAM and 0 MB of pagefile.

Back to the speed statement. You would be right to be skeptical of the Desktop being any faster. In reality, if you have something that needs memory a lot it will slow down the system. The slowest part of a computer system is probably going to be the HDD. Most home systems only have 7200 RPM drives, and older systems with PATA are also at a disadvantage. Now, if you are running an OS on a laptop, you really do not want to be writing to an HDD since you could have as slow as 4200 RPM or 5400 RPM, though 7200 RPM drives are becoming more available for a premium.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[markov_chain]

When on a system with enough RAM I just disable swap.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows just has shitty memory management. For the most part I get by okay disabling swap with just 512MB of RAM which makes it much more responsive, only occasionally I get out of memory messages which isn't really a big deal and definately better than the lag from Windows swapping when it doesn't need to. This may not be a good solution for you depending on whether you really do need to swap, but I suggest giving it a try.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[rufty_tufty]

Don't know about XP, but with NT I once tried that!
It refused to boot, even into safe mode.

I set it to 1K, booted perfectly...

the other trick is to use Knoppix, create a ram drive (the size of the CD), copy the cd into the ram drive, and boot from there - now that is a fast system!

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[kcbrown]

I understand that now software do a lot more, we have higher resolutions and color depths... But does it justifies the lack of performance, the bloat? I mean, OpenOffice will crawl on a machine with less than 256MB, and a average Amiga had no more than 4MB of RAM!

Welcome to the world of object-oriented programming. What, you thought all that crazy inheritance was free???

Applications are bloated because developers try to (and fail to, as it turns out) "optimize" for lowest development time, and they think they'll be more "productive" if they use a bunch of classes from some class library that kinda sorta does what they need (hey, no big deal, just subclass from it and reimplement the methods that don't do what you want, right?). But if everything I've seen is even halfway true, there is usually no real reduction in development time, and the resulting programs are usually even more opaque (and thus harder to debug) than they would be if they had been badly written in a procedural language. At least with a procedural language, what you see is what you get, and tracking down the flow of control is relatively straightforward. With an object-oriented program, what appear to be straightforward method calls tend to be very difficult to track back to their actual source unless you use some magic tool to do the job for you. End result: the program is harder to understand (is it really using the class method you think it is, or is it using the method of one of its ancestors?), harder to debug, and harder to maintain.

Object oriented programming is a tool, just like procedural programming is. There are certain classes of problems where it's very obviously the right tool for the job, and sometimes it's the right thing to use even in the middle of a procedural program. But it's not a general-purpose programming method.

If you think I'm wrong about all this, try justifying the 30-40 levels or so of inheritance nesting that you get from a typical Java stacktrace. Each of those levels represents an additional level of inefficiency that simply wouldn't be there if the program had been written properly (which may or may not involve writing it in an object-oriented fashion).

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[CommandNotFound]

So all modern operating system kernels use RAM to cache disk blocks even at the expense of having to swap memory used by processes to disk.

No, this does not happen on Linux boxes. If it does swap due to disk access, it must stop after about 10-20MB. On Windows XP, this happens all the time and it infuriates me. Especially if I copy a large file over the network, since it swaps out my *running applications* so it can cache a file that lives on another machine. Then over the next half hour I have to watch screens and menus redraw as I try to run the other apps. Win9x had a MaxFileCache setting that I wish XP had. I would set the cache to 128MB and leave it. Or better yet, I'm hopefully going to a Linux workstation soon at work and can finally cut the cord.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[iangoldby]

The software should use the least resources necessary for the task assigned.

I can't think of any case where you would want to use 'all the resources it can' (except perhaps stress-testing something).

Of course, if the task exceeds the resource then you will end up using all the resources available. Maybe that is the case with some games. It shouldn't be the case for day-to-day word processing.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[squiggleslash]

I would imagine that you're simply not using much of the disk, hence the total of your loaded applications + memory used by those applications + caching of disk blocks is less than your total RAM. Do not believe that because of that, the default behaviour of the Linux kernel is not to make use of swap to cache the disk at the cost of application memory. Honestly, that's what it does, and from time to time the subject comes up and it's somewhat controvertial for the reasons you state in the latter paragraphs. (Remember also that what's reported as swap doesn't encompass everything that's on disk rather than in RAM - your libraries and application code never count towards "swap", but they are frequently taken out of RAM and reloaded as necessary. Linux doesn't have to copy them into swap because they're already on disk.)

A fairly eye opening discussion of this is here.

If you've ever had the experience of Firefox or OpenOffice suddenly acting slow as hell after you've been doing something that involves large files, especially on slightly lower memory systems, you'll get some idea of how this can be an issue. Something as simple as building a CD image and burning it is made more reliable by this scheme, but will also have quite an effect on the desktop afterwards, especially on machines with slower disks.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

It should be the case with all 3D games, as curved surfaces, etc should be subdivided or modeled so that you can't see any pointy edges (unless you're meant to), and the lighting shouold be as realistic as possible. As it's impractical to do full ray-traced images then compromises have to be made.. but anyway.. I'd expect games will always be pushing a system to its limits, even in the future. Once you can do the graphics realistically, then you simply expand your horizons and increase the scope of the game - have it running a whole city at one time, with advanced AI for every NPC in the city etc etc (I think Elite 4 is doing something cool along these lines?). Obviously a game like Solitaire doesn't have to push the limits, but any 3D rendered game should always push the system as far as it can to get everything realistic physically, aurally, visually, etc etc. There may be a point where it is acceptable to stop pushing, but until your desktop PC can and does model every quark in your game world, then you know you could be doing more! Games are helping to push technology along, and if the games stop needing extra resources, who's going to pay to buy those resources (apart from the army, quiet you, you always like to disagree, yeah you at the back, pfft).

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

I was thinking about researchers and thinking that they don't really use desktop PCs and so shouldn't be taken into account in this, but actually aren't all the latest supercomputers just racks and racks of blades? So maybe they'd help drive down computer prices and have a need for more efficient and powerful machines (though when you can just add on another rack rather than develop an entire new processor, who cares?), but when your average desktop is powerful enough to simulate an entire city including its weather, sewers, traffic, civilians, CO2 emissions etc all at once, then it would take a real moron to want more. We always want more though, it's just in our nature ;)

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Er. The Amiga community strongly embraced OO programming - it had BOOPSI (Basic Object Oriented Programming Systems Interface - largely language agnostic OS-wide OO component system... - good idea, implementation could have been better, but still it was better than most), MUI, ClassAction, etc., and in fact its implementation of "shared libraries" functioned almost identically to COM objects before BOOPSI ever appeared.

Whatever's at fault, it's not OO methodology itself. It's just laziness. On the amiga, if your program was buggy or leaked memory, you crashed your machine (or got an Enforcer (memory protection add on usable on high-end machines with MMUs) hit, which meant you'd crash your customers' machines). The absence of memory protection in the presence of message-passing-by-reference pre-emptive multitasking probably encouraged careful, efficient coding. Is the lack of safety worth it? Not these days, when peopleor download random stuff off the net and run it (back in the day, the bulk of amiga users relied on filtration of the nasty stuff from the raw internet by magazine coverdisks/coverdiscs - though at one time the aminet (amiga software repository on the internet) was the largest repository for _any_ platform all the same).

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[billcopc]

The problem with Windows isn't more RAM, it's the fact that there's something fishy going on in the kernel and it will swap out no matter what. Even if you nuke the swap file, the stupid thing will evict code from RAM and reload it from the EXE file later.

Case in point: I have 16gb in this machine (just because I can). At least once a day while switching between a browser and a couple spreadsheets, Office 2007 will sit stupid for a few seconds with a half-drawn screen while reloading from disk. I don't run many background processes, and my system disks are dedicated to the OS and apps. All data files are on a separate disk array... the choke point is the kernel itself! It's just kinda sorta really dumb.

The thing to remember here is that AmigaOS, like BeOS, is a real-time operating system, at least in spirit. Windows is a "when I feel like it"-time system. If Microsoft could get their act together and realize that User Interface means ME ME ME, maybe they could release a product that is as adored and worshipped as AmigaOS and Mac OS. We have these ridiculously fast machines that feel slower than the 486'es of a decade past, and it's all about UI philosophy. Make a UI that gives immediate feedback to my commands, not 100ms later.. 1ms later!! It's okay if the actual process takes a bit longer, as long as it "feels" fast the user will be happy. We're not sitting at our workstations with stopwatches to measure performance, we just want to do our work without the frequent eye-rolling pauses of the Microsoft regime.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually on linux the behaviour is tunable.
Just change the value of /proc/sys/vm/swappiness (default 60) to get the new behaviour immediately.
with 60, The system won't start using swap before you fill a lot of your memory with running applications.
put 100 on it, then the behaviour moves toward windows': swap before you really need. The only useful thing I can think for this is when one of your applications can make good use of as much cache as it can.A file server, web server or alike.
For a desktop usage, I find setting at 100 hindering: you had memory but because you have a music or video player running that is reading hundred of megabytes, this will fill all the cache and will also swap out all of your inactive applications. Next time you click on anything, it has to be swapped out and you to wait.

Really at 60, my system almost never touches the swap.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[hey!]

It's not inheritance. All other things being equal, inheritance should reduce bloat by reducing redundant implementations that are loaded into memory.

If it's anything, it's encapsualtion. Every object class has an API; APIs are walls of abstraction between what is desired and how it is done. Enough layers of APIs and you can easily end up with a system which performs its tasks correctly, but inefficiently.

I always tell young programmers that when efficiency counts, the layers that matters most are the one at the very top and the one at the very bottom. Everything else that is there only exists to connect them.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually made your Win9x pc a lot faster as it could hold more stuff in memory. Now you buy 1GB for that price and I'm under the impression that it only helps marginally.

If it only marginally helps then being short on memory is not your problem.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Cro Magnon]

but when your average desktop is powerful enough to simulate an entire city including its weather, sewers, traffic, civilians, CO2 emissions etc all at once, then it would take a real moron to want more. We always want more though, it's just in our nature ;)

Yeah! Today it's a city, tomorrow the world! Mwahaha!

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[westlake]

Dude, buy more RAM. RAM is cheap.
Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?

The programmer is expensive. RAM is cheap. Your employer is cheaper.

He expects to see projects completed on time and under project. He isn't interested in paying a premium for engineering elegance and efficiency his clients will never see.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

Yep I guess I was thinking too much from a GTA point of view. I need to think more free-roaming Universe environment, then possibly Multiverse. Where's Isaac Asimov when you need him?

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Dog-Cow]

Swap isn't used when ejecting readonly data, such as code, to make room for the disk cache. If you actually use your system enough to use memory on data files, you'll see your ram usage increase dramatically. And opening a file and reading it doesn't count. Linux won't swap memory that's not been changed if it can be read from the file it came from.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Vintermann]

One word: garbage collection. In principle, garbage collected apps don't need any more memory than statically managed apps, but if they were strictly limited to the same amount, they would be insanely slow (gc for every single allocation?). However, time spent garbage collecting is usually propotional to the amount of live objects on the heap, not dead ones. So garbage-collected apps allocate wildly and wastefully, because that gives the best performance. Given five times as much memory, garbage collection performs better than manual management, according to one article (no time for a link, google it :-)

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[kegon]

> Firefox with 6 Slashdot tabs and 1 gmail tab

> with the exception of tabbed browsing, I used to do all of this on my Amiga

Amiga had tabbed browsing long before the concept came to Netscape/Mozilla. I think Opera was (one of ?) the first and IBrowse on the Amiga was very very soon afterwards. So you could have done tabbed browsing on your Amiga but I doubt you could have done 6 Slashdot tabs even if Amiga had support for CSS, because the pages are pretty big even for other platforms.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Vintermann]

"I've never liked the idea of Java handling memory cleanup, when the programmer should just be doing his job properly..."

Two words: Guru Meditation. coding in as tight memory bounds as they did on the Amiga meant that even C was too expensive for most things, and that had a high price. (Passing around arguments on the stack? What a waste! That's what registers are for!).

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Eideewt]

Under Linux you can tune this with /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. Set it to a lower value and you shouldn't see much swapping. This may or may not improve your overall performance, but it should at least make the system feel more responsive.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Lord Ender]

Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?

The purpose of a computer is to digitize ideas. If throwing extra RAM chips in to a computer saves me from having my concentration (and thus idea digitization) broken by a disk read delay, it is not a waste.

This is slashdot, schwab. How on earth did you wind up on this website while still thinking of better hardware as being a "waste?"

And yes, I waste water, too. But that's much much cheaper than silicon.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Lord Ender]

I've never liked the idea of Java handling memory cleanup, when the programmer should just be doing his job properly

I've never liked the idea of the compiler generating the machine code, when the programmer should just be doing his job properly.

Face it. You're a dinosaur.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[mdozturk]

If an efficient algorithm is found to handle one atom of the text then that benefit only grows as you write more text.

Linear search is the most efficient search method when you have exactly one item on your list. However you shouldn't assume that it will remain efficient as the list size grows.

"It's a very fast algorithm, it just doesn't scale well"

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[mr_mischief]

The people employing the programmers think the programmer should use the least resources necessary for the task assigned. Since people buy software as long as their current system doesn't make it painfully slow to use, the programmer's time is more judiciously spent fixing bugs or writing another bloated product than optimizing something that runs fast enough.

In the days of older, slower systems with less memory, programmers were more frugal with computer resources because there was a need. Then, much of the world was doing single-user, single-tasking things on ridiculously fast systems. Now, in these days of multi-tasking (most people still only use desktops one user at a time) it'd be nice to see some apps that are a bit more miserly since even a few megs per application of waste can add up.

It's still a matter of programmer time vs. benefit. A company could go broke trying to wring more application features out of less memory and fewer processor cycles. If their apps can be a little more efficient than the next company without their programmers having to take much more time to do it, that's likely an acceptable trade in the marketplace. Still, it' the feature checklist that people shop for.

Speed, memory requirements, DLL hell, and even stability are likely going to be blamed on the OS vendor more than the application vendor anyway. Sad but true.The OS should be fast, responsive, and stable on its own. It should keep an errant application from bringing down the system. In fact, killing the application that's causing problems can be the key to the OS keeping the rtest of the system stable. There's no reason to expect MS, Novell, Apple, Red Hat, or Sun to make third-party applications fast and reliable. Many people still do.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in this economy, you can't.
Welcome to the new feudal age.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[stevenvi]

OpenOffice will crawl on a machine with less than 256MB

Really? It runs just fine on my 500 Mhz 128MB machine...

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[COMON$]

I agree, the problem is, not coding efficiently is causing a plateau in speed. I remember getting my 333 dell back in 98 and thinking it was smokin. I was running windows 98, word, and a couple misc games. I could boot in under 30 seconds. I now have a 3.6GHz Intel P4 with 4 GB RAM that behaves no quicker when typing in word, boots a bit slower and unless I am doing something intensive like encoding is the same machine.

Having that small footprint is really all that is necessary, even on my Ubuntu machines I have a hard time seeing any speed difference from my 1998 machine. You can just get more eyecandy.

That all being said, if the average joe would sit down and think what they really need a home PC for, internet browsing, e-mail, music, and word processing, Amiga OS would be fantastic. I want to multitask and tab between apps without waiting several seconds between programs.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[misleb]

As much as there are valid reasons to use much memory, most of what we waste memory on now is purely bad software engineering. I used to have no problem running lots of different apps at once in 2MB RAM on my Amiga. Now, lots of apps will need more memory for good reasons - if I open hundreds of tabs in a web browser of course the documents will take a lot of memory - but that doesn't change the fact that we've gotten extremely complacent, and it comes at a cost. I'm writing this on a laptop with 1GB of memory that's at the moment extremely sluggish because of swapping. I'm not running much - certainly nothing justifying swapping just to change applications, but it does.

Then something is wrong with the particular OS you are running.

-matthew

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[misleb]

I've always thought this as well. Just because we have faster processors and more RAM doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to be efficient. Okay so it's maybe stupid to be optimising a word processor in assembly or something along those lines, but really - all these people who have just grown up with Windows have no concept that something so old could in fact be better.

I'm not going to argue that Windows is particularly efficient with memory, but perhaps you take for granted all that the OS is doing for the user and the developer. Think of all the libraries, network services, graphic accelleration, proper memory protection/managment, interprocess communication, etc. Computers of the past were not, in fact, better. They sucked. From the sounds of it, Amiga OS is still pretty backwards are far as OSes go. I mean, "limited memory protection?" Give me a friekin' break. It's 2007, for gods' sake.

It's like the DEC Alpha or whatever the processor was called - lots of potential, way ahead of the competition, but the management made mistakes (probably totally generalising and getting things wrong here). Consumers need to be better educated :

Maybe you need to be educated on what exactly a modern OS is doing behind the scenes. OSes of the past like DOS, Amiga OS, Mac OS, and Windows 3.1 were "crap" from a computer science perspective. A big reason consumers were stuck with crap like Windows 95 is because not too many people had enough horsepower to run an NT kernel. Even NT 4 before SP 5 was better than Windows 9x.

I, for one, am happy that common PCs finally have the resources to run fully functional OSes (I'm not a Windows user, mind).

-matthew

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[pip1]

"rufty_tufty said:
the other trick is to use Knoppix, create a ram drive (the size of the CD), copy the cd into the ram drive, and boot from there - now that is a fast system!"

sure, that so call 'trick' might work rather well, infact it the same concept of the old Amiga RAD disk (Recoverable rAm Disk) but to this day AFAIK, there is no other OS/machine/app that can infact keep that ram copy in a recoverable ram and boot from it after a warmboot?, is there infact such a thing for linux or windows today?.

the RAD IS/was rather cool keeping in mind you can mearly copy any file/dir, assign it as whatever you like and boot it , so it was trivial to make a RAD, fill it with your boot assigns options/apps then copy it to a dir somewere, then you had an enarc mount a RAD,copy that disk dir to the rad and reboot after that every reset would auto boot the RAD as it was still available in ram so no need to keep copying that HD dir on reset... now thats cool and way faster than booting/copying from harddrive every time...

average first (HD)boot time 20 seconds, after that , RAD boot times ,between 4 and 15 seconds depending on what your usual booting stuff is/was/

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

The only real difference between then and now is the networking services. The memory protection is important, I'll give you that, but saying 'we have a lot more these days' is a poor excuse - the speed of a modern PC is at around a thousand times that of an original Amiga, maybe more. Yes I guess in a general computing platform where the hardware is not standardised, we have a few more layers between the graphics, sound, networking, etc, but things should still run pretty damn fast, and do it with a bit of flair and polish. To me, Windows something still feels slightly bloated and creaky.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Illbay]

It's interesting to think whether it's a waste *not* to use the extra CPU cycles and memory we have these days, by coding efficient apps, or whether we should push a system to use every resource it can, for example...

...loading Windows Vista with no other applications.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

"But hey! Security through obscurity."

Don't knock it, it seems to work for Macs!

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never liked the idea of Java handling memory cleanup, when the programmer should just be doing his job properly..

That's no different from not liking the idea of the C library handling malloc/free -- simply at a higher level. (malloc/free are non-trivial functions to implement, as well.)

I use a higher-level language than C, which has a GC. If I thought a programmer's job was to waste a lot of time doing what a computer can do better (track down all the weird code paths in a 150,000-line app -- which would easily be a million-line app in C), I never would have become a programmer.

Put another way, programming is all about abstraction. A GC is a really good abstraction. Why wouldn't a programmer use it?

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[ericlondaits]

Not only network services...

Did you ever notice how Windows allows to do drag and drop from almost anywhere to almost anywhere? You can drag selected text from the notepad to the address bar of the explorer, drag an image from the explorer to the desktop, drag a file inside a program to open it, etc. That's mostly COM/OLE technology, which implies extra levels of indirection and thus extra CPU and memory overhead.

There's also library modularity, where many Windows programs use standard OS libraries (like TAPI, MAPI, HTML rendering, DirectX, DirectShow, etc.) which provide very rich APIs compared to BIOS services and other interfaces from times of yore.

And most overhead can be traced to a lot of background services whose convenience we already take for granted... like DHCP, USB Plug and Play, Instant Messaging, Firewall, Antivirus, background mail checking and spam detection, HDD indexing (like Google Desktop does), automatic software update checks, background printing, background MP3 playing (my P-100 could hardly play MP3s in DOS as the only task... it depended on bitrate) and all manners of widgets, taskbars, tray icons, etc.

We also got used to high definition non-interlaced true-color desktops, possibly with 3D acceleration, Clear-Type, virtual Desktops, fonts with soft edges, etc. I remember when I first saw a full color (probably 8-bit color, actually) photo in an old Amiga (Amiga 1000 I think), and you could see it render on the screen one line at a time. The same with any SVGA slideshow in my ancient 486 SX under DOS.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Not coming in your pants because some idiot can't handle a modern OS on modern hardware?

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

When I was taught about the GC I was under the impression that it was simply for programmers who adopt poor coding practices (not freeing memory after assigning it). To me it sounded like a waste of processor cycles, having to occasionally check memory to make sure that none had been left allocated but is no longer being referenced by anything. Sure, it may save you some effort, and that's fine if you like having your application run slowly, but personally I'd prefer to have any application I write running efficiently. I was under the impression that the GC was one of the main reasons for Java being slower than C (aside from the obvious fact that it's usually run via an interpreter). It's been a while since I've done either C based or Java coding as I mentioned, but I guess I'm just elitist and would rather than people learn proper coding practices rather than have everything done for them. There are advantages to both methods though, it depends how good a coder you are, how much time you want to spend writing you application, and how efficient you want it to be. The world is now full of 3rd party libraries and such that you can use to speed along your application development, whereas I'm the type of person that prefers to write a webpage in pure HTML rather than use a WYSIWYG editor. As someone else mentioned, I am a 'dinosaur' in a way, and I have to get used to the idea that it helps to use others' code, though really I'd prefer to code everything myself to make sure that it's done right!! I wish I were born in the 60s or 70s :/ :p

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

However, time spent garbage collecting is usually propotional to the amount of live objects on the heap, not dead ones.

This is because proving liveness usually involves tracing from registers through a variety of pointers, and in a full collection all live objects will be examined, and possibly relocated.

Modern collectors partiton the heap into "generations" divided by object longevity. In generational collection systems, objects are not allowed to point to newer objects. The system GCs on a partition-by-partion basis, only when a given generation's partition is full. Thus, most of the time, depending on the overall rate of object creation, live "nursery" (most recently created generation) are copied into the next youngest generation. Nurseries are usually small enough to fit entirely within a CPU cache, and proving liveness in a heap that small is quick, because there are fewer objects to examine and no data to fetch into the data cache, even if all new objects are live. Older generations require more inspections, and much more interaction with off-cache memories.

Consequently in a generational GC system, the frequency of collection is driven by the overall rate of object collection, and the cost of collection is dominated by the rate at which long-lived objects are created. Short-lived objects are much cheaper than long-lived objects because they will not be copied to later generations. Very short lived objects -- ones that do not survive long enough to be copied out of the nursery -- are essentially free. The generational hypothesis holds that in most programs -- especially ones written in functional programming languages -- almost all objects die very young.

There are modern methods of parallelizing generational garbage collection, using barrier systems, so the expensive parts of generational GCing -- proving liveness in older generations, and moving objects from one non-nursery generation to an older one -- can be moved into separate threads. This imposes some extra overall system costs in maintaining the barrier array (typically a bit per page of heap), however in a multiprocessor system, and in a computationally intensive or time sensitive program which fits the generational hypothesis, delegating this work to threads that can be run on other CPU cores is a good strategy.

However:

So garbage-collected apps allocate wildly and wastefully

Garbage-collected apps will do fine allocating wildly as long as allocated objects are short-lived.

In particular, it is important to minimize the scope of any reference (i.e., avoid global variables!)

Wastefulness is bad for performance if it involves copying waste to older generations (i.e., keep sparse data in compact structures)

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[misleb]

The only real difference between then and now is the networking services

Oh, hogwash! All that cool Amiga stuff back in the day was banging on the hardware directly. THe OS provided very little as far as abstraction compared to OSes of today. It goes WAY beyond network services. Seriously, take an OS theory class some day. You'll learn to appreciate what a modern OS does to keep a full featured system running.

The memory protection is important, I'll give you that, but saying 'we have a lot more these days' is a poor excuse - the speed of a modern PC is at around a thousand times that of an original Amiga, maybe more. Yes I guess in a general computing platform where the hardware is not standardised, we have a few more layers between the graphics, sound, networking, etc, but things should still run pretty damn fast, and do it with a bit of flair and polish. To me, Windows something still feels slightly bloated and creaky.

Well, i'm not going to defend Windows. I'm a Linux/OS X user. The computers I use are fast enough. Honestly, I'd rather have more features, functionality, and eye-candy than do the exact same things I did 10 years ago, only 100 times faster. Really, just how "fast" do you want common operations to be?

I think you're totally romanticizing the past... a past when computers were novel. A past when simply being able to print "hello world" and making it fade to black by twiddling the video registers from an assembly program was cool.

-matthew

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

A lot of important stuff in there, sure, though wrt the drag and drop, since the desktop is really just another (specialised) explorer Window, it's not that hard to do (well maybe I'm just being an ass saying that, in fact I probably am), and having text being dragged and dropped between apps isn't too challenging a task for the computer, but I get your point that there is a lot of potential for interoperability. I think the Amiga probably accomplished the same kind of application interoperability via scripting (been a whlie as I said, but I'm pretty sure there was some kind of standard..), and again that was in the olden days, and wouldn't have slowed things down much at all.

When it comes to firewall, I like to have one in the router - antivirus, well.. fair enough for scanning individual files, but it shouldn't have to be resident and scanning everything all the time if you're running in a secure environment. I turn off hard drive indexing whenever I notice that kind of tick box, I uninstalled Google desktop after it got boring, I send prints to a spooler on our server, filter spam at our ISP, prefer to turn off automatic update checks (at least for crap like Acrobat, which I have just uninstalleed completely and use GSView instead.. and I don't mind if apps check for updates on startup of the actual application)... I do play MP3s occasionally, though most of the time I forget to, or pause it when someone phones me and forget to start it back up etc, and I remember trying to play a low bitrate MP3 on my 68030@40Mhz, it was rather choppy.

Anyway, I think most people agree that these days coders tend not to try as hard, just because they have so much processor power and memory space at their disposal. There are many specialised versions of Linux that will fit on a floppy/memory key/CD and still enable you to do serious work. They (presumably - the only tiny OS I tried was QNX, which was a whole OS with a few apps, on an Amiga floppy many years ago) interface fine with all your hardware, provide apps for browsing and office productivity etc. Some things like graphics work do benefit from extra horsepower, but when it comes down to the windowing interface, it should be given more priority so that the system feels more responsive (even if tasks are taking a few ms longer in reality due to the extra cycles being given to the actual interface). I'm pretty sure I had font smoothing on my A1200 as well, since you mention anti-aliased fonts there..

Windows does a lot of stuff, but it doesn't do it in a nice manner, and obviously there is a lot of crap in it that even Microsoft wants to see the back of, since they aren't providing complete backwards compatability in Vista. They have a rather poor track record for their software though, so I'm not expecting things to be amazing. I used to want to stick with Windows for gaming, but I may just end up being a convert to 100% console gaming eventually and just use PCs for work (and maybe coding games for consoles :p ). I used to prefer PCs for games, due to being brought up with an Amiga, and the mouse and keyboard being a good control combination, but if I can get used to the Wii controller for FPS', I may actually convert!

Anyway, sorry to try and be contrary, but I still think that people are overestimating how much power it takes, or should take, to power the OS.. maybe I'm simply underestimating it, but.. not much has changed in the last decade - there's different hardware and interfaces, like USB (which I think does suck up some processor power, and would really have to since there are so many different possibilities for the peripherals, and everything has to be done completely through the drivers, though I don't know the details). Old Amigas had TCP/IP networking, they had printers, they had PCMCIA, hard drives, floppy drives, zip drives, 3D accelerated hardware and PPC add-in cards, etc etc. They could do everything you want your PC to be able to do, and they did it all with a pretty tiny footprint (I had a 180MB HD, n

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Physics Dude]

Okay so it's maybe stupid to be optimising a word processor in assembly or something along those lines, but ...

A lot of the problem isn't just that things aren't being optimized in assembly, but in the design (or lack thereof) of the software. A lot of programmers just treat all memory/disk resources as a single infinite black box. If programmers would even make more of a conscious distinction between memory and filesystem we'd be half way there.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[iangoldby]

The people employing the programmers think the programmer should use the least resources necessary for the task assigned. Since people buy software as long as their current system doesn't make it painfully slow to use, the programmer's time is more judiciously spent fixing bugs or writing another bloated product than optimizing something that runs fast enough.

I kind of agree, but the situation is not nearly as black-and-white as you appear to be suggesting. Clean, efficient, code is usually much easier to debug and maintain, and has less bugs to start with. There is a commonly perceived view that efficient code is obscure and hard to follow, but this is a bit of a straw man - it can be in extreme cases, but bloated code is often much harder to follow. Well-designed code can be a joy to read. OK, maybe I should get out more...

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

Yeah well I do kinda miss the past. I also do know that things are totally abstracted these days, and that slows them down, but also in a weird way speeds things up because it allows you to use hardware from different vendors who compete (thinking graphics cards here). Much higher bandwidth, but increased latency.. I have taken OS 'theory' classes before, though I knew most stuff before that anyway - as with a lot of the stuff I did at Uni, and I actually learned most of what I did about hardware and basic coding while I was on my Amiga (started out in BASIC when I was 12, if you don't count the programs I copied out of the manuals for our Commodore 100 to draw triangles and stuff when I was about 4).

I'm probably thinking Windows too much since that's what I've used the most on PCs, and Linux is a definite improvement. Again, using an OS like Linux helps you to appreciate exactly what you OS has to do (maybe not if you're using Ubuntu, but I've setup RedHat and SuSE Enterprise, tho I guess they will still be fairly user friendly and easy to configure compared to some other flavours..). It's certainly astounding what computers can do today compared to what they could do in the days of Amigas, though I think some layers of complexity could be taken out - for example all code bangs 'on the hardware directly' when it comes to the x86 processor, and even more variable stuff like hard drives and DVD drives, so why not create a more standard interface in hardware for sound and graphics cards? One argument against that is that it could stifle creativity when it comes to hardware, though I guess I don't really see why it would any more than using OpenGL or DirectX does.. we could do with some more 'banging on the hardware directly' these days, at least in compiled applications. I'm not talking about crazy demos which are written directly in assembly and mess with the hardware in ways which man was not meant to mess :p

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Dan Farina]

I don't know -- Python is many times slower and bigger (in memory) than the equivalent C application, but much more terse and (I would argue) by sheer lessening of volume easier to manage and debug. Yet it is still popular. I think this silliness about "we should try to use less memory because it's the Right Thing" should be abandoned in favor of "I should make the end-product useful and functional.

I mean, should we give up array bounds checking because it sucks up CPU cycles?

Computers are meant to be used. Part of the reason why programs have proliferated so rapidly in recent years is precisely BECAUSE it has been less necessary to take care of these mundane details and to experiment.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[iangoldby]

I don't think we are saying dissimilar things.

Leaving aside additional resource requirements due to runtime interpreters and libraries such as used by Python/Java/etc, I think a great deal of bloat is actually due to bad software design - duplicated code, algorithms that are more complicated than necessary, coding for many special cases instead of taking time to work out a single ingenious general solution, etc. All of these things lead to errors, an increase in the code size and a reduciton in maintainability.

I'd never advocate throwing out array bounds checking. But I'd always advocate refactoring code to reduce complexity. Two completely different things.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[misleb]

So do most modern operating systems. GNU/Linux and Mac OS X will also make full use of swap if available, even if there's "enough" RAM.

I don't see that at all. The swap usage on every Linux system I've ever run has stayed near zero as long as there is plenty of RAM. That is, unless at some point you do run out of RAM and something needs to be swapped out. Sometimes it'll stay swappped out if it doesn't get used.. and then swapped back in when it does get used. From what I gather swapping even when there is plenty of RAM is mostly a problem on Windows. I never have that problem on Linux. I'm not sure about OS X because it is harder to tell when the disk is being accessed because my macs are generally quieter. If there is swapping, I'm sure it is because there just isn't enough RAM. Mac apps can take up enourmous amounts of RAM.

-matthew

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Abcd1234]

Cripes, someone is misinformed...

I was under the impression that it was simply for programmers who adopt poor coding practices

No, it's for programmers who don't want to waste their time handling memory allocation when a GC can do it better. It's also for programmers who realize they aren't perfect, and hate having to track down Yet Another Memory Stomper/Leak, when a GC could have eliminated the problem entirely. Or for programmers who value software security and stability over their ability to (poorly) hand optimize.

To me it sounded like a waste of processor cycles

Wrong. There have been many studies which show that GC's are as fast, if not faster than traditional malloc/free, as you can amortize costs over time. There's plenty of literature covering this, if you take the time to look.

I was under the impression that the GC was one of the main reasons for Java being slower than C

Also wrong. a) Java isn't that much slower, these days, thanks to hotspot JVMs doing runtime profiling and optimization. b) Even back in the old days, Java was slow primarily because of the VM. Yes, occasionally the GC would kick in and grind things to a halt briefly, but a modern generational GC is quite efficient.

but I guess I'm just elitist and would rather than people learn proper coding practices rather than have everything done for them

And this is just ridiculous. You might as well tell people to go back to using assembler. High-level languages and tools exist for two reasons: 1) they're faster, and 2) they're safer. And the latter is particularly important because *no* programmer is perfect, no matter how good they are.

though really I'd prefer to code everything myself to make sure that it's done right

Wow, that's quite a statement. It presumes that a) you know how to do everything the "right" way, and b) no one else can. So while you're wasting your time implementing Algorithm X for the nth time, I'll be busy actually doing something constructive, rather than reinventing the wheel over and over and over again.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wondered why MUI was so slow. This explains it!

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu runs GNOME right?

Both GNOME and KDE tryes to build another OS on top of an OS - at a very sorry loss of performance.

No wonder so many HW vendors loves GNOME and MSoft

Try damnsmalllinux on a 128 to 512 MB setup and whatch your machine soar

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Jumpy]

I remember browsing the web on my old Amiga. I used to use the
voyager browser. It used to crash when the chip ram would get used
up. The more pictures a web page had on it the more likely you would
see that software failure alert.

I still miss some things about the Amiga but I've moved on the
fabulous world of Linux. Still its interesting some people are
still hacking on those things!

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was taught about the GC I was under the impression that it was simply for programmers who adopt poor coding practices (not freeing memory after assigning it).

Why the assumption that low-level == good, high-level == poor? Henry Ford did not personally assemble his company's automobiles: was that bad management practice?

GC is for programmers who want to delegate memory management to the computer. With a GC, not only do programmers not explicitly free memory, they often don't have to explicitly allocate it either. They just program, and the computer allocates or frees memory as appropriate.

It's not just a question of saving effort, either. GC makes things simple that are either difficult or even impossible with manual memory management. Closures are a great example - a powerful building-block for all kinds of abstraction, but they make it essentially impossible to determine when any given object becomes redundant just by looking at the code. (You agree that abstraction is good, right?)

Or even simple things like returning a large object from a function. Users of GC simply return the object without having to worry about who owns it. Fans of manual memory management would return a pointer to the object - inefficient at best (smart pointers typically use slow techniques like reference counting), at worst error-prone. Fans of stack-based allocation are forced to copy the object - a waste of cycles if ever there was one!

To me it sounded like a waste of processor cycles, having to occasionally check memory to make sure that none had been left allocated but is no longer being referenced by anything.

Perhaps you should find out how GC works. To me, the alternatives sound like a waste of processor cycles - having to laboriously scan a list of free blocks in malloc() to find one the right size (with GC, addresses don't need to be constant, so allocating memory in the heap can be nearly as efficient as allocating it in the stack), or - God forbid - using reference counts, which must be incremented and decremented practically every time an object is used.

In fact, programs that use a GC often use fewer processor cycles than programs that manage memory manually. The place where GC is less efficient is memory usage, which is often considerably greater for a program that uses GC; this can cause a performance hit if it leads to cache misses and the like.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Nazlfrag]

Would a 1 gig flash drive suffice?

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Vintermann]

That's the long story, yes :-) "wastefully" wasn't perhaps an appropriate word. What I mean is that at any time a GC app will hold a lot of memory that is technically avaliable to other programs, it just hasn't realised because the garbage hasn't been collected. I suppose this shouldn't be a problem if the programs share garbage collection mechanisms somehow.

(Is that common? I don't even know)

I believe modern malloc-implementations also "waste" memory to increase performance, by eagerly allocating large chunks. Memory management on the Amiga... I'm pretty sure the OS used fixed-partition multiprogramming or a variant thereof, because fragmentation meant that you couldn't expect to be able to run Deluxepaint, close it and run Simant, and then close it and run Pirates. Anyway you couldn't play many demos and games that way, since they didn't bother with the OS at all... Ah, the nostalgia! But I've heard horror stories about the tricks pascal programmers used to keep only parts of the program in memory at any time, so I don't want to go back!

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

I'm not saying that I'm perfect or always right, the thing about using 3rd party libraries taken off the net is that they could have lots of bugs, just be inefficient, and possibly closed source so you won't even be able to fix things up if needs be. At least if you do something yourself you know exactly what is going on, and have a better chance of sorting out any bugs you find. I know I'm a bit behind when it comes to the latest programming languages and practices, as I was originally self taught, and I actually ended up doing a *lot* less coding at Uni than when I was just coding for fun, but I'm trying to rectify my situation. Thanks for the info on the Java GC, I would have accepted it a lot more easily if it wasn't touted as being so slow. I thought that that processors had just become so fast that there wasn't really any problem in speed for things like simple games, but it sounds like Java is advancing nicely. I do love the platform independent concept of Java, it's based on a great idea, but IMO I'd rather use a language that is efficient, and make modifications for different platforms, than use a platform independent one that is going to be really slow, unless it's just for some simple application where speed doesn't matter. I may try it again some day. Currently I've decided to learn Perl, I know it isn't exactly modern, but it sounds a lot better than PHP for security in server side scripting, and I'm about to do a web based interface for a database at work..

Again I'll reiterate that I'm not perfect, but in terms of bugfixing/coding/logic I have a fairly solid base which I built up during my teenage years (admittedly I wasn't all self taught, my dad did teach me some stuff like linked lists), and I could easily say that I was above average in my Computer Science classes at University, though that's probably not saying much. Compared to a lot of people at /. I've had a lot less experience with coding and keeping up with the latest technology, and I still have an 80s/90s type attitude where applications were written by very small teams, or even individuals, and they were built from the ground up just because there was no other choice. I have no problems with official libraries like OpenGL, etc, but when it comes to making functions and libraries for specialised string/date/whatever manipulation I'd rather do my own to gain the experience, unless I'm more stretched for time (as I am at work). Again I assume a lot of people on /. can write good code, but there are also a lot of people out there that don't. I may even be one of them so far! I know someone in the past referred to my TEAMbot code (bot for CS that I made in high school in C++) as 'twisted hacked', but hey, it worked :p

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

I admittedly haven't done a lot of coding in C++, though I have used malloc and free, I guess I just like the feeling of 'control' and the idea that it was more efficient than having it done automatically as BASIC or some other language would do. I 'like' using pointers and all that stuff, as long as I see it has benefits. Once higher levels of coding are reached, and they are shown to compile into just as efficient code as a lower level language, then that is fine with me. Or if as in the case of Java the language has other benefits than pure efficiency, it can be good to use it. You've shown that in general it can use less processor time, though as a tradeoff it uses more memory (most things seem to work this way). Having to swap out the cache is likely to be more time consuming than using a few extra instructions, so I don't know if that is a benefit either. Meh.. if an application warrants using Java then I would use it, but most of the stuff I do will only need to be run on Windows, and for simple cross platform applications then a web interface using JavaScript and SSS is acceptable.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Abcd1234]

I'm not saying that I'm perfect or always right, the thing about using 3rd party libraries taken off the net is that they could have lots of bugs, just be inefficient

Well, if it's any kind of common library (like Boost for C++, or glib for C), it'll have far FAR more mileage on it than any code you've written, so odds are, it's less buggy than anything you (or I) could spit out. As for efficiency, you're making the classic mistake of prematurely optimizing. That kind of micro-optimization is rarely beneficial. 99% of the time, performance enhancements come in the form of higher-level algorithm modifications, not low-level library changes. And either way, you should be using a profiler to determine where the hotspots are, and then fixing those specific cases.

string/date/whatever manipulation I'd rather do my own to gain the experience

Heh, you know, it's really funny you should pick those examples. In the first case, there's *so many* string implementations out there that writing one yourself is pretty silly. That's like writing your own linked list implementation. An interesting educational exercise, yes, but a waste of any decent programmer's time. The basic C library has most of what anyone would need (although I'll grant that string composition is a pain in C, though that can be fixed by some clever using of vsnprintf and it's cousins). And every other decent (and not-so-decent) language that's higher-level than C has it's own string type.

And as for dates, you've just picked what is probably one of the most painful problems is normal application programming. Handling Gregorian dates is a *massive* pain in the ass. The entire problem space is one huge corner case. Time zones, daylight savings time, leap years... In fact, it's been said that if you were to try and design a system of times and dates that would be as difficult as possible to work with, it'd probably look a lot like what we have right now. Consequently, writing your own date code is absolute insanity! Why recreate bugs that someone else already fixed?

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[somersault]

I was actually planning on writing my own linked list implementation in Delphi to remove repeat items from a list. Partially just as an educational exercise since I've not used linked lists since University, and it's been a while since I've user pointers in Delphi too. With the date thing I have written a function to convert dates from one form to another, though it only does UK format dates (reads in a date from Excel and then converts to a different form to use as part of a filename). I don't mind using well known 3rd party libraries like glib and glut, and I have even used 3rd party delphi components from random Delphi websites (pretty much any GUI work I do is through Delphi, though I've done OpenGL stuff in C++), to save time. I'm currently wanting to use Perl as a server side scripting language in place of PHP which I've always used in the past, but I'm not sure of the ways that people usually use Perl in this regard - I could use Mason and then I would be able to use Perl in a similar way to inline PHP, but otherwise I guess I'd have to write everything in cgi and load in html from external files or build it right into the code. I guess we're amazingly offtopic by now so I don't mind asking for resources or advice on how Perl is used in a server side scripting environment..

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, allocators hold on to memory given to them by the operating system, because sbrk(2) and equivalents are slow.

Getting memory from the OS and returning it is something either type of allocator could do easily enough. Most don't, because the developers were happier with paging performance in comparison.

CLISP has (or used to have, anyway) a number of experimental GC schemes which played with a variety of APIs for requesting more memory from (or returning no longer needed memory to) the operating system. Among them were sbrk and mmap, with various hold vs return policies.

In any event most GCs will hold twice the desired managed heap size, so as to maintain two semispaces. This makes copying and compaction somewhat easier. Once a semispace has been collected, it contains only never-used pages and dirty pages full of broken heart objects and unreachable garbage. That entire semispace can be returned to the operating system, and a new one made of zero-filled pages can be requested. In some OSes with efficient zero-fill-on-demand or COW demand paging, this is a win, and means the memory footprint of the program varies between the desired heap size and something short of double that.

Alternatively, rather than maintain semispaces (and simultaneously compact memory via copying), an implementation can slide objects towards the start of the heap, compacting out the "holes" left by dead objects. This trades off the space taken by a semispace model for some computation (and possibly extra copying). This approach is popular in memory constrained systems which are also small enough to make mark-and-sweep acceptably fast.

Shared managed heaps are certainly possible, and have been done (Genera, for example). If there is no way to look at arbitrary memory locations (i.e., you can ONLY visit reachable objects, and those are all in trees rooted in your process registers) then this is safe, and can be done efficiently with cleverness in synchronizing on the allocator.

These constraints are incompatible with C-like semantics with respect to heap access and mutation.

However, there are only aesthetic and complexity objections to implementing exactly this type of system using UNIX shared memory APIs.

(In fact, it's been done in communicating sequential processes systems, but I don't know of any open source system that could be used as a reference; the obvious area to look for one would be mixed-model OS X applications (databases?) which give ILP32 processes views into heaps managed within an LP64 process -- skeletons describing this are on developer.apple.com somewhere, although the openmcl.clozure.com people certainly have their fingerprints all over that model).

(Inferno's Limbo components (Bell Labs) probably do this too, but there are worldview mismatches between the Labbies and Lispers that are hard to overcome, so I don't know for sure).

Finally, the complexity is not just in the coding of the system. There are also interactions among duelling control systems with respect to the overcommit of real, physical memory, and those are hard to debug. An example would be a strict LRU page replacement system forcing out all the client process pages while the heap server is busy touching its many pages to find and relocate live objects.

Your friendly BSD man page for madvise(2) is likely totally unhelpful, and is probably everyone's best starting point. :-(

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Vintermann]

Speaking of unhelpful, you're the opposite! Why post anonymously? You obviously know what you are talking about, which probably means more people are interested, which means you should have upmods, but the moderators don't see you, because they mostly don't browse at 0.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the compliment!

they mostly don't browse at 0

But they're supposed to browse at -1, right?

Why post anonymously?

(Sorry if this sounds arrogant rather than direct.)

1. I was very tired and making typos, and the stuff I put my name to (because I stupidly registered with a plesionym (how's that for a neologism?), everyone would recognize me) is better edited. Typos and thinkos are closely correlated.

2. a) Sometimes being an AC gets fewer people examining what you write in a given message more closely than many people thinking: "oh that's so-and-so, he's a crank" or "that's foobar and what she writes is so smart that i have gone through her posting history". I do this myself (I keep friends and foes lists, and at least one in each overlaps with yours...).

2. b) Another way of putting this is that it gets lonely being the last word in a discussion. I get more replies as AC.

3. I have a devious and easy (but idiosyncratic) system for managing threads I am AC in, and prefer it to the slashdot notification system.

4. Someone has to stand up for the AC! ACs write the worst and the best of /.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, refilling a pool in only 10 milliseconds is pretty fast!

so many memories...

[bennomatic]

...whatever happened to my old Amiga 500? I wish I knew...

Re:so many memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

i cant believe i gave away my Amiga 1000... that thing could have been my retirement fund.

still have the Amiga 600 floating around, it has a great form factor, like a chunky mini keyboard, it was useless for anything but funky games, but they came on floppies and floppies die :(

Amiga 1200 now that thing rocked, still remember the funked up video graphics @ my first raves all running of some juiced up 1200.

Re:so many memories...

[SQLGuru]

My 1000 is in my garage.....but it does still work. Never got around to getting the hard drive for it, though.

Layne

Re:so many memories...

[Tumbleweed]

...whatever happened to my old Amiga 500? I wish I knew...

I'm pretty sure I saw it on eBay.

Re:so many memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, you don't have "so many memories"...

Re:so many memories...

[Jack Action]

I believe 1985 called...

Re:so many memories...

[AliasTheRoot]

Boxed my 600 for a few years, when I came back to it the metal components had rusted. It's in a landfill somewhere now.

Short memory

[edwardpickman]

Interesting that he would mention not worrying about viruses. If history repeats itself that should be short lived. Amiga was one of the worst in the old days for viruses. Most of them at the time came from floppies because it had this habit of auto booting the disk the moment they were placed in the drive. Hopefully the new OS is better guarded but the limited user base is likely to be it's best defense.

Re:Short memory

[LoudMusic]

Amiga was one of the worst in the old days for viruses. Most of them at the time came from floppies because it had this habit of auto booting the disk the moment they were placed in the drive Did the Amiga hardware include a motorized floppy drive similar to the Apple Macintosh floppy drive? I don't think that standard "x86" drives would automatically access a disk - the OS usually has to be told to do so, unless it is constantly probing. But I think that would cause the OS to constantly be hanging. I think Tandy also used automatic drives.

Re:Short memory

[MrShaggy]

Yes it did.. it knew that there was a floppy. Pretty slick. I would try to put this amiga os on my laptop on a partition. Gives me something fun to try.

Re:Short memory

[pioneerX]

It made a clunk every few seconds as it checked for the presence of a disk. This made you stick in disks at random just to shut it up.

Re:Short memory

[rossdee]

It wasn't a motorized floppy (in the sense of insertion and ejection) but it did detect a diskchange automatically. However if when it scanned the directory block on the disk, it found it was corrupted, it would run a disk validator program. Unfortunatelyhe first place it would look for the disk validator program was on the floppy disk that was in the drive, so a hacker could write a virus that maskeraded as the disk validator and it could automatically run whenb the disk was inserted.

This type of virus was made obsolete by later versions of AmigaDOS (Version 2 and higher) and there were good antivirus programs in shareware and freeware.

(I was an amiga owner from 1986 til 2002)

Re:Short memory

[eddy]

The reviewer wasn't around then (on the platform):

"However, in all these years, there has been only one operating system that has captured my heart. While I missed the glory days of the Amiga in the late 80s and early 90s, and was only introduced to the platform a couple of years ago, I can see why its diehard fans have held on to the OS despite having to wait so long for a new version to be released. Call me crazy, but I'm an Amigan now, and will be as long as I can. This OS has struggled past incredible obstaclesboth financial and psychologicaljust to exist, but I'm already anxiously awaiting its successor."

That brings a smile to my face. I can almost understand diehards who almost literally are in love with their darling from the 80s. But he wasn't even on the platform then. That's pretty amazing.

Me, I was there, but I don't really feel the urge to go back. The Amiga was amazing, and the OS had some good ideas, but for me it was only a vehicle for games and demos. The amazing hardware is no more, and the games aren't there.

I guess that leaves the demos, but I'm afraid to go back and discover they're all the bland 3D-object masturbations I saw on the PC. In my memory, they're all so good. Greetz goes out to Melon Dezign.

Re:Short memory

[ozmanjusri]

Interesting that he would mention not worrying about viruses. If history repeats itself that should be short lived. Amiga was one of the worst in the old days for viruses.

Even more interesting that he was more productive on the Amiga than XP even despite its shortcomings. It shows just how badly format lockin has hurt the computer industry.

If we'd had hetrogenous computing environments which allowed free and open data exchange, we'd have had all of those opportunities for competing platforms to establish niches for themselves, and advance the whole field through competition.

We certainly wouldn't be waiting half a decade in anticipation of a moderate facelift to one mediocre OS...

Re:Short memory

[zakezuke]

Did the Amiga hardware include a motorized floppy drive similar to the Apple Macintosh floppy drive? I don't think that standard "x86" drives would automatically access a disk - the OS usually has to be told to do so, unless it is constantly probing. But I think that would cause the OS to constantly be hanging. I think Tandy also used automatic drives.

IIRC, the floppies drives on the amiga were identical to x86 counterpart. I back up this claim by knowing for a fact I took a standard x86 drive put it on my amiga when the factory drive failed. It was too short for the bay, and franky I couldn't seem to get High Density to work on my A2000 but aside from that no problem. The only thing they did differently, that i'm aware, was use the disc change pin. As in when you put a disc in, the drive would relay this to the system.

It was a complaint of mine that on the PC, when using multiable media, you had to press "OK" once you swapped discs, an operation which could have been handled by the disc change line. Even more sad the fact that this support only came into play in later versions of windows, a feature offered on older systems.

Re:Short memory

[bhaak1]

It made a clunk every few seconds as it checked for the presence of a disk. This made you stick in disks at random just to shut it up.

Yeah, the trackdisk.device was lousy in that way. But for every AmigaOS version there were programms that could stop the clicking.

For 2.0 upwards they were even implemented as Commodities

Re:Short memory

[SenorCitizen]

IIRC, the floppies drives on the amiga were identical to x86 counterpart. I back up this claim by knowing for a fact I took a standard x86 drive put it on my amiga when the factory drive failed. It was too short for the bay, and franky I couldn't seem to get High Density to work on my A2000 but aside from that no problem. The only thing they did differently, that i'm aware, was use the disc change pin. As in when you put a disc in, the drive would relay this to the system.

There's an explanation for HD disks not working. The (very) few Amigas that came with HD floppy drives had custom-built drives that would spin at half speed with HD disks. IIRC, the reason for this was that Paula's bandwidth wouldn't have been enough. And of course Commodore never updated the audio chip/floppy controller...

BTW, did you get the disk change function to work properly? I always thought there would be some trouble just using a regular drive. Some of the later non-Commodore A1200's came with standard PC drives, and couldn't start certain copy-protected games.

Re:Short memory

[kegon]

>> because it had this habit of auto booting the disk the moment they were placed in the drive

The parent is wrong, viruses came from people swapping vast quantities of infected cracked games, not from the design of the disk drive. In fact, the floppy drive which could detect if a disk was in the drive coupled with an OS that reacted to it was a good feature. No more "insert disk and then click OK" dialogues, just "Insert disk".

> Did the Amiga hardware include a motorized floppy drive similar to the Apple Macintosh floppy drive?

If you mean motorised eject then no. These weren't "standard" x86 drives; I don't know about other differences but you could store 880 KB on a formatted floppy or 1.76 MB on the rare high density drives.

Re:Short memory

[Bert64]

It did make a clunk, but for no real reason...
It was possible to turn off the clunk and have it still detect inserted disks correctly.

Re:Short memory

[zakezuke]

There's an explanation for HD disks not working. The (very) few Amigas that came with HD floppy drives had custom-built drives that would spin at half speed with HD disks. IIRC, the reason for this was that Paula's bandwidth wouldn't have been enough. And of course Commodore never updated the audio chip/floppy controller...

I just popped in a standard HD teac drive as my amiga drive failed. I got annoyed and eventually invested in a scsi floppy controler. That worked pretty well, but as you might imagine, it was worthless as nothing came out for the amiga in HD.

BTW, did you get the disk change function to work properly? I always thought there would be some trouble just using a regular drive. Some of the later non-Commodore A1200's came with standard PC drives, and couldn't start certain copy-protected games.

I wasn't game oriented, esp since I got into the amiga very late. As I couldn't be bothered swapping discs I went out of my way to get cracked editions of things I actuallly used. After all, running origional discs is dumb, and using floppys when you don't have to is silly. I can only speak for Pirates, Civilization, Colonization, and Lemmings. There were certainly some cooler games I "wanted" to find but simply could not, like "It Came From the Desert".

Re:Short memory

[Bert64]

Also the fact that programs could remain resident in memory over a soft reset...
So a virus puts itself into the bootblock of a bootable disk, and when youve finished playing that game and reboot to play another, that one gets infected too.

The drives themselves were standard, at least the double density ones... The high density ones found in the A4000 and some A3000 systems were specially modified to spin at half speed in high density mode because the floppy controller couldn't handle the higher transfer rate of HD drives. On the other hand, the floppy controller is far more powerfull than the ones typically available in other systems, and you could use areas of the disk that were usually reserved, such as the outer most edge, but all this was done in the controller chip, not in the actual drive.
As for storing 880kb/1.76mb, that was achieved by having more sectors per track (11 as opposed to 9 used by ms-dos), but you could use tools like diskspare.device to put up to 1.1mb on a DD disk and potentially 2.2 on an HD.

Re:Short memory

[Anonymous Coward]

The floppies on the Amiga were not identical to x86 counterparts. That is, the diskettes were of course identical, and the mechanical drive I assume was also the same, but the *floppy controller* was very different from both the x86 and the Apple counterparts. It was extremely flexible, and could read any floppy format. Reading PC 720k floppys was not a problem, but for a PC it was and is still impossible to read an Amiga floppy. Amiga DD floppys were 880k, as opposed to 720k on the PC.

Look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#The_Commo dore_Amiga

Re:Short memory

[Duds]

It's not that he's more productive. It's just that the OS does very little so there's nothing distracting him (ignoring his insane FUD about swapping and virus checkers. I never notice windows swap and my virus checker runs silently at 4am).

All he's saying is that he (like most writers) are continually distracted by "OOH SHINEY" and have no self-disicipline to get anything done.

That doesn't make OS4 useful for normal people, in fact it makes it less useful. And as for the boot up time, well BeOS did that a decade ago and in fact was a very similar OS overall (except even it had 3d drivers).

Re:Short memory

[zakezuke]

The floppies on the Amiga were not identical to x86 counterparts. That is, the diskettes were of course identical, and the mechanical drive I assume was also the same, but the *floppy controller* was very different from both the x86 and the Apple counterparts.

I should have been more clear. But needless to say I as an end user could pop in a Teac drive on my a2000 and do DD 880k disks. I could not do 1.44 or 1.8meg discs. I don't remember if I was limited to 1.44 on the scsi floppy controler I had, or if I felt it was wise to keep my stuff on something the PC could read.

Again, if I remember correctly, there were issues reading mac 3.5inch DD mac floppies, but not HD ones if you had a HD drive that is. Again my recall on this subject is vague.

Re:Short memory

[somersault]

Most OSs do 'very little' in terms of distracting you - or at least they should do little. The OS is there to provide libraries for your programs to interface with your hardware. It's similar to using a graphics system like OpenGL or DirectX. The interface should not matter, it's the applications/games that are meant to make you think 'ooh, shiny!'. Of course if the OS is poor then you will be negatively distracted. It's nice to be able to customise the OS' GUI and stuff to make everything more pleasant, but having themes in your OS isn't too spectacular an achievement. The Amiga OS in this case is notable because it works quickly, as any sane system should. Think how much calculation is going on when you're playing Half-Life 2 at 180fps or whatever, and then witness how long Windows takes to alt-tab between Winamp and Firefox, or whatever. On a modern system that runs at clock rates >1000 times faster than Amigas used to run (not sure how much faster the RAM and HDs are, but as others have pointed out, everything used to fit into RAM back then anyway even if you had like 16MB, though my first Amiga was 512KB and floppy based), why does the system take so long to visibly switch between tasks etc.

I remember our Mac Classic wasn't able to keep up with my typing even when I was 10 years old, but I don't think our A500 had that problem (though admittedly the interface was less fancy). The only thing I remember being slow on my A1200 was waiting for the file list in a large directory, but that would have been more to do with a slow HD (180MB!! :p )

Re:Short memory

[mikek3332002]

Interesting that he would mention not worrying about viruses. If history repeats itself that should be short lived. Amiga was one of the worst in the old days for viruses. Most of them at the time came from floppies because it had this habit of auto booting the disk the moment they were placed in the drive. Hopefully the new OS is better guarded but the limited user base is likely to be it's best defense.

So that's why Windows is virus haven, it all because of Auto-Run.

Re:Short memory

[YttriumOxide]

I've been an Amiga user since around 1987... Went from A500, to A600 to A1200 to A4000 to AmigaOne. In that time, the longest I've been without an Amiga is 2 years (between my A4000 and my AmigaOne). In all that time, I was only ever really a gamer on the A500 (since I was under 10 years old...) and I've never really been in to the demoscene.

For me, the Amiga isn't about games or demos. I tend to side with the author of TFA really - the Amiga is just a great OS: Small, Fast, Efficient and doesn't bug you every few seconds or cache memory to disk when there's really no need to.

Right now, I'm writing this from my intel iMac, while my Win2k box sits to my left compiling some code for work, my Linux box sits under the desk being my local caching proxy and my AmigaOne has my email client open. So, I'm hardly a fanatic of any OS, but the Amiga will always be my favourite just for "getting stuff done" (assuming that the "stuff" in question has the appropriate software - the one great lacking on AmigaOS right now)

Re:Short memory

[Duds]

then witness how long Windows takes to alt-tab between Winamp and Firefox, or whatever.

On my system, instantly. With several explorer windows, Team Foundation server, skype, Thunderbird, Media player classic, 200MB of my company's product, Outlook and god knows what else running.

Memory is cheap. Buy some.

Re:Short memory

[somersault]

Well I only have 768MB on this laptop and I don't think I should need any more. Memory is not the problem, it's the OS. When it's doing heavy computation, the interface stops functioning so well, which should not happen in an efficiently multitasked system.

TBH my copy of XP Pro could do with a reinstall to get rid of the crap that has accumulated in the system (at least a couple of other people had this laptop before me as well). Sometimes the start bar freezes for a minute or so, it's just frustrating. How hard is it to build a properly functioning interface to access and run your files? I read that the guy that wrote the original Amiga OS just locked himself in a dark room for a week or so, and came out with the basic interface and a great multitasking system. Been a while since I read lots of Amiga magazines but really, with all the engineers and cash at Microsoft's disposal, you'd think they'd have a near perfect system. Unfortunately too many cooks do seem to spoil the broth (not that I've ever thought that Windows was ever a pleasant or efficient OS, though I did grow quite accustomed to 98).

Re:Short memory

[somersault]

It was probably a poor example anyway, but even when you say 'instantly', if you really compared it to an OS that did it in 1ms rather than 100ms, you'd notice the difference. I'm not saying Amiga OS does everything in 1ms, I haven't measured speeds, but if you haven't experienced the difference you probably wouldn't notice. You have a low user ID though, maybe you have experienced Amigas, who knows. Even if the applications do switch 'instantly' (probably around 300ms on my machine), the changeover is ugly, with noticeable artifacts as the windows are drawing themselves. I also hadn't even noticed that my system was doing the stupid maximise/minimise animations when alt-tabbing until I was trying to see how quickly it went, so I've turned it off now. I can't remember a lot about my Amiga since it's been about 8 years since I used it, but I do remember that I thought the Windowing system was a lot quicker than Mac OS and Windows. Like I've said before, it took a while to bring up all the icons in a heavily occupied folder, but I'm pretty sure the actual GUI itself rendered lightning quick (may just be nostalgia? probably not though)

Re:Short memory

[mdwh2]

What sort of autobooting are you talking about?

Obviously a disk booted when you first switched on the machine, this is how all platforms work. It's just that back then it was common to have machines without hard disks, and games booted direct from disk, which became a virus target. If I booted a PC with my own boot disk, I could get it to do whatever I liked too - this isn't really comparable to the situation on a platform today, and yes, the Amiga has happily worked as a platform with a hard disk for ooh, about a couple of decades now.

When the OS is running, floppies do not "autoboot" (unlike CDs on Windows...)

But yes, in general it was the "worst" because it was the most popular home machine for a time.

Re:Short memory

[Wienaren]

Some drives (ie models, brands) required activating the stepper motor in order to report disk change events.

Re:Short memory

[Duds]

I've not used OS4 but with 1.3, that's definately myth. It's a clunky pile of hell these days, which isn't surprising.

And no, when I say instantly I mean it and I don't see any redrawing at all. This is a 2gb machine admittedly but near a gig of that is currently taken up just by SQL Server and our product.

Yes, redraw on high CPU load is occasionally iffy but to claim windows always artifacts or takes time on a properly specced system is just not true.

Re:Short memory

[somersault]

Well I used to use Workbench 3.1 on a 40Mhz 68030 with 16MB of RAM (no FPU tho :( ). As I said I'm probably remembering everything as perfect through rose tinted spectacles, I know I got a shock the first time I went back to Gran Turismo 2 after GT3, but compared to Mac OS which used to have to buffer up all inputs and execute them over time, the Amiga OS was real-time.

My current system is a Pentium M 1.7GHz with 768MB RAM and a Quadro FX Go700, not spectacular, but come on, it should be able to handle drawing applications etc instantly. Compare it to my 68030 at 40MHz, and the faster RAM, etc - everything really *should* be 'perfect' when it comes to alt-tabbing and so on. I know that it does come down to individual applications as well, not just the OS, but when you think how much computing has advanced over the years, it feels like the power that we do have is being wasted (when you use Windows at least). Think of all those people who say that they run Linux on their older systems and it reacts a lot better than a faster machine running Windows. You just have to admit that it's not as good as it could be - by a long way!!

Re:Short memory

[GregWebb]

Mac DD disks used CLV not CAV motors, rather like early CD-ROMs. This meant you got bettter disk capacity but you needed a very special controller / drive to read it.

They dropped this for HD in the interests of compatibility.

Re:Short memory

[Duds]

I've never met these people. Anyone running a modern KDE or Gnome has generally found it slower in most use in my experience.

Re:Short memory

[somersault]

I've not met them either, I've just seen them post here. Some modern versions of Linux will no doubt be 'bloated' too, depending on what your requirements are for your OS, though in general Linux is a lot more customisable than Windows will ever be, so you can get rid of something if you really don't want it, even down to the kernel level (sorry to state the obvious).

Re:Short memory

[Duds]

Unless it's a binary module, then they'll get rid of it for you ;)

I suppose in the year 2038....

[ip_freely_2000]

..I'll be mentioning something cool in Mac OS LXVIII and some idiot will say "Why, we did that in Amiga OS 4, and we did it better!"

Re:I suppose in the year 2038....

[Nossie]

I'm thinking either that's sarcasm

or you are the pot calling the kettle black?

Re:I suppose in the year 2038....

[Anonymous Coward]

And then in 2043 you will be telling the Windows folks that Mac OS LXVIII did it better 5 years prior!

Thank Goodness!

[dada21]

Now I can get ProComm to dial into those old Telegard BBSes that I still have the phone numbers for in my Apple Newton. I hope that someone ports a terminal emulator that supports the RIP protocol, because ANSI and AVATAR are just boring.

This will completely let me replace my Coco3.

Tradewars door, here I come!

Re:Thank Goodness!

[jesterzog]

I hope that someone ports a terminal emulator that supports the RIP protocol, because ANSI and AVATAR are just boring.

RIP graphics had a shiny factor, and were sometimes faster to load, but I definitely preferred ANSI or ASCII for most things. Both put limits on the sysop's often limited design ability to disguise useful information inside shiny graphics. Programs like RIPTerm (in DOS, at least) tended to be a lot more klunky than ANSI terminal apps, although it could have been quite different on Amigas.

Re:Thank Goodness!

[antdude]

Use SyncTERM (no Amiga port though) for that. ;)

Re:Thank Goodness!

[antdude]

Agreed. However, ANSImation and ANSI music were annoying, and bad for slow dial-up connections like 2400 speed. :(

Re:Thank Goodness!

[YttriumOxide]

MANY years ago on my Amiga 600 I remember the first local BBS to implement RIP... and those of us with Amigas all had use of it straight away, while the local DOS/Win31 users all suffered a long wait...

The terminal emulator we all used was "Term" - perfect RIP support. The source code and binaries for Term 4.7 are both on Aminet if you're interested.

Re:Thank Goodness!

[ewy99]

Ahh. Forgot about Term! A BIG step up from jr-comm! Liked the fact that there were different optimized versions depending on which processor you had

Re:Thank Goodness!

[YttriumOxide]

Ahh. Forgot about Term! A BIG step up from jr-comm! Certainly is!

Liked the fact that there were different optimized versions depending on which processor you had That's very common with Amiga applications. Many installers will ask what CPU you have (good ones will detect it) and then give you the appropriate binary based on that. It probably isn't THAT necessary really, but it was just always part of the Amiga way of doing things.
As a note: The m68k emulator in OS4 for PPC machines treats itself as a 68020 with FPU - just MUCH faster.

Yeah

[winkydink]

Couldn't the 6 of you who are still interested just start a mailing list or something?

Re:Yeah

[Rob the Bold]

Couldn't the 6 of you who are still interested just start a mailing list or something?

So that would include 6 interested people + at least 2 guys who keep posting "Amiga is Dead" over and over?

Re:Yeah

[Bamafan77]

It's like the Michael Myers of Operating Systems. :)

Re:Yeah

[wolverine1999]

Can we have an Atari ST mailing list too while we're at it?

Re:Yeah

[nick rawlings]

A mailing list is only useful if there is more than one person on it, perhaps a blog?

So how much computer is the amiga?

[stainless69]

The wayback machine says:
http://www.archive.org/details/Amigaand1985/

Re:So how much computer is the amiga?

[digitalhallucination]

"640k ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981

Re:So how much computer is the amiga?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga in 1988

Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtxeWmqBeYw
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLwJc44OGQ4

The only question left

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it run Duke Nukem Forever?

Re:The only question left

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, only until the next crash

Thank you, Thank you, I'm here all week :)

Re:The only question left

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobe, but it will run Duke Nukem Constantly!

Re:please..

[mcrbids]

die already. the amiga's time has come and gone.

What is your problem?

I don't get all upset when somebody drives by in a 1950's Studebaker all tricked out. Yeah, it has some limitations, such as: a single-speaker AM radio, no air conditioning, cruise control, electric windows, it requires fuel additives to not die on unleaded gas, and it's hard to find parts for. Oh, and it's a death trap in an accident.

And despite all that, it's still mighty cool. I honk when I see somebody driving one.

Can you imagine what a dorkass you'd look like if you stuck your head out the window and screamed: "Dude, die already! The Studebaker's time has come and gone already!".

Oh, wait. Nevermind. You're posting O/S elitism on Slashdot. My guess is that you probably already know all about what a dorkass you look like. Never mind. //Scuze me...

What is it used for?

[Fizzlewhiff]

The Amiga's killer app was video production which has been trivial now on Macs and Windows XP for years. Even the Video Toaster that was cherished by Amiga users now requires a P4 or Athlon and Windows XP. It seems to me that Amiga OS doesn't offer that much when compared Linux, BSD, OS X, and Windows. Heck, I'm even going to throw WM5 in there since it has better browser choices.

Re:What is it used for?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was one of the first computers to emulate
intel chip with a jit compiler ... just like a precoursor to java jit...
it took the 6800 and emulated intel and pc os

i guess it would have to to that again to run
under vmware

vmware -> emulate 6800 -> amiga os -> emulate intel ? -> pc os ?

we are running the inferior chip with the fewest registers

amiga had the better chip for compilers and unix and it did jit before java ... probably invented jit ...

and the game companies liked it and made the best games from a gui point of view

that the pc could not match

the amiga was like a console machine of its time

emulated mac better than a mac shame linux was not out it probably ould have dusted a pc at running it ...

Re:What is it used for?

[StarWreck]

I was just reading that the Amiga was used to create the special effects for Star Trek: Voyager (including the intro credits used for the entire duration of the series). It feels like Star Trek: Voyager wasn't that long ago. But I guess its been a while.

Re:What is it used for?

[zakezuke]

The Amiga's killer app was video production which has been trivial now on Macs and Windows XP for years. Even the Video Toaster that was cherished by Amiga users now requires a P4 or Athlon and Windows XP. It seems to me that Amiga OS doesn't offer that much when compared Linux, BSD, OS X, and Windows. Heck, I'm even going to throw WM5 in there since it has better browser choices.

That was the main reason I switched from Amiga to Sun. Browsers were limited to like 4 bit video even if you had a 8 or 24 bit bitplane board, unless you were update the roms "again" to version 3 if I remember correctly. I was a dumb ass and updated to version 2.x roms and couldn't kickstart version 3.x from version 2.x. Not that I was offended by the idea of pirating the roms as amiga folded.

Also 24bit graphics boards were not really standarized, well I think Picasso II was the defacto standard, something that cost a pretty penny. The board I had could emulate AGA graphics, amiga 8bit ham support, but not without newer roms.

But I started to price what it would cost to update my hardware on my amiga 2000. The cost was horrible. By the time I added in a faster cpu, more memory via a special cpu board upgrade, a defacto standard graphics board, oh and an extra serial board to handle a standard mouse, not to speak of the fact that you needed a 23pin to something else cable to sport either the stock monitor, an EGA monitor, or one of those rare vga monitors that would sync down to TV levels in the unlikely event the config on my graphics card failed, well... the cost was equal to a high end penium with 16 megs of memory.

There are still many features I miss.

Re:What is it used for?

[Kent Recal]

Yep. It was also used for SeaQuest and Babylon5.
Ah, the olden days...

Re:What is it used for?

[YttriumOxide]

There were many "killer apps" for Amiga depending on who you are. I've been an Amiga user for 20 years now, and I still haven't EVER tried my hand at video editing on ANY platform. Other people talk about games and demos - feel free to look up my earlier posts about that...

Re:What is it used for?

[mwvdlee]

Amiga is outdated by now. Logically, since it hasn't really been updated for about a decade.

Still, I have an old A1200 (sans mouse. well, vertical movement only) and when I booted it up about a year ago (just to see if it still worked), I was pleasantly surprised by how well the OS worked; smooth sailing and just a pleasure to work with. AmigaOS really is something special, even in these modern times. It's hard to describe, and surely there was a hint of nostalgia in there, but in the end I managed to do what I wanted to without a hitch. Something I cannot say about my XP and Linux boxes.

Besides, I still haven't found quality pixel-editors like Amiga's Personal Paint and Brilliance on Windows.

Re:What is it used for?

[mdwh2]

What's the killer app for Macs?

Seriously - all the Mac articles focus on pointing out flaws in Windows, rather than telling us the killer unique app for Macs, yet everytime an Amiga article comes along, there's a load of comments asking for unique wonderful features that don't exist on any other platform.

I'm not disagreeing with your point by the way, but I can't help noticing that people always seem to hold the Amiga to a higher standard (you see this with other things on Slashdot too - e.g., Firefox gets "IE is crap", Opera gets "Why should I use Opera?").

Re:What is it used for?

[mdwh2]

Although note that's not really a browser problem, but that the OS didn't properly support 8 bit graphics until 1992.

Re:What is it used for?

[zakezuke]

Although note that's not really a browser problem, but that the OS didn't properly support 8 bit graphics until 1992.

Which... GUI webbrowsers actually came much later, like 1994 or so. I "imagine" it was possible to gear a web browser to support 24bit graphics as 24bit cards existed and software to use them also existed, but it made sence to support AGA.

It does make me think of IBM's attempt to release a dos based GUI web browser. This was a somewhat reasonable idea as there was a surplus of pre-pentium hardware. For the life of me I can't remember the name, but it's certainly something pre-2000. Commercial ware, cost under $100. It "came" with a modem but they never answered my tech support inquery as to whether they offered a microchannel modem. But there were a few issues.

1. Lack of graphics standardization. VGA was standard, but limited to 4bit. Unless you were using a graphics card directly supported, you were limited to 4bit. Lower resolutions at 8bit were standard.
2. Lack of sound card standardization. Soundblaster was sort of the defacto standard, and most boards emulated the soundblaster well enough.
3. Lack of mathcoprocessors. If you were lucky enough to have a 486DX, or a 386 with a mathco, you were golden, but jpeg decoding was just to freaking slow.
4. At slightly under $100 you could buy windows, at least the upgrade.

With Amiga, you "could have" ran a independent screen and delt out 8bit and 24bit graphics directly. The OS was perfectly happy to be in it's unique mode. Terminal programs did this to support 16 color text IIRC. But this wasn't done. But regardless to run a web browser in 8bit or beyond you needed
1) 3.x roms and workbench, you could cheat if you had 1.3 roms, but not 2.x roms.
2) a graphics board which was supported or could emulate AGA
3) A mathco, which wasn't directly supported on the a2000. Usually supported as part of a cpu upgrade.

The cost of these three items was in excess of, well, IIRC an e-machine circa 1998, which was at the very start a Cyrix socket 7 233. Hell, a simple motherboard upgrade and pci vid card to an existing throw away 286/386 was far less.

I stuck with the Amiga for a while but... there was no way I was going to shell out more money then I already did.

How often?

[nytes]

...and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop.

And just how often does that happen?

Re:How often?

[YttriumOxide]

On my system - whenever I try and run my own code :/

But seriously, not very often on final release. Some of the betas were a bit buggy and crashed fairly regularly doing routine things, but final release has been rock solid for me. Even my own code (joked about above) doesn't really lock up the system, just brings up the "Grim Reaper" (crash manager program) where I can kill the process, fix the code and try again. My current uptime is just over one week, with usage of between 2 and 3 hours every night after work and a good 6 hours each day of the weekend.

emulator or vmware?

[Danzigism]

i'd really like to try AmigaOS 4 out.. I google'd some screenshots, and it looks fun to experiment with just for something different.. i'd like to try emulating an Amiga system.. Or possibly using something like Vmware.. does anyone know if this can be done?

Re:emulator or vmware?

[POds]

You'll probably get just as much fun from AROS - although, theres, last time i tried it, it did not have any emulation - that may have changed, but i doubt it!

http://www.aros.org/

Nice system, plus it has its own compilers etc so you can write software for it. It would be kinda neat if someone took the interface and ported it to *nix.

Re:emulator or vmware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for AmigaOS4.. But you can emulate the old amigaos based on the classic m68k cpu which is upto 3.9. There is a nice open source emulator for this callled "uae" or winuae for windows

Re:emulator or vmware?

[Anonymous Cowled]

I've been using UAE for years and have to say - it's very good... The amusing thing I find about it is that UAE (Initially Unusable Amiga Emulator (!!), then Unix Amiga Emulator, then Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator) was a unix app, which was ported to Windows (WinUAE), then fell out of development on the *nix side and has recently (in the last 2 years) been ported back to *nix from WinUAE to become E-UAE!

Re:emulator or vmware?

[Danzigism]

thanks so much for the info.. low and behold UAE was sitting right in my repositories :-D! the configuration looks awesome.. i guess i just need to make a diskfile then we'll be good to go..

Re:emulator or vmware?

[YttriumOxide]

AROS would likely be "some" fun for him, but if he's just been looking at OS4 screenshots, AROS with it's OS3.1 looks would be a bit of a nasty shock stepping back in time.

To answer the emulation question the grandparent asked, unfortunately no - you'd need a PPC emulator that bypasses the "security" (sort of a hardware dongle chip on the motherboard of the AmigaOne - a move forced by Amiga Inc on the hardware and software developers (Amiga Inc is neither) and much hated by a large part of the Amiga community), can run the modified UBoot firmware (or a reasonable enough facsimile of it) and then you MIGHT just be able to get OS4 running.

Alternatively, wait a little bit until things settle down in the legal arena surrounding Amiga Inc and I think there's a good chance that Hyperion (the people who wrote AmigaOS4) will end up with full rights to it... then I expect to see some REAL movement.

Re:emulator or vmware?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, sorry. UAE is an amiga emulator, in the original sense - it emulates the m68k amigas. This new OS runs on new PowerPC hardware. I don't believe there is a PPC emulator that can run it yet. I bet there will be in the short- to medium-term future.

Cheers.

Re:emulator or vmware?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend e-uae for anything but windows. UAE is kinda outdated compared to e-uae, which has alot of the same features as winuae

Re:emulator or vmware?

[alanwall]

plus the author of e-uae also writes code for OS4
I have met Richard several times at AmiWest

Re:please..

[MrShaggy]

Here HEre! Its amazing that most things that you see today was based on the machine. I won't go as far as to say that was the only game in town. But her..

What's wrong with this summary?

[greenguy]

There's something not right, here...

Something not up to Slashdot standards...

Ah... there's no "dept." caption/commentary!

Re:What's wrong with this summary?

[SeaFox]

Ah... there's no "dept." caption/commentary!

Let me be the first to suggest this be assigned to the "He's dead, Jim." dept.

It's a shame...

[taupin]

...that there's no new hardware that will run this. Still, all this fun is a completely moot point if there is no new hardware available to run OS4 on.

Re:It's a shame...

[Hao Wu]

I will keep using Amiga for spite. I hate whoever killed this superior operating system.

Only Amiga is worth using. If you disagree, you deserve worse than death.

Re:It's a shame...

[dosle]

no... It's a feature!

Re:It's a shame...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, doesn't the term 'amiga' mean anything to you, cause you seem to be the total opposite of what it connotes...

Re:It's a shame...

[amigabill]

Yep. Hardware is currently the big problem. Contracts are in place so that a company named Hyperion is doing the actual programming and everything to make the OS4 product. Amiga Inc. has ultimate control over what hardware it is licensed to run on. Somewhere in there they have a lot of resistance to making it run on x86, so no general PC motherboards.

People don't want to port it to Mac PPC hardware, giving the reasoning that there is no register-level documentation available for some things, which makes it difficult to properly support and keep their commercial, proprietary OS product running well. (How is that Apple designed chip intended to work, what are the register and field definitions, etc) Sure, some people have obviously figured some of that out because Linux and BSD work on it to some degree, but this is a proprietary OS and they don't want to deal with the same reverse-engineering, disassembly and debugging process, and they don't want to deal with the issue of combining GPL source code with their proprietary stuff. There is an effort to try and discover and collect as much information as possible about Mac hardware at amigamac.wikispaces.com to make some attempt to fill in that hole. I'd really love to run OS4 on a laptop, and I like my iBook G4 a lot, and there doesn't seem to be any other possible way to get a PowerPC in a laptop shape.

There are a couple boards from Genesi that were/are pretty good hardware, the Pegasos and Efika. Pegasos is now out of production, and Efika is built for low-power-consumption embedded things and does not have a case that it fits into, and apparently can only operate one IDE device at a time (not HD and CDROM at the same time) on its single PATA port. Plus, a number of efforts to get a license from Amiga Inc. allowing OS4 to be ported to any Genesi product have failed to get a genuine response from Amiga Inc.

There's also been a number of other attempts to get an OS4 license with the intention of making a new PowerPC board design. Most of these that are known publically are also known to have not got a good response to their license inquiries to Amiga Inc. Amy05 and Panda from Troika http://www.troikang.com/index.html and a couple designs from ACK http://safir.amigaos.se/article_ack_eng.html and a G4 board that I can't find more than IRC logs about at http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=3097 and continued at http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=3112 which have been announced but not a great deal has been seen about these, and a number of Amiga fans have chosen to believe they are not likely to be completed and sold with OS4. I hope those naysayers turn out to be wrong in the end, but only time will tell.

But there is currently one hope, that was announced by Amiga Inc even. The Samantha project is also a low-power-consumption device, but comes in a standard Mini-ITX format, and is said to have a license to run OS4. http://www.sam440.com/eng/index.html

Yes, the hardware situation has been a huge headache for Amiga fans for some time, as Eyetech's AmigaOne board ceased production a year or two ago. Unfortunately they ended up using a northbridge with some problems, and the fabless designer makign it seems to have gone kaput. Most who have tried to offer a solution have been totally ignored by Amiga Inc. It almost seems that Amiga Inc. specifically does not want to make any money with "their product", considering that a handful of people have said publically that they tried contacting Amiga's designated technology licensing email address only to be completely ignored. (And how many people do Slashdot readers believe would genuinely try to get an OS4 license?) You don'

The obligatory..

[MrShaggy]

Can you run linux on it??

Re:The obligatory..

[operato]

amigaone can run linux :P

Re:The obligatory..

[StarWreck]

I'm pretty sure all Classic Amigas can run Amiga Linux, a rarely heard of flavor of Linux. And AmigaOne's can run pretty much any PPC Linux without any problems.

Re:The obligatory..

[nogginthenog]

Classic Amigas can run Linux/68k, which is the regular Linux. You need a CPU with a MMU though.

Re:The obligatory..

[armb]

> You need a CPU with a MMU though.

In principle you could run uClinux without an MMU. http://www.uclinux.org/ports/ has a dead link to an Atari project, but no mention of the Amiga.
Anyone who cares enough about their Amiga to want to run Linux is going to have a processor upgrade anyway, I suspect.

Re:The obligatory..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, saying an A1 can run pretty much any PPC linux is total bollox. It started with a modified 2.4 kernel, those changes never got submitted for upstream review. With 2.6, the kernel can be hacked to sort of run - did it myself back around 2.6.9 before my A1 died - the big problem is the lack of coherent DMA. A guy, I think in the Südtirol, picked it up but it's still a long way from mainstream.

Zarniwhoop

From the nothing-to-see-here department

[Bifurcati]

That was the first thing I noticed, too! I couldn't work out what was "wrong" with the story - some sort of disturbance in the force :)

Re:please..

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is right on on the Studebaker comment, but I think people's sense of it is this:

If it takes pretty much a decade of dicking around to get an OS release out the door, and you STILL have to guess what it'd be like to run this OS on hardware that's not emulating a 680x0, it's gonna take a WHOLE lot of time-saving computer use to get your decade of invested time back by switching instantly between major applications.

I say this as a former Amiga owner and lover. It's not even over now. It was over many long years ago.

Play with the legacy hardware if you like (Hell, I was drooling over a Cray X-MP at the National Cryptologic Museum not too long ago), but mentally - guys, MENTALLY - join us here in the current century, OK?

We like you Amigans, your hearts are in the right place....

Blessed be thy Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

I purchased my A600 second hand for 20 wingwams. Had a pisser of a time with it!
Then I sold it for $100. I thought that would be the end of my Amiga days.

A friend dropped around about 5 years after I sold that Amiga, He had a surprise
for me - My Amiga 600!! Yes, yes, He picked it up at a salvage yard for a gigantic $1.00
I know its mine due to the engravings, missing screws and soldered bits on the inside.

Now, that it is returned to me, Im going to leave it on the other side of the world
and see if it comes back - or I might get buried with it when I die..
I havent decided yet....

Re:please..

[digitalhallucination]

People get upset when I drive my 1985 Lada Niva around and laugh at me. It doesn't even have a radio.

Just because it is old doesn't make it a classic.

Perhaps in 2057 people will see my junker as a piece of history, but until then...

Let it rest in peace!

[jmorris42]

> I don't get all upset when somebody drives by in a 1950's Studebaker all tricked out.

I think old cars are cool. I think old computers are cool. I think old computer games are cool even. But it is time to stop molesting the poor Amiga's cold dead corpse like this. It's dead people, remember it for what it was but leave it in peace. It belongs to a different time, a difference philosophy.

The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform. No amount of cool could save it when Amiga Inc went kaput. Let it be a lesson unto you, invest not thy emotions, neither thy creative output in platforms which can vanish in the twinkling of an eye. The future belongs to Open Standards, Open Platforms and Open Source. Apple is coming around, albeit kicking and screaming most of the time, even Microsoft will eventually be forced to adapt or die.

Amiga Inc died and the bloody bits have passed from charnel house to charnel house, each run by a rabid fanboi who believed with all his heart that HE could save the Amiga platform, but none of their plans could be realized because no sane person will invest the needed funds to bring a product to market because there isn't a market for it waiting to buy it. Just read the article to see why. How many times do you read phrases like "used to", "was", "once", etc. Most of the software still in use is old 68000 stuff from companies which themseleves are so long in the grave that nobody would even knows where to look for the sourcecode anymore, assuming it exists. Orphaned closed source software. So even if interest could be revived it would be for naught because a new Amiga owner can't (legally) obtain much of the software anymore.

Combine with the tangled ownership history for the IP and you get stuff like the line in the article where the current developers find they don't have the right to port to x86. PPC is pretty much dead these days, no future development is likely that would be useful to a desktop OS so the current roadmap is a deadend. The only PPC platform in production these days is the PS3 but it doesn't allow "other OS" to access the 3D hardware which would be a bummer since Amaga OS 4 just gained 3D support. :(

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[Dan East]

The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.

Yep, just like Macintosh. And we all know that IBM machines survived because of Microsoft's open operating systems.

The reason Amiga died was because Commodore was completely inept on just about everything non-technical in nature - advertising, business decisions, corporate alliances, you name it.

Dan East

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[GreggBz]

Your post is right in a sense but let me correct a few things.

The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.

The Amiga died for many many reasons. This likely isn't one of them. The Amiga was pretty open compared to it's competitors at the time. Commodore killed it with mis-guided management and bone-headed marketing. Microsoft and Columbia Business Machines killed it and many others when they said, let us have MS-DOS on whatever hardware we want, IBM. I don't think an open standard would have helped at that stage. It was already dead before Linux had it's heyday and OSS became the savior of everything.

Most of the software still in use is old 68000 stuff from companies which themselves are so long in the grave

You can get all the source code for 76,900 packages by looking here. That is where I get most of the software I still use. A few old legacy apps still linger but again, your point is not really valid. The developers are moving forward, and could care less about old 68K assembly. If they had it, so what? It's so old it's meaningless.

The only PPC platform in production these days is the PS3 but it doesn't allow "other OS" to access the 3D hardware which would be a bummer since Amaga OS 4 just gained 3D support. :(

Really? Try all kinds of set-top boxes, TiVo's, the Wii, the X-Box 360, cell phones PDA's, embedded platforms, a few custom motherboards and who knows what else I missed. IBM makes millions of PPC processors. They've hashed out the alternate PPC hardware option about a gazillion times at Amiga.org. In a word, PPC is not going anywhere.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[Stormwatch]

What was that joke again... if Commodore made sushi, they'd advertise it as "raw cold fish".

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[fyngyrz]

Almost. It went like this:

If Commodore owned the KFC franchise, they'd advertise it as lukewarm dead bird.

Having said that, I'd certainly pay a few hundred bucks to run a 680x0 emulated AmigaDOS v2 or v3 in a window on my Macbook. I wrote a lot of Amiga code. Wrote the first Amiga CAD system, in fact, a PCB layout engine; sat in the CBM booth at the spring COMDEX in Atlanta in 1986, demoing the shipping product to interested parties. Interesting times. Still have all manner of code archived here and there.

But deal with new hardware? My 4000 and several 2000's lying around here all still work fine, so.... nah. :)

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[blincoln]

Having said that, I'd certainly pay a few hundred bucks to run a 680x0 emulated AmigaDOS v2 or v3 in a window on my Macbook.

Does UAE not work on your Macbook?

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[fyngyrz]

Does UAE not work on your Macbook?

Wasn't aware of it. Googling got me to the sourceforge page for the Mac version; so far (just a few minutes in) it is unclear if it is PPC, Intel, both, must be compiled, diskimage, or what. But thanks for the pointer. I'll look it over!

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[arifirefox]

yes but AmigaOS 4 is a closed source OS on a closed nonexistent system and a cpu that even Apple ran away from. So as dumb as commodore was, this tops the cake.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[fyngyrz]

Learned a little more; it's a PPC project, so, no, it won't work on my Macbook, which is a dual core Intel. Sigh.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[Malfourmed]

The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.

The proprietary nature of the platform had little if anything to do with the Amiga's death ... in contrast with the incompetence, self-serving nature and maliciousness of Commodore's management. The Amiga is further proof that technical excellence is insufficient to win, keep and expand market share unless backed up by marketing, commercial and strategic nous. The Amiga deserved to be the pre-eminent home/office OS of its time. With proper support I think it would have had a shot at being number two in the market.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[Des Herriott]

Have you looked at E-UAE? http://www.rcdrummond.net/uae/

It's open source and MacOS X is supported, so I presume it should build fine on an Intel Macbook...

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[StarWreck]

Check your Amiga's for NiCad batteries on the motherboard. They are usually green and barrel shaped. You need to remove them as soon as possible

For everyone who says Amiga is a dead platform... if an Amiga is dead then it was probably killed by leaky NiCad battery acid.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[ChameleonDave]

Well, in that case they would be particularly stupid because sushi is cold cooked rice seasoned with vinegar and served with a variety of toppings. Sashimi is cold raw fish.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[FlynnMP3]

Nice! I found 'Demons are Forever - DOC demo' there. I have been wanting that demo again for years. My copy was on a floppy that was corrupted. Time to unpack the A2000 again. Thanks.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[Bright Apollo]

Umm, the Power CPUs routinely outperform x86s across the board. And what my AIX boxes can do after a single day of configuration is not even possible with a rack of Dell blades and the VM platform of your choice. Power5 CPUs are what grownups use.

-BA

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[k8to]

I have successfully built and run uae (patched to 0.8.25 , I used a debian source package to start), and e-uae from rcdrummond on a intel macintosh. I recommend e-uae.

It's a hassly program to set up, as some emulators are (Basilisk is similarly effortful), but once this effort is paid, I find it keeps working without too much trouble. Getting floppy based games working can be more work than you want, sometimes.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[mdwh2]

You missed the chance to sell him it for "a few hundred bucks"! ;)

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, the Power CPUs routinely outperform x86s across the board. And what my AIX boxes can do after a single day of configuration is not even possible with a rack of Dell blades and the VM platform of your choice. Power5 CPUs are what grownups use.

Hey dumbass, he was talking about the 68k line. PPC was never backed by Commodore, only by third parties.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[amigabill]

The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.

If that's such a huge reason for a platform to die, then why is Microsoft doing so much better than Linux? Why did I buy an iBook, because so much of OSX is proprietary and only a tiny bit is open-sourced, and their hardware is a very closed platform. (Apple doesn't provide much documentation for the proprietary chips and all that)

Sorry, but I do not have enough obsession with GPL to believe that proprietary stuff will fail by definition.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[jmorris42]

> The reason Amiga died was because Commodore was completely inept on just about everything non-technical in nature

No, Commodore died because they were taken over by congenital idiots. The Amiga died because the platform was tied to one company's fate. A problem all closed proprietary solutions eventually face. The Atari line of computers died with Atari, Amiga died with CBM, The TRS-80 line died when Tandy lost interest and stopped refreshing the line, etc.

> Yep, just like Macintosh.

Apple's hardware line is effectively dead because they have decided hardware is a commodity. When they tire of OS X the users will have no choice but to accept whatever Steve gives them next. (nay, they will declare it insanely great before even seeing it, the power of the Kool-Aid)

> And we all know that IBM machines survived because of Microsoft's open operating systems.

Actually, yes. The IBM PC would have been a footnote, widely used in corporate america for some period of years but never taking over the world had not Microsoft made DOS widely available to clones. In a sense DOS was "open" because anyone could buy it for a small part of the cost of a system, more like a RAND patent license used in a standard.

But when Microsoft commands a migration, their userbase has no choice but to migrate. In each case the users have no choice but to keep using what they have until it stops working and then doing a very painful migration or accepting the regularly occuring pain of changing platforms when someone else's corporate politics dictate.

It was that realization that made me jump to the penguin the first time I encountered it. Freedom from ever being orphaned by a dead platform again, Freedom from being forced to relearn everything yet again, migrate documents, etc. Vi and emacs are, have been and forever shall be. Learn them once and you need never worry. Redhat can be taken over tomorrow by corporate buttweasels and die. Novell can lie down with Microsoft. Linus, Cox and Morton can all be hit by a meteor at a conference and it won't matter, the platform will live on. Linux can become outdated and be replaced by a successor, or by BSD or Solaris. It doesn't matter, the platform is bigger than the kernel and will live on. Because the platform is more a set of ideas than code. The big idea is the UNIX philosophy/ The second biggest idea is that the core code is portable across any UNIX/Posix like environment.

Re:Let it rest in peace!

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet it just kills you that this "insightful" rant is still rated a mere 2. The masses, they just don't get it, eh? Oh, by the way, wipe the spittle off of your monitor, when you have a sec ...

Not to point out the obvious but...

[nick_davison]

no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications

I hear not having any will do that for you.

Re:Not to point out the obvious but...

[Atario]

I hear not having any will do that for you.

Any swap? Or any major applications?

Re:please..

[GreggBz]

Amen,

If I enjoy my hobby, why exactly does it bug them so? We are unique in that I guess we get new wares, and a slight bit of development in Amiga land. I guess that makes us different then the hordes of people selling/buying SGI Indys / Atari's / C64's / Acrons and SNES's on ebay. People hack and make new software for these things occasionally to. Nobody makes fun of them. Usually it's just "cool, a GUI web-browser for the C64! l337!" Amiga has a stigma I suppose.

Really, I enjoy the Amiga scene. I have no illusions about it's relevance, I have no grand notions of an Amiga Desktop revival,
I just enjoy retro-gaming, simple computing and the novelty of a unique platform.

Aren't any of you tired of upgrading your PC with a new video card? Or switching backgrounds in Gnome? Yawn. Don't you want to broaden your horizons a little?

boot time

[oedneil]

There was an Ask Slashdot a while back about why Windows doesn't have a faster boot time. I don't remember what the final consensus was, but how come this OS is able to boot so quickly? Why can't Windows do this?

Re:boot time

[izomiac]

I'd guess bloat. I would assume that Windows is an order of magnitude or two larger than this OS. That said, though, I've heard of people cutting XP's boot time to 12 seconds. Still, I have no idea why "modern" OSes take so long to boot. Linux takes a couple minutes on my computer, and I hear Macs are similar to XP. Personally I run the BeOS which is similar to Amiga in boot time (I've heard of people booting in 5 seconds). And that's to a fully usable desktop (no login, ready to open Firefox), while checking for hardware changes (you could swap out your video card and there's no prompts or delay). So fundamentally I don't see any reason why other OSes can't boot in 10 seconds or less.

Re:boot time

[Kelson]

Windows gets a lot of flak for booting slowly, but in my experience, Windows XP is unbelievably fast compared to Windows 2000 or Fedora Core. Between work and home, I've got two Fedora 6 desktops, two Windows XP desktops, and a Mac OS X laptop that I work with regularly, plus a number of servers running Win2K and various Linux distros. The two XP boxes are ready to log in in 10-20 seconds. Win2k and Linux tend to take 1-2 minutes, regardless of hardware speed. I haven't measured the OSX box, but it's comparable to the XP system. Possibly a little slower, but nowhere near the Win2K and Linux systems.

Re:boot time

[Anonymous Coward]

But are it ready to be used in those 10-20 seconds? The boot times of XP seems more of an illusion to me, due to the fact that alot of background processes are still loading.

Re:boot time

[kegon]

Precisely, you get your desktop up very fast after logging in, then you have a 5 minute wait while XP, er, finishes booting up.

Re:boot time

[julesh]

There was an Ask Slashdot a while back about why Windows doesn't have a faster boot time. I don't remember what the final consensus was, but how come this OS is able to boot so quickly? Why can't Windows do this?

The biggest problem with Windows boot times is that Windows just does too much stuff. Windows XP, on a first full boot with no additional software, uses somewhere in the region of 90MB of RAM just do so standard system stuff. All those programs have to be loaded and initialised before you can log in.

At a guess, this system does less stuff by default, and is therefore faster to start. Simple, really.

Re:boot time

[Anonymous Cowled]

> Windows is an order of magnitude or two larger than this OS

More like a magnitude of 10... AOS4 iso = ~50 MB... XP Pro iso = ~500-600 MB, IIRC.

There's a lot of stuff in XP that most people will never use. You can reduce the footprint of XP to about 12 MB - this will load in seconds, but you won't be able to do anything!!

Of course, you don't have to go to this extreme - you can take out just the bits you know you wont need (like extra language / keyboard support and some of the more obscure drivers, etc) using nLite to strip it from your install cd, or XPLite to remove carp from an existing installation.

Re:boot time

[Cro Magnon]

That's my guess too. I've never had an Amiga, but I remember turning on my olde 8088 machine with MS-DOS and getting the C:> almost instantly.

Re:boot time

[squoozer]

I've noticed this too and had a think about it.

Once windows is at the log in screen there is still quite a bit to do, generally, before the machine is fully ready for use. Unlike Linux a lot of stuff starts after login. I also noticed that my Linux box tends to run a lot more services than my windows box. Perhaps that is because I develop on Linux and play on Windows...

All in all I think the boot times are probably comparable. Windows might have the edge slightly. To be honest I think it's impossible to compare accurately. One thing I would like to see is a sexier boot sequence for Debian. It's very helpful to see what's loading but also terrifying for new users.

Re:boot time

[izomiac]

Orders of magnitude are powers of 10. I figured that a base XP install is about 2 GB and if AOS4 is ~50 MB that's ~2 orders of magnitude (5 * 10^1 MB compared to 2 * 10^3 MB).

I've been playing around with nLite, but I doubt you could get XP to something under about 1 GB and still have it mostly functional. If you tweak it further then you can get it down to about 200 MB with a fair sacrifice in functionality. Even so, it looks like AOS4 is still only a fourth of that, and a BeOS base install (I mention it because that's what I'm familiar with) is only about 150 MB (and can be reduced to ~50 MB without much of a loss).

That said, you can reduce Windows 2000 to a fairly small size more easily, but it still doesn't boot considerably faster. So not everything is harddrive IO. Windows is probably slower partly because it's doing stuff with applications (preloading IE, Windows Defender, etc.). Just about everything you install will increase boot time.

Re:boot time

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason XP seems to boot much faster than Win2K is because Microsoft set that as a design goal in XP.

One way to accomplish that of course was to put off stuff that on Win2K is done before you get to the logon prompt until after the user logs on. So while the logon prompt shows up much sooner, it still takes basically the same amount of time for the system to get up to a stable state where you can actually start doing stuff.

I don't get it...

[Grinin]

I know it was a cool OS back in the day... but now hasn't it been surpassed by just about every other operating system / linux distribution? Also... if you can't buy the hardware for it whats the point? To say "Hey... I got Amiga OS on a CD!"

Can it even be run in a VM environment?

no, you'll have bigger problems

[gradedcheese]

In the year 2038, you will have a much bigger problem than arguing about Amiga:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Re:no, you'll have bigger problems

[operato]

old amigaos had that problem but it's been well patched now.

Re:please..

[Belial6]

You must have mis-understood that the 680x0 emulation is just that... an emulator, not for the OS itself, or for native applications. Either that or your comment must include Windows and Linux, since they both also have emulators for the 680x0.

Re:please..

[goldspider]

Harping on the supposed superiority of a dead platform sounds more like O/S elitism to me.

Long live Amiga!

[Vacardo]

Hell, they'd better include following functions in the next patch of Amiga OS4:

* Synthesised Boot-Block Error and Guru Mediation Codes!

* That Robo-Speech program we all used to type dirty words!

* A button that simulates "Blowing on the floppy to make sure it loads this time"!

Re:Long live Amiga!

[YttriumOxide]

I know you were just trying to be funny, but...

* Synthesised Boot-Block Error and Guru Mediation Codes! I haven't seen OS4 guru yet, so I don't know if it really does. Instead we have this lovely little thing called "Grim Reaper" that just lets us kill the process when it dies painfully. In instances where I have seen a harder crash (only with the pre-release (beta) versions), it's just frozen completely.

* That Robo-Speech program we all used to type dirty words! The original version of "Say" from m68k AmigaOS systems runs fine on OS4 :)

* A button that simulates "Blowing on the floppy to make sure it loads this time"! My AmigaOne doesn't have a floppy drive - sorry!

OOOH!

[nocookieforyou]

I hope it can play old Amiga games like SuperCars and Lotus!!!!!! and who could forget dear old Eliza, the simulated psychologist: "Please elaborate on ****"

Re:OOOH!

[Anonymous Coward]

do not repeat yourselve.

Re:Who cares...

[flyingsquid]

The Amiga is dead... get over it.

You know, that's just what they said about cuneiform. But I'm continuing to develop new kinds of clay for the tablets and to experiment with new ways of making a reed stylus- I'm working with a new kind of reed from South America which is vastly superior to the ones the Sumerians used. And cuneiform on clay tablets works fine for all my word-processing and accounting needs, plus it never gets viruses. Well, I did once have a problem with mold growing on my styluses. But I solved that by keeping them in a dry place.

Why Amiga? Why not Zeta?

[LoudMusic]

Perhaps most telling, the reviewer was able to move his daily writing workflow from Windows XP to AmigaOS 4.0: 'Not only was it possible to do this, but having done so I feel no urge to switch back. It is nice to not have any distractions when working -- there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications, no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop.' If you're looking for a fast booting and obscure operating system I'd recommend something more like Zeta (what has become of BeOS).

http://www.zeta-os.com/

I really liked BeOS. In fact I've installed and used it in the past year. Though it was short lived ;)

I'm sure these operating systems are excellent for older hardware that has already been downgraded to web browsing, emailing, and simple word processing. All they need to do is boot and run Firefox. Google takes care of the rest. Has anyone made an uber-lite Linux distro that just includes X and Firefox? Perhaps even launches straight to a Firefox full screen window with tabs. I guess maybe a Linux web kiosk ... shit, I've got to look that up!

Re:Why Amiga? Why not Zeta?

[imbezol]

Probably not. It'd at least need a menu to restart Firefox when it crashes so you don't have to reboot every other hour.

Re:Why Amiga? Why not Zeta?

[91degrees]

Probably not. It'd at least need a menu to restart Firefox when it crashes so you don't have to reboot every other hour.

Assuming you do have that unreliable a system, Wouldn't restarting X (ctrl-Alt-Backspace) solve this?

Re:Why Amiga? Why not Zeta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or AROS, which is an actual Amiga OS clone.

Syllable started out as an Amiga OS clone once.

Re:Why Amiga? Why not Zeta?

[YttriumOxide]

AROS - because it's too much like AmigaOS 3.1... yuk! AND you've got less applications available than classic AmigaOS. Honestly, AROS is great as an "Amiga Research OS", but I wouldn't dare consider it for any real usage.

Syllable - can't comment, since I haven't seen anything other than screenshots... but I'd be at least slightly worried about application support (probably significantly less than AmigaOS)

For anyone reading the above and saying "how many apps can there really still be for AmigaOS?", take a look at Aminet and OS4Depot.

Re:Why Amiga? Why not Zeta?

[Grinin]

Thanks for the link... I can't read whats on the page, but do you have a link to some screenshots?

I loved BeOS. I thought it was a very intuitive operating system with many cool features. Too bad it didn't last very long, but hey, that sort of thing happens.

What kind of capabilities does ZetaOS have?

Re:Why Amiga? Why not Zeta?

[Zobeid]

For me the fatal flaw of BeOS was that it could only be programmed using C++, a language that I despise.

The Amiga was tough to program (at the application level), but at least it was all done in straightforward C, and it was easy to adapt other languages to its API, so you had a lot of freedom. . . You could code for it with languages ranging from C++ to JForth to Amiga E (my favorite) to Pascal or Modula-2 and more.

I'm currently on Mac OS X, and it really is best programmed using Objective-C. But. . . It differs from BeOS in that Obj-C doesn't suck. Mac OS X and Cocoa is also much easier to work with than the Amiga, because the SDK is fantastic and is free.

Nice Nostalgia

[ewhac]

A quick Google will reveal that I was very deep into the Amiga at one time, and a lot of the platform architecture still holds a lot of appeal for me. I wrote a eulogy for the platform about 12 years ago. Even to this day, I still judge a platform's value by how it stacks up against the Amiga's design and philosophy.

If I could find an affordable Ethernet card, my Amiga 3000 would still be in active use today, mostly as an archive server for all my old stuff. Sadly, the only Ethernet cards I can find are $150 or so, and the TCP/IP stack is (usually) not included.

The way things are now, though, the only way Amiga will have a future is if A) a dedicated investor with very deep pockets and a lot of patience funds a company to look after it; or B) they Open Source the entire OS and support utilities. The latter is likely very easy from a contractual aspect, since the only "borrowed" code was from TRIPOS, and much of that was re-written in C for the OS 2.04 release years ago.

I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy." I'd like to see more Amiga philosophy in modern software design, but even I have to admit that light of Amiga may be irretrievably fading. Really, you people have no idea what you missed...

Schwab

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[opusman]

How are the recumbent cycles going? :)

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[Fujisawa Sensei]

The way things are now, though, the only way Amiga will have a future is if ... or B) they Open Source the entire OS and support utilities.

You mean like this? http://aros.sourceforge.net/

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[whorfin]

Well, if people can have unnatural reverence for the IBM M Keyboard or Rotary Dial Phones, I see no reason why sticking by the virtues of the Amiga is to be shamed. However, just remember not to mumble too much when you stare at people.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[DingerX]

Nostalgia is Greek for "pain of the mind".

The Amiga was the only OS I ever used where my interaction with it was characterized by screaming obscenities: it worked really well, really fast, and without ambiguity.

Reading this article makes it all hurt again: the author tries to write a review that glosses over the fact that all the applications are fifteen years behind the time, and the author fails. It still hurts.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[dzd-n-confused]

Rotary was considered stylish back then kinda like our cars now except it didn't dent everytime you touched it. Obviously lots of people miss their rotary phone or thinkgeek wouldn't carry a retro bluetooth headset. There is something to be desired in old technology that I disagree with in modern tech, mainly cooling but also boot time. Someone above mentioned BeOS and Zeta sucks it doesnt even detect the Ati Rage Pro in my laptop and the boot-time is slower that BeOS Max (which has another version in development). Why are we having so much trouble getting back to fast booting computers and passive cooling. This is off topic but my first computer was a Timex Sinclair T1000, then later a Commodore PET with a builtin tape drive :-) and later on the optional 5mb Harddrive and dual-floppey drives..... Point is why cant someone build a computer that ... 1. Boots in 10 seconds 2. Requires absolutely no fans 3. Still rivals current top tier technology like the Core2Duo Series Personally I love modern technology like dvd burners but what about true instant-on without using flash disks and ram based drives for a basic home computer. I want something that is ready to use by the time my tv displays a picture and still be able to play Quake 4 and such. Anybody else love to wait?

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[Wavicle]

I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy." I'd like to see more Amiga philosophy in modern software design, but even I have to admit that light of Amiga may be irretrievably fading. Really, you people have no idea what you missed...

Maybe Reichart can pay you to work on Onion for AmigaOS 4 and we can all relive it!

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick Google will reveal that I was very deep into the Amiga at one time..

Wow, you are right. After doing a quick search, the first result shows that you run the AmigaWhore... err I mean AmigaWare website.

You seem to be a very dedicated individual.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[bhaak1]

I want to thank you for the cool animations you made back then.

They showed what could be done with this wonderful machine and were a great inspiration for a lot of people.

After all these years "The Dream Goes Berserk" still looks good. Thank you.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[bhaak1]

The way things are now, though, the only way Amiga will have a future is if ... or B) they Open Source the entire OS and support utilities.

You mean like this? http://aros.sourceforge.net/

This is mostly a reengineering of AmigaOS 3.0. They didn't use the original code.

Although I think AROS is the best way to try to save the OS part of the Amiga. The hardware part with custom chips and cool demos that use them works pretty fine on Emulation but I don't expect that this will give any new impulses.

It is amazing how fast even AROS hosted on Linux is. Especially when you compare Amiga programs side by side to KDE programs. Makes you wonder what those programs do.

The Amiga had a localization similar to gettext. Programs had ARexx ports that are something like DCOP for KDE. It had a clean and fast GUI (okay KDE doesn't have that :). The later GUIs could even be themed.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[Bert64]

Most of the original code was C, but AmigaOS 2.04 was rewritten in mostly assembler, that's why the port to PPC took so long...

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[Atario]

I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy."

You think you've got it bad? Check out my handle...er, user name.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[bhaak1]

Please get your facts straight. AmigaOS 1.x was written in BCPL(e.g. dos.library), C(e.g. intuition.library) and Assembler (e.g. exec.library).

For AmigaOS 2.04 everything written in BCPL was rewritten in C.

I don't know exactly how big the assembler part was. Anybody got some valid links for that?

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[YttriumOxide]

There's a lot of discussion of AROS in this thread, but I think people need to remember that it is just a re-engineering as you say. And it strives for "AmigaOS 3.1" as the target, which is getting VERY old now. When people think of AmigaOS, they often think of OS3.1 or earlier, since that's what most of them have seen. That's where all the "Amiga is dead, get over it" comments come from. As an AmigaOS4 user (and AmigaOS3.9 before I got my AmigaOne), I couldn't imagine going back to something so primitive. Some wonderful features in there, but really, that OS truly *is* dead - AmigaOS4 is *many* years ahead ("Sys:Prefs/Internet" is a pretty good dead giveaway right from the start!)

If it were to ever happen, the open sourcing of OS4 would effectively kill AROS (in its current form) in seconds (it'd be reborn of course by patching the few goodies they do have on top of OS4).

As for your other comments - yes, how do people LIVE without ARexx?!

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[YttriumOxide]

glosses over the fact that all the applications are fifteen years behind the time, and the author fails I don't think that's completely fair... better to say "the vast majority of the applications..." - there are a few modern apps, and getting more each day. After all, tell me what DVD playing software you used 15 years ago? And what SMB client? And what MP3 player? etc etc.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[Bitsy Boffin]

If I could find an affordable Ethernet card, my Amiga 3000 would still be in active use today, mostly as an archive server for all my old stuff. Sadly, the only Ethernet cards I can find are $150 or so, and the TCP/IP stack is (usually) not included.

I have an A3000 out in my garage, amongst other bits and pieces of history. It was pretty trick for it's time, a full complement of memory, soft-kicked running the last official Kickstart of the time, a Picasso card with Pablo expansion (never worked out how to use that), a couple of large IDE hard drives (running on a PC card adapter thing I'm trying to remember the name of) and a couple on the SCSI too (I ran a BBS on it, and purchased it from a guy who closed down his BBS), a "fast" serial port card, few others bits and bobs. It's slightly broken, it needs a new PSU mostly, certainly fixable.

Anyway, every now and then I think for a few seconds, "hey, I should really get that working again, yea, that'd be cool", but quickly afterwards, I realise that when I did get it working I don't actually have any use for it. Sure I could make it a "file server", or even a web server, but that is just, I don't know, beneath it somehow, like a once great scientist reduced to clearing paper jams from a printer.

Somehow, I think it's better for it to just rest in piece in a box in my garage. Death with dignity so to speak.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[kcbrown]

I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy." I'd like to see more Amiga philosophy in modern software design, but even I have to admit that light of Amiga may be irretrievably fading. Really, you people have no idea what you missed...

Man, ain't that the truth.

Imagine owning a computer that was not only at least 2 years ahead of everything else around it, but also at the same time was something that you, as a computer-oriented individual, could completely understand the internal workings of. It was a platform that made it easy to do magic.

The OS was not only efficient, internally it was dirt simple. You could read the assembly source code for the OS and understand the whole thing without breaking a sweat. The way they wrote it and the way they managed the internal data structures was a thing of beauty. I've not seen anything like it since.

The only failing of the Amiga was that it lacked hardware memory protection. If it had that, it would have been bulletproof.

If anything proved that you don't need complexity to achieve power, the Amiga did. I think we've forgotten that. There is very little in the computing world today that is elegantly simple (both internally and externally) and powerful at the same time anymore.

And yeah, you people who haven't experienced that elegantly simple power have no idea what you missed.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[ewy99]

Just watched the Deathbed Vigil. Just listened to Gail tell the story of the Lemmings incident. So you were the blocker?! :) Any other fun things that you can talk about that took place?

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[Nossie]

is there a vnc server for OS4? hehe any chance you could give me a temp login for a look?

I'd love a new amiga but I already have an aging PPC apple cube doing my server tasks, why would I want to buy another old PPC machine as a new system? :-|

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[YttriumOxide]

Sorry - I'm not too keen on opening a VNC server to the outside world! If you're interested in taking a look though, most places do have local Amiga User Groups - just put a quick post up on somewhere like AmigaWorld.net and I'm sure you'll find somewhere nearby you can go play with it in person.

As for why you'd want it - well, honestly, maybe you wouldn't. It all depends what you need out of a computer - if AmigaOS and the apps that it has can provide it, then all the things TFA mentioned about speed, responsiveness and not being bugged to death by other apps can be a pretty big draw. If what you need isn't available on AmigaOS, then just like any OS, you probably don't really want it.

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[Nossie]

haha thanks but I was only really asking in jest

I'm pretty sure I'd buy one if it had something like these specs:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/8641d.php

but I cant see me paying a premium for stock off the shelf DRM'd hardware

http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36685

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[Om]

Anyway, every now and then I think for a few seconds, "hey, I should really get that working again, yea, that'd be cool", but quickly afterwards, I realise that when I did get it working I don't actually have any use for it. Sure I could make it a "file server", or even a web server, but that is just, I don't know, beneath it somehow, like a once great scientist reduced to clearing paper jams from a printer.

I just wanted to point out the beauty of this paragraph. I also was an Amiga user back in the day. It was the single reason why I made computers my hobby/career last has lasted to this day. Incidently, I also read the GP's eulogy back then! However, when I think about purchasing an old one on ebay to relive those magical moments, I can't quite bring myself to do it, and I never understood why until I read your above passage. You are 100% correct. It does seem like an injustice somehow. As if it will make me more sad than happy to go back and play some of those old games. The entire time I would be thinking about what could have been.

Anyway, bravo, mate.

As a side note, I really like how this particular thread is chock full of relatively low Slashdot IDs. You can almost map out the age group that is interested in this particular topic by this number.

++Om

Re:Nice Nostalgia

[YttriumOxide]

Yes, the "dongle chip" as it's affectionately known is probably the most horrible thing Amiga Users have ever had forced upon them... we can only hope that once the whole situation with Amiga Inc resolves itself, Hyperion will have free access to do whatever they want with AmigaOS4 and then we'll likely see it opened for many other platforms, including the Pegasos hardware (which I think is great hardware, but I find MorphOS a bit uncomfortable to use compared to AmigaOS4). Like many others, I also dream of the day AmigaOS4 gets ported to x86 (I'd love to run it side by side with MacOS on this intel iMac I've got here!)

Memory protection... sorta

[misleb]

New features include limited memory protection

Welcome to the 1990's, Amiga!

-matthew

Amiga4Life

[Intrinsic]

I dont care what anybody thinks. I love the Amiga, and it was a sad day when I had to give it up because it was not keeping pace with the rest of the world.

Awe inspiring games came out of that machine, Out Of this World, and Another World all the stuff from Delphine Software for that matter. To this day I think about how those games were designed, and it still effects me on a basic level as I work on my multimedia projects.

All I got to say is keep the Amiga posts coming I love to listen to peoples version of the days of old. And down with the naysayers, you will never understand the power of the dark side my padawan learners!

http://www.amigaforever.com/ Biatches! :)

After reading TFA

[TinBromide]

While I enjoyed a review of all the old programs and whatnot, this would be like a company buying windows 3.1 from microsoft, updating it to 4, and a reviewer touting the joys of lotus smart suite or eudora.

I am a fan of old hardware and my old macintosh 512 lives on in a basilisk II emulator which I will occasionally use to play some of those old mac games. (galax ftw!)

Anywho, I am all for an OS and hardware being limited to the hobbiest domain, sort of like using ham radio instead of IRC, but I shudder to think what would happen if an OS that lacked rudimentary memory security until recently was unleashed upon the harsh interweb en mass. I'm certain amiga OS would have even less security than OS/X and a lonely hacker could ruin a lot of people's fun.

Re:please..

[NormalVisual]

I don't get all upset when somebody drives by in a 1950's Studebaker all tricked out.

Neither do I, but it's annoying when you see someone selling some car with a non-descript frame/powertrain with a new body and trying to represent it as a Studebaker. :-) The Amiga was a great machine (I still have, er, more than one) and I'll always have a fond place in my heart for it, but what's being sold now isn't an Amiga as far as I'm concerned. Consequently, I really don't have much interest in exploring it as anything more than a curiosity.

Bad resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] and much better 680x0 emulation.

680x0? What a terrible resolution!

Re:please..

[Stormwatch]

Harping on the supposed superiority of a dead platform sounds more like O/S elitism to me.

Even if said dead platform is actually superior?

Informative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this is really informative ad hominem attack on another poster. Fuck whoever modded this

Re:please..

[misleb]

Actually, this Amiga OS 4 business is more like someone driving around in a "modern" immitation of a 50's Studebaker. Taking all the fuel problems, the safety problems, etc and making something that kinda looks like a 50's Studebaker. That isn't cool. An authentic 50's Studebaker all tricked out might be cool, but a cheap immitation with none of the class of the original is not.

-matthew

I miss my Amiga too.

[deusdiabolus]

...of course, more than anything I miss the fact that I could access that box of 3.5" floppies with all my .MODs on them. Does anyone know if the newer OSes (including this one) will have some sort of backwards compatibility for FFS-formatted floppies?

Re:I miss my Amiga too.

[cyclomedia]

you need a hardware interface to manage the funky access speed switching: google catweasle

Re:I miss my Amiga too.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to be cheap and aren't willing to get a Catweasel as the other poster suggested, I remember reading somewhere (possibly somewhere related to UAE) about a hack that will let PCs read Amiga disks, that requires two floppy drives for some reason, it may damage you disk drives though.

That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

[Dwonis]

I remember when "Amiga" meant innovation and usability at an affordable price. One of the amazing things about the Amiga was that most of the cheesy slogans that were used to sell it (e.g. "Only Amiga makes it possible" and "The computer for the creative mind") were true. It felt good to own an Amiga, because it was orders of magnitude better than anything else out there.

Today, "Amiga" is just a trademark. Will this new Amiga-branded system compete with Mac OS X? With GNU/Linux? With Windows? If not, why should I, as an nostalgic Amiga zealot, care?

I have no need for yet more proprietary hardware running yet another proprietary OS in a time when commodity hardware and free software are where most of the interesting things are happening.

The new Amiga we dream of won't be called "Amiga". It will be something completely different---built by a small group of brilliant people that nobody has ever heard of---not the underwhelming output of some company whose only real purpose is to figure out how to extract revenue from the copyrights and trademarks for a 20-year-old technology.

Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

[arifirefox]

I remember the Amiga tv commercials and print ad spreads in Newsweek and Time. The Pointer Sisters! ahhh those days...

To me, the day that Amiga died wasn't when Commodore fell apart. It was when I saw a picture in Byte Magazine of an Amiga 3000 running unix in 16 color grayscale. This wasn't the Amiga of cool demos, games and Toasters. This was just another boring computer. And who cares about that?

Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

[operato]

it makes for a good embedded os since it does have a small memory footprint and is heading towards memory protection, etc. a lot of embedded os imo don't move about like amigaos.

Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

[Aokubidaikon]

Who cares about a small memory footprint? The Amiga was great because it was cool.
What made it cool were the games and demos, being able to amazing stuff PCs and Macs couldn't do.
 
While the OS was very good at the time and it's interesting to see an update being published it will not wow or amaze anybody.
If I want to be amazed in 2007 I'll get a PS3 (as soon as some decent games come out for it that is).

Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

[operato]

you're not getting my point. if you have amigaos on a mobile phone or a set top box it'll blow everything else out of the water. if you've ever used palmos or windows mobile, they don't do anything that great (in terms of multitasking and speed).

Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

[mdwh2]

I don't entirely disagree with the spirit of your post, but it's false to say it's just a trademark. This OS is an updated AmigaOS, at least as much as modern versions of other OSs are updated versions of their predecessors. In fact, it's "Macintosh" which is just a trademark, as the original MacOS was ditched, and the hardware platform is different now too.

not the underwhelming output of some company whose only real purpose is to figure out how to extract revenue from the copyrights and trademarks for a 20-year-old technology.

I dare you to post that in an Apple thread, and see how fast you get modded down...

Extracting copyright and trademark would apply to enforcing copyrights on the old software. Writing new versions and using the trademarks they have a right to use doesn't seem comparable, and is what all companies do.

Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

[smellsofbikes]

One thing I loved was the ads:
Amiga: "The computer for the creative mind!"
Mac: "The computer for the rest of us."

That, for me, said it all.

Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when "Amiga" meant low resolution, interlaced, composite video.

But that was great for video production!!!!! And you could buy a de-interlacer for extra money if you really needed more than a tinker toy display that gave you a headache when you looked at it.

Re:That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

[kocsonya]

I loved when the ads were put together back in that time:

Amiga: "The computer for the creative mind"
Mac: "The computer for the rest of us" :-)

Re:please..

[zakezuke]

die already. the amiga's time has come and gone.

What's really sad is the fact that there "was" a good market for amiga type machines in the 1990s, when webTV and other set web browsers were in vogue. Hell, just expand out, what was it called CD32, their game/cd console, and poof a good game machine and something the parents could use to check their stocks and e-mail.

I "imagine" that AmigaOS would be rather handy for hand held applications. It was designed to operate at very low resolutions, did multimedia before it was a term, multitasking, all of this with only a 68000 and less than 1 meg of memory. in this age of bloatware, it's actually rather ideal for this nitch application.

download?

[HaDAk]

...i still can't find a download link.

Re:download?

[cyclomedia]

try http://www.aros.org/ :-)

Re:download?

[YttriumOxide]

I've said it before (and will therefore probably get my first ever "redundant" mod) but if he's wanting OS4, then AROS is *NOT* the answer. Unless you consider Win95 the answer to someone looking for Windows Vista!

At least: constructivity on /. !

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.

        At least, constructivity! On /. ! What do you know ? ;)
        Despite the group of individuals who were producing some software for
the Amiga was quite active at a time, it is true it did not endure. Why
"group" and not "community"? may be because of the difference between
simple gregarious instinct and real social link? A posteriori demonstration
of R. Stallman and GPL hypothesis for GPL here: poor in-between places in
closed source versus open source policy choice.
        And by the way, the grand parent post was quite right with the car
analogy: more than one people is surprised to learn that many features
which can be found on a "modern" car were already present more than half
a century ago, not to mention coming back to electric cars which leads us
to a full century ago.
        If someone is intersted in the OS art, I think he/she should have a look
at the architecture of those of old Amiga, it'll give some useful enligthment
on the subject.
        Yes, old computer science is cool, or may be I am simply getting old myself,
hum, - sick - too early in my country to peek up a beer, I shouldn't read /. in the morning, 'hope my mood is not ruined for the whole day ;)

It wasn't autobooting.

[cerebis]

Amiga disk drives had a mechanical switch which acted to inform the OS whenever a disk was inserted into the drive. The OS would read the bootblock when a disk was inserted, but it didn't actually "boot" it.

Virus writers then used that short-sighted habit of the OS to get their code into memory. These "Bootblock Viruses" were widespread and generally tended to be pretty innocuous, one of the most common being the "ByteBandit" virus, which did nothing but spread itself.

The switch wasn't actually necessary for the disk to be read and one "hack" -- in the traditional sense -- was to cut the plastic pin off the switch so that the OS wouldn't notice disk insertions. Of course, in that state inserted disks wouldn't appear on the desktop automatically.

Re:It wasn't autobooting.

[vidarh]

Cutting off anything wouldn't have done any good - the Amiga polled the disk drive every few seconds to check for a disk. And yes, it would autoboot from floppy, but no different from a PC, i.e. only when the OS wasn't already loaded.

Re:It wasn't autobooting.

[Faw]

These "Bootblock Viruses" were widespread and generally tended to be pretty innocuous, one of the most common being the "ByteBandit" virus, which did nothing but spread itself.

The ByteBandit virus also kept a count of all the disks it had infected. I had one with over 30k infections...

If I were Amiga OS' chief designer ...

[SpaghettiPattern]

I'd do the sensible thing: 1) migrate to ppc, 2) put in large chunks of BSD code and 3) migrate to x86.

Re:If I were Amiga OS' chief designer ...

[POds]

Good luck migrating to PPC, the OS was written for... duh uhh, PPC :/.

Nice attempt at trolling non the less.

Re:If I were Amiga OS' chief designer ...

[SpaghettiPattern]

Good luck migrating to PPC, the OS was written for... duh uhh, PPC :/.
Nice try but no cigar: The Amiga personal computer was based on the Motorola 68k series of 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors.

For the funny porpose I'm merely suggesting an evolution analog to MacOS. Back in the 80s, Mac and Amiga ran on almost identical hardware. I bet you can find more details yourself.

Re:If I were Amiga OS' chief designer ...

[Jarlsberg]

Yeah, yeah, whatever. Wikipedia to the rescue, etc.

Except you're talking about the classic Amiga. Amiga OS4 is a native PPC app, with an emulation layer for Motorola stuff.

Re:please..

[operato]

well the os4 needs ppc and needs to ported to different architectures :S

Open Open Open? AROS!

[cyclomedia]

www.aros.org

is an open source cross platform community driven recreation of AmigaOS and all it's wonders that even modern OS's STILL just don't mangage 20+ years on such as

1. Logical Volume Assignment : Assign "Webs" to your web site dir and point your web server at the Drive called Webs, not a hard path attatched to a hardware controlled drive letter. oh and if you want to move your website or switch to a backup just reassign Webs to point to the new location, only the underlying OS will know that you've moved it. Also works for removable media, ram drives, network mappings. Beautiful and not tied to a mysterious legacy drive structure peppered with acronyms like unix/linux wither

2. ability to control window z-index. The window you are currently using isnt forced to be on top, again this may sound odd at first but imagine you are copy-pasting text line-by-line from one window to another, in windows you'd have to resize and move them around so you could always see both whichever was in focus just so you didn't give yourself an epliectic fit by switching back and forth constantly. in Amiga OS even a maximised app can stay underneath other apps when you are using it. this is by far the feature i'd still most like to see in windows, you can however configure KDE to do this, fortunatley (i usually assign bring-to-front to a double click on the title bar, simple, would someone PLEASE write some kind of service to allow me to do this in Windows!?)

3. multiple screens, different software can open a new screen in a different resolution with different color depth. yeah you can kind of do this in windows when booting up a game but we all know it's actually re-setting the resolution of the system as a whole, illustrated by the fact that when a game bombs your desktop is f**ked. You can have as many as a like, so you can be tight with your desktop's video ram and run it in 256 colors if you wish, but imagine at the same time being able to host a HD movie on another screen, pause it, and switch back to the desktop instantly without waiting for the OS to have a fit first.

4. actually well implimented multitasking, like being able to zip up a bunch of folders on your hard drive AND format a floppy ready to put them on at the same time. without a) a major slowdown or b) the whole system crashing and burning. and what's with windows totally stopping dead when you stick anything in an optical drive, does Vista still do that?

i use windows professionally day in day out, and have done for about a decade, but i still get frustrated by what i see as it's bizzare failure to impliment even the simplist, sensiblest features i started off using when i first ever set foot in a multitasking OS

Re:Open Open Open? AROS!

[julesh]

www.aros.org

is an open source cross platform community driven recreation of AmigaOS and all it's wonders that even modern OS's STILL just don't mangage 20+ years on such as

1. Logical Volume Assignment : Assign "Webs" to your web site dir and point your web server at the Drive called Webs, not a hard path attatched to a hardware controlled drive letter. oh and if you want to move your website or switch to a backup just reassign Webs to point to the new location, only the underlying OS will know that you've moved it. Also works for removable media, ram drives, network mappings. Beautiful and not tied to a mysterious legacy drive structure peppered with acronyms like unix/linux wither

You know you can tell Windows what letter to use for a drive, don't you? OK, so you can't use names, but I don't personally find that too limiting. And the directory naming convention on Linux is just a convention... if you wanted to, you could easily change it. Most programs have a configure script that allows you to specify the names of the directories that their files will be installed in.

2. ability to control window z-index. The window you are currently using isnt forced to be on top, again this may sound odd at first but imagine you are copy-pasting text line-by-line from one window to another, in windows you'd have to resize and move them around so you could always see both whichever was in focus just so you didn't give yourself an epliectic fit by switching back and forth constantly...

I've been able to do this with X11 since I first used it. I believe the feature has existed for as long as the platform has been available. You can achieve it with windows using any of a variety of focus management programs available. I believe there's one in the powertoys collection available from MS.

3. multiple screens, different software can open a new screen in a different resolution with different color depth. yeah you can kind of do this in windows when booting up a game but we all know it's actually re-setting the resolution of the system as a whole, illustrated by the fact that when a game bombs your desktop is f**ked. You can have as many as a like, so you can be tight with your desktop's video ram and run it in 256 colors if you wish, but imagine at the same time being able to host a HD movie on another screen, pause it, and switch back to the desktop instantly without waiting for the OS to have a fit first.

I can achieve this effect on Linux with virtual consoles.

4. actually well implimented multitasking, like being able to zip up a bunch of folders on your hard drive AND format a floppy ready to put them on at the same time. without a) a major slowdown or b) the whole system crashing and burning.

I've been able to do that with both Windows since NT4 was released (97, IIRC) and Linux since the first version I tried back in 95.

and what's with windows totally stopping dead when you stick anything in an optical drive, does Vista still do that?

I don't have this problem. Could be a driver issue with your machine?

Re:Open Open Open? AROS!

[YttriumOxide]

AROS is great, and I've played with it quite a bit. But it's not a shade on OS4. AROS is a reimplementation of AmigaOS3.1 with some really nice features added. OS4 is a massive leap ahead of OS3.1. I sincerely hope the AROS guys look at OS4 and do some work in that area.

(of course, I even more sincerely hope to see OS4 on a platform people can readily get... I love using my AmigaOne and I hate it when I show it off to people only to have to follow up with "but there's no way you can currently get it yourself")

Re:Open Open Open? AROS!

[Just Some Guy]

You know you can tell Windows what letter to use for a drive, don't you? OK, so you can't use names, but I don't personally find that too limiting.

...because you've never used it. In AmigaOS, the idea of assigning names to directories (not just drives) was pervasive. You'd say that "FONTS:" would comprise a list of directories where you stored your fonts files. When a program tried to open "FONTS:Helvetica.font", it'd search each of those directories in order and return the first match it found. All system libraries went in LIBS:, your command-line utilities went in C:, and so on. It was exceedingly rare to use hardcoded paths instead of named search lists for anything general.

I can achieve this effect on Linux with virtual consoles.

Probably, but maybe .5% of people actually use that ability. Again, the difference with AmigaOS was not that you could do it, but that everyone universally did it. I was just something you used without making a big deal of it.

I've been able to do that with both Windows since NT4 was released (97, IIRC) and Linux since the first version I tried back in 95.

No way. You might have been able to perform those exact (poorly chosen) examples, but neither Linux nor Windows were anywhere near as good at multi-tasking in '95, let alone '85. It's like hearing someone talk about a car with great handling and not understanding; your Oldsmobile can turn corners, too, right? It was just something you had to see to really understand.

I have no illusions that AmigaOS will make a comeback, and by now I wouldn't want it if it did. Still, it did a lot of things right, even by today's standards, and you can't just dismiss it by saying that other systems can do some of the same things.

Re:Open Open Open? AROS!

[nickos]

2. ability to control window z-index. The window you are currently using isnt forced to be on top, again this may sound odd at first but imagine you are copy-pasting text line-by-line from one window to another, in windows you'd have to resize and move them around so you could always see both whichever was in focus just so you didn't give yourself an epliectic fit by switching back and forth constantly...

I've been able to do this with X11 since I first used it. I believe the feature has existed for as long as the platform has been available. You can achieve it with windows using any of a variety of focus management programs available. I believe there's one in the powertoys collection available from MS.

This is possible with some window managers (WindowLab and obviously AmiWM spring to mind) on X11, but by no means all. This cannot be done on Windows AFAIK, and believe me I've looked. Powertoys doesn't do it either but does allow "activation follows mouse (X-Mouse)" which is the X Window System's default policy (the Amiga's focus policy is sometimes called "click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus"). Since you cannot replace the window manager on Windows it seems unlikely that this will ever happen without Microsoft's support.

Re:Open Open Open? AROS!

[ericlondaits]

1. Logical Volume Assignment : Assign "Webs" to your web site dir and point your web server at the Drive called Webs, not a hard path attatched to a hardware controlled drive letter. oh and if you want to move your website or switch to a backup just reassign Webs to point to the new location, only the underlying OS will know that you've moved it. Also works for removable media, ram drives, network mappings. Beautiful and not tied to a mysterious legacy drive structure peppered with acronyms like unix/linux wither

That sounds like UNIX's mount. I don't see the problem with that... acronyms are a human made convention, unix culture, not a technical impediment.

3. multiple screens, different software can open a new screen in a different resolution with different color depth. yeah you can kind of do this in windows when booting up a game but we all know it's actually re-setting the resolution of the system as a whole, illustrated by the fact that when a game bombs your desktop is f**ked. You can have as many as a like, so you can be tight with your desktop's video ram and run it in 256 colors if you wish, but imagine at the same time being able to host a HD movie on another screen, pause it, and switch back to the desktop instantly without waiting for the OS to have a fit first.

This "fit" you mention sounds like a problem with graphic boards, not the OS. Changing video modes is a jumpy operation even on linux... ... and as long as Windows is concerned, it can handle multiple monitors with different video modes just fine. With my el-cheapo NVidia card I can watch full screen video on my TV (being played by WMP) while still working on the main desktop with the WMP window minimized.

4. actually well implimented multitasking, like being able to zip up a bunch of folders on your hard drive AND format a floppy ready to put them on at the same time. without a) a major slowdown or b) the whole system crashing and burning. and what's with windows totally stopping dead when you stick anything in an optical drive, does Vista still do that?

Haven't used Vista, but I know what you mean... still, I'd say it's not a problem with how multitasking itself (as process management goes) but rather with the FDD drivers (which seem to get top priority). This is not a problem with Linux, for instance, which also buffers floppy disks nicely.

Still, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft didn't fix this... I really want FDDs to dissapear, just like in the Mac. I tried not installing a FDD in my new PC (one year ago), but had to because of Motherboard drivers that had to be installed right in the middle of the XP installation. I'm not too crazy about the way my DVD-R drive works under Windows (locks quite a bit if the disc is not perfect, etc.), CD-ROM drives always seem to work better under Linux, but I really can't say because 80% of the drives I ever used were cheap OEM drives, so it might not be an issue with good hardware.

Re:Open Open Open? AROS!

[zakezuke]

3. multiple screens, different software can open a new screen in a different resolution with different color depth. yeah you can kind of do this in windows when booting up a game but we all know it's actually re-setting the resolution of the system as a whole, illustrated by the fact that when a game bombs your desktop is f**ked. You can have as many as a like, so you can be tight with your desktop's video ram and run it in 256 colors if you wish, but imagine at the same time being able to host a HD movie on another screen, pause it, and switch back to the desktop instantly without waiting for the OS to have a fit first.

I can achieve this effect on Linux with virtual consoles.


Not really. The Amiga could handle multi screens running different resolutions, and you could pull these screens down like a shade. You could have 1/2 the screen running low rez, the other half running high rez, without tweeks or fuckups.

X, near as i'm aware, can't change resolutions on the fly, or rather you can but the desktop size remains constent. You can have multiable screens but these seem to be limited to the same resolution. This sort of becomes a moot point as we switch to LCD, but still.

Sure you can have multiable virtual consoles, but what the parent was talking about was doing this on a single console.

Re:logo went plaid

[choseph]

Fitting that the logo is plaid, having gone to ludicrous speed and all. I wouldn't be surprised if they up and passed all the other OS capabilities those speeds.

Re:Who cares...

[meringuoid]

And cuneiform on clay tablets works fine for all my word-processing and accounting needs, plus it never gets viruses.

Someone needs to read more Neal Stephenson.

1993

[Anonymous Coward]

That looks really fuckin' cool for 1993.

Re:please..

[91degrees]

People get upset when I drive my 1985 Lada Niva around and laugh at me. It doesn't even have a radio.

I'd get upset too. You paid about half what anyone else paid for a car and it's still running 22 years later.

Why are they laughing?

The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

[master_p]

The reason the Amiga was special was that it was a quantum leap for computers of the time for the following reasons in no particular order:

1) preemptive multitasking.
2) special hardware for graphics.
3) a unified memory architecture.
4) stereo sound with hardware-assisted mixer
5) a UNIX-like O/S with many goodies, including .info files for executables (a local registry for each program)
6) a nice GUI that looked good on low resolutions with datatype aware drag-n-drop for every app.
7) a good DMA architecture that allowed for easy parallelization of many tasks (for example graphics not blocked by I/O)

What would it take for the Amiga to be a quantum leap today, given that the average 500$ Intel PC has much better capabilities than the Amiga of yesteryear? there are certain possibilities:

1) provide sound and graphics of 5000$ worth at the price of 500$. This is highly unlikely, because all the billion dollar pioneering research in graphics takes place in the labs of NVidia and ATI, two companies that will not be willing to sell their top technology for a mere 500$. The Amiga was the result of hardware gurus like RJ Mical that worked on their own designs...so unless a similar group of talented individuals gather up and make something unique, this possibility is less likely to happen.

2) provide a computer with a fixed hardware, like a console, but with an O/S that the users can write applications and games that hit the hardware directly. It might sell but for small numbers...back bedroom programming will certainly thrive on such a machine,
but I do not think the numbers it sells will be sufficient to sustain it.

3) do something really wild like a computer with 3d stereoscopic graphics projected either in mid air or in a special display. Now that would be a quantum leap, but only if the price is right, and it would certainly be hard to make and sell.

Overall, I do not think Amiga has a place in today's computing environment...especially when the O/S works on special hardware platforms.

Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

[Bert64]

Port AmigaOS to the PS3 or one of the other games consoles (not a huge step because theyre all PPC based), provide a keyboard and mouse and a developer environment to write homebrew apps as well as some educational programs etc. Most people i knew who's parents bought them amigas did so because they _WERENT_ just games consoles, and could be used for doing homework etc.

Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

[YttriumOxide]

including .info files for executables (a local registry for each program) Actually, the ".info" files are pretty much just an icon and optionally some string variables for starting the program. For "registry-like" things, Amiga has always just used config files. Especially keep in mind that any file can have a ".info" (eg I could have "MyPicture.png.info" and the ".info" contains the path to my image editor instead of allowing the OS to use my image viewer to open it)

provide sound and graphics of 5000$ worth at the price of 500$. Yes, that'd certainly sell... but like you say, isn't really a possibility.

provide a computer with a fixed hardware, like a console, but with an O/S that the users can write applications and games that hit the hardware directly I agree with you on this as well - might sell in small quantities, but isn't really viable most likely.

do something really wild like a computer with 3d stereoscopic graphics projected either in mid air or in a special display And that'd be awesome, but again is a bit of stretch...

Overall, I do not think Amiga has a place in today's computing environment...especially when the O/S works on special hardware platforms. I think what you're missing is that no-one is really trying to revive the Amiga hardware platform. That's pretty much dead and buried, for the reasons you and many others have already outlined. The AmigaOS is what still stands a chance - perhaps only a slim one, and it quite likely (almost certainly) will never have any significant marketshare, but as long as it sells well enough to keep the developers coding it, that's all that really matters to those of us that love using it.

Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

[ronanbear]

The Amiga would fly on something like the OLPC (with a different architecture) and lack of power wouldn't be a problem.

Having to get a big box with custom hardware sorta defeats the major advantages of the Amiga platform. flash based ultra light PCs though would be a different matter. They could make them cheap and sell bucketloads of them if there was wireless.

Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

[radish]

1) preemptive multitasking.
2) special hardware for graphics.
3) a unified memory architecture.
4) stereo sound with hardware-assisted mixer
5) a UNIX-like O/S with many goodies, including .info files for executables (a local registry for each program)
6) a nice GUI that looked good on low resolutions with datatype aware drag-n-drop for every app.
7) a good DMA architecture that allowed for easy parallelization of many tasks (for example graphics not blocked by I/O)

There were other machines around at the same time with many of these features, at the same price :-) Surely you haven't forgotten the 16-bit wars already!

provide sound and graphics of 5000$ worth at the price of 500$. This is highly unlikely, because all the billion dollar pioneering research in graphics takes place in the labs of NVidia and ATI, two companies that will not be willing to sell their top technology for a mere 500$.
Don't they already sell their top designs for $500? Isn't that what a top-end video card costs these days? You just don't get the rest of the computer with it :-) What you would need them to do is sell their top designs for $20, which isn't going to happen.

Overall, I do not think Amiga has a place in today's computing environment...especially when the O/S works on special hardware platforms.

Agreed, and even more so given that, as far as I can tell, this new AmigaOS has very little to do with the original other than name. It's just another niche OS which is platform specific, non-free (in any sense) and very, very limited in functionality. Pointless.

Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

[Anonymous Coward]

3) do something really wild like a computer with 3d stereoscopic graphics projected either in mid air or in a special display.

Looks like someone has been watching too many Ben Affleck movies.

Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

[paulsnx2]

What do you *REALLY* have to do to leap over the current OS approach?

Toss the OS. It is just a stupid way to distribute software libraries anyway. Instead, build a "Configuration System" that knows how to build virtual systems, configure them to talk to each other, and deploy them.

This is what we are ultimately going to need anyway. What use is an "OS" when the typical computer system will have many independent Cores (or CPUs or whatever you want to call them) each with plenty of memory and plenty of bandwidth to some sort of persistant storage. Such a system will easily support a number of Linux deployments, a few BSD deployments, a few Amiga deployments (maybe under immulation), XP, Mac, etc. etc.

We do this now for web applications. You deploy a database, a few appliction servers, some web servers, some firewalls, toss in some systems for load balancing and failover. This stuff takes people weeks and sometimes months to configure.

So how are we going to configure and deploy all this crap in the future? The best idea is to build complete descriptions of virtual machines. If the developer wants to develop "on Linux" or "on Windows" go ahead. Then generate the virtual machine and ship it.

Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

[master_p]

"There were other machines around at the same time with many of these features, at the same price :-) Surely you haven't forgotten the 16-bit wars already!"

Nope, there was none. Atari ST did not had multitasking unless you run MultiTOS. The MacOS did not have preemptive multitasking, only co-operative multitasking. The PC had DOS. Only Acorn Archimedes had preemptive multitasking.

"Don't they already sell their top designs for $500? Isn't that what a top-end video card costs these days? You just don't get the rest of the computer with it :-) What you would need them to do is sell their top designs for $20, which isn't going to happen."

Nope. Their top designs, i.e. the graphics architectures that are being designed as we speak are not yet sold on the market. The top graphics cards of the market are at least 2 years behind from the very best that exists in NVidia's labs. The XBox had an NVidia chip that was available for the PC a year after XBox's launch.

Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

[master_p]

Yeap, good idea. I totally agree with you.

Another possibility is to use Haskell or Erlang as a base programming language. These languages can easily be parallelized for multicore systems, since they are pure programming languages.

Newer than MS-DOS 6

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey guys, check this out! Amiga OS 4 may have just come out but I have found out something even faster. DOS!!! If it crashes, it only takes two seconds to reboot and you have no distractions at all. Remember the good old days you guys when nobody cared about graphics. You can even get all of your word processing done on edlin (the superior wrod processing environment) and all you have to do to print it is just crack out that old edlin manual, figure out how to save the file, then exit and just type PRINT . You don't have to worry about viruses because they don't make any for DOS anymore and all of the DOS viruses came on floppies and if you put it on that new AMD64 machine, chances are, you won't have to worry about viruses because you won't have a floppy drive!!!!! Isn't it exciting! They just came out with a new version not that long ago themselves. Download it here http://freedos.org/. It's great because you don't have to have an emulator. Get it NOW!!!!!

IMO, the REAL Amiga Went Open Source

[dammy]

Amiga turned into a three ring circus. First you have those who sort of own the copyrights (most of the patents still are owned by Gateway and are licensed out to Amiga). The sad tale of OS4, it was suppost to be owned, sort of, by Amiga Inc and Hyperion. Hyperion's orginal contract to roll out OS4 had a $25K buy back option (which I under was executed by Amiga Inc). Little did Amiga Inc know or realize, Hyperion allowed a newly coded kernel that was owned by Hyperion subcontractors (Frieds (SP) Brothers) to be used so when the buyback option was executed, Amiga Inc couldn't get the kernel since that was owned by a third party. Think it all still in the hands of lawyers and there is no licensed hardware to use for OS4. I don't expect to see any licensed OS4 products being offered for sale for a long period of time.

Second is another closed sourced called MorphOS which runs on third party PPC hardware made by Genesi (the OS and hardware are owned by seperate companies).

Third is where I think the true Amiga spirit lies, a open source version called Amiga Research Operating System (AROS). It's a community OS driven by what we loved in our Amigas. The orginal AROS coders realized that we would never see customized hardware that gave the real Amigas such power and capabilities compared to the painful window boxes of the 1980s. Common hardware (x86) was targetted as the new enviroment, it was the OS that mattered since the x86 had grown far beyond what the A4000 could have offered at the time. AROS is also being ported to PPC (and specifically Genesi's new PPC, EFIKA), x86_64 and hopefully one day, ARM. Self booting x86 ISO can be download (free as in beer) at http://www.aros.org/. AROS is a work in progress so it's not as nice as OS4. Then again, unlike OS4, it can be used on just about any old x86 that you have laying about. AROS is always looking for more developers and there is a third party bounty system setup to motivate AROS developers at http://www.teamaros.org/

Dammy

Re:please..

[YttriumOxide]

And what exactly is "classless" about the AmigaOne with AmigaOS4? It's as real an Amiga as you'll get.

True, it doesn't have an OCS, ECS or AGA graphics chipset... true, it doesn't use Paula for sound... but neither do most Classic Amigas these days if people are still serious about USING them - the chips are in there, but they've been bypassed LONG ago by expansion cards (including PCI buses added A4000T systems and then PCI graphics and sound cards thrown in). My AmigaOne is just as much an Amiga as those are, and a LOT classier.

Re:please..

[YttriumOxide]

Oh, and further to my last comment...

It's more like a brand new Studebaker was built and a bunch of whiners went around saying "but it's not a REAL Studebaker", despite it having the same look and feel, being able to use all the same accessories, feeling the same to drive (only much smoother and more powerful) and so on, while having some new body streamlining and a modern efficient engine under the hood.

Re:Missing options

[Dilaudid]

> Windows is an order of magnitude or two larger than this OS
 
More like a magnitude of 10... AOS4 iso = ~50 MB... XP Pro iso = ~500-600 MB, IIRC.
  Err... sorry but 10* larger is what "order of magnitude" means. Commonly abbreviated O(n), O(3) means in the thousands, O(2) means in the hundreds etc. Of course there's nothing you can do now you've posted, but this is slashdot so pedantry is it's own reward :)
Good info about XP though... I'd like it if linux booted so quick, but given you never need to reboot, why bother...

AREXX

[Chysn]

I had an Amiga 1200 when I was in college, the early 90s. One of the sweet things that the Amiga OS had was AREXX. It was a simple scripting language, but it was able to listen to and talk to applications that had an AREXX port. So you could write scripts that allowed entirely different applications to communicate with each other for any imaginable purpose. That was fun and--even by today's standards--unique.

Re:AREXX

[garutnivore]

So you could write scripts that allowed entirely different applications to communicate with each other for any imaginable purpose.

Taken literally that statement is true. You can certainly write a script to use a word processing software and a calculator application to levitate your house (this goal is one instance of the set "any imaginable purpose"), for instance. Most likely, that won't work.

But if we bring the scope down to "for solving emergent problems that the applications cannot solve in isolation", then how is this any different than writing a script to control gimp and oowriter on Linux?

Re:AREXX

[Chaset]

Unique... hmm, by your capsule description, it sounds just like Applescript. I'll grant that there may be some amazing capability you didn't describe, but it doesn't seem unique to me.

Re:AREXX

[Chysn]

> Taken literally that statement is true. You can certainly write a script to use a word processing
> software and a calculator application to levitate your house (this goal is one instance of the set
> "any imaginable purpose"), for instance. Most likely, that won't work.

        If you had hardware controlled by the computer that was capable of levitating your house, then there's no reason it wouldn't work perfectly.

> But if we bring the scope down to "for solving emergent problems that the applications cannot
> solve in isolation", then how is this any different than writing a script to control gimp and
> oowriter on Linux?

> Unique... hmm, by your capsule description, it sounds just like Applescript

        Yes, these are very both similar to how AREXX worked. In the case of AREXX, the applications actively extended the language with new functions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx

Re:AREXX

[Zobeid]

I think AppleScript can perform a similar role to ARexx, aside from the unfortunate fact that AppleScript is brain-damaged as a programming language.

Worth noting. . . The ARexx port is well documented and can be addressed by other languages, so it is possible to control applications with other languages as long as the apps have an ARexx interface. At one time I used PowerLOGO to control applications that way. I have been told the same is also true of AppleScript ports on the Macintosh, but I don't know about any examples of it.

I've often wondered why Python, Ruby, and other popular scripting languages can't be used the same way. Coming from an Amiga background, it seems to me like the most obvious thing that you would *want* any scripting language to do. (But then, I also wonder why applications -- other than games -- cant' have their own screen displays on a Mac or PC.)

Re:please..

[somersault]

The OS used to do the instant switching as well. I'm still waiting for Windows to catch up and give me the same feel of control when I use my computer that I had on my Amiga. I guess I should try the latest versions of Mac OS, maybe the 'spirit' of it matches the one I felt when using an Amiga. I know it sounds really dumb to talk about something like an OS in that way (well, maybe not with all the Linux zealots around here ;) and I always liked Linux just because it seemed closer to the Amiga OS that I basically cut my teeth coding and learning about hardware/software on), but using Amiga OS you had the same flexibility, extensibility (lots of apps to upgrade the look and feel of the GUI for example) and control that you get with Linux, though one benefit would be more standardised hardware and OS, so it was easier to develop for.

Not only fast reboot - NO shutdown

[YttriumOxide]

I find it interesting TFA never mentioned my personal "quirky little favourite" of AmigaOS. Not only are the reboots amazingly fast, but you don't need to shutdown. If I want to turn it off, I press the power button. If I want to reboot, I give it the three finger salute (that's either "Ctrl Amiga Amiga" or "Ctrl Alt Alt" (depending on if you want a soft or hard reboot) for anyone paying attention) or hit the reboot button on the front of the computer. There's no "shutdown" required.

Re:Not only fast reboot - NO shutdown

[zakezuke]

If I want to turn it off, I press the power button. If I want to reboot, I give it the three finger salute (that's either "Ctrl Amiga Amiga" or "Ctrl Alt Alt" (depending on if you want a soft or hard reboot) for anyone paying attention) or hit the reboot button on the front of the computer. There's no "shutdown" required.

Unless you happened to shut down while the HD was still writing, then you needed to peform some intensive checks. This was mostly an issue for those of us running some old ass 5.25 inch scsi drives, or worse yet MFM. I was a cheap bastard an ran a Seagate ST-419, where 4 designated their full height drive. This wasn't really an OS issue... but a soft shutdown that would understand wait for drive cache to be clear then shutdown would have been most handy.

Re:Not only fast reboot - NO shutdown

[YttriumOxide]

As an FYI: The Amiga 4000 did do this on ctrl-amiga-amiga. It'd wait about one and a half seconds before rebooting and in that time it'd cleanly finish everything it could (such as aborting large write operations and so on). I've never actually tested on my OS4 system, but I'd imagine the soft reboot (ctrl-amiga-amiga (or ctrl-win-win on a "standard" keyboard)) would do it whereas the hard reboot (ctrl-alt-alt) would not.

WinUAE

[UED]

You don't need the hardware. Just use WinUAE emulator.

Interesting hardware

[rbanffy]

While I agree diversity is a Good Thing, I see a PC where the major difference is a PowerPC processor instead of an x86 one pretty uninteresting.

For what it is, it would be far better to release it for x86 processors. Even Apple did it.

I want a 16-core ARM CPU, Burroughs B5000-like memory and hardware-assisted garbage collection. The simplistic PC architecture has lived far too long.

AmigaOS isn't anymore for computers

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be a killer OS for set top boxes, cellphones, kiosks, PDAs, portable media players/recorders, etc, where no memory protection and no multiuser environment are a no-issue and where memory space and speed are a must, but they still insist on putting it on computers. Why?
I wish I had the money to buy the sources:(

40MB hard drive?

[gillbates]

I realize things were different back then, but I've managed to accumulate 120MB of my own source code over the years. Heck, the source for the Linux kernel alone, compressed, wouldn't even fit on that drive. It had a lot of limitations that probably weren't apparent at the time, because the expectations of a computer was probably considerably less than it is today.

Software is bloated today because it tries to be all things to all people, and because hard drive space is cheap. The cost of hard drive space for the typical "bloated" office application is less than some people pay for a cup of coffee. Performance is nice, but features drive the market.

Even I like FreeDOS. It's fast, installs easy, but I haven't used it since I installed it. Why? - Well, because even Windows can do so much more. Compared to MS-DOS, FreeDOS is an easy winner. But it's not 1980 anymore, and people are looking toward using computers for more and more these days. Even the $300 Sam's club special can play MP3s and burn DVDs. Can the Amiga?

Re:please..

[mdwh2]

It's not even over now. It was over many long years ago.

Play with the legacy hardware if you like (Hell, I was drooling over a Cray X-MP at the National Cryptologic Museum not too long ago), but mentally - guys, MENTALLY - join us here in the current century, OK?

But who are you referring to when you say "join us here in the current century, OK?"

You see, every Amiga story on Slashdot gets flooded with "It's dead" comments, but I find it hard to see comments from anyone advocating the Amiga has the best machine ever. In fact, I've found it hard to see those comments in about the last 10 years. Even on Amiga forums, about 5-10 years ago, most Amiga users still seemed to also have other platforms, and the extremely rare "The Amiga is better than PC" post got shot down even by Amiga users themselves.

If you mean the fact that people are still developing in it, well there are plenty of niche platforms, both old and new, being worked on, which occasionally get mentioned on Slashdot. No one trolls on those threads though.

So I think the only ones who need to mentally join us in this century are the ones who seem to be stuck in the 1990s PC vs Amiga flamewar mode...

Atari ST/TT/Falcon

[nurb432]

Dont forget, Atari did it first :)

Re:Atari ST/TT/Falcon

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's also not forget, Atari also did it worst.

Re:please..

[mdwh2]

But it's commonplace for car manufacturers to reuse brandnames for newer models of cars, there's nothing misleadning about that.

And someone better complain about Apple for slapping the "Mac" label on something which today is completely different...

They have a legal right to the trademark, so it's not like you describe.

1995 called....

[slightcrazed]

...They want their Operating System back.

The Amiga Could Run THREE OS's at Once!

[airship]

I was the managing editor of .info magazine, which covered the Amiga exclusively until 1992; just before it died, we did.

My (admittedly high-end, for its day) Amiga 3000UX could run Windows 3.1, Unix, and AmigaOS SIMULTANEOUSLY on three pull-down screens. People would freak out when they saw me pull down and flip between three different screens running three different operating systems. And it wasn't just some cheap parlor trick - all three were running various applications in real-time.

Oh, and you could even run a Mac emulator on the Amiga screen at the same time.

This was in 1990. Can your machine do anything even remotely like that today? AmigaOS had a very different way of looking at how computers should work. There is still a lot that OS programmers can learn from the Amiga.

Re:The Amiga Could Run THREE OS's at Once!

[Cereal Box]

Can your machine do anything even remotely like that today?

Yes, easily. It's called VMWare.

Re:The Amiga Could Run THREE OS's at Once!

[alanwall]

not the same at all !

Re:The Amiga Could Run THREE OS's at Once!

[Anonymous Coward]

throwing x86 cards into an a3000 is no more special than buying a small pc and running it under your desk.. vmware IS special - throw vmware server onto a fast multi-core linux box and be amazed. (1.6ghz quad core xeons are less than 350 USD afterall)

Sun had x86 cards since the supersparc days, and HP supported this on the PA-RISC arch natively!

Re:The Amiga Could Run THREE OS's at Once!

[djp928]

Please explain why not.

Re:The Amiga Could Run THREE OS's at Once!

[pip1]

"throwing x86 cards into an a3000 is no more special than buying a small pc and running it under your desk.. vmware IS special - throw vmware server onto a fast multi-core linux box and be amazed. (1.6ghz quad core xeons are less than 350 USD afterall)

Sun had x86 cards since the supersparc days, and HP supported this on the PA-RISC arch natively!"

ohh come on, you apparently know a few things about the older tech, but you have to admit that the 286/386/486 bridgeboards for the old amiga were rather more than your average £1000/$2000 home PC today has...

why is it your lumping the home Amiga PC in with these industrial strength server boxs and kit, hardly seems fair to compare unless your trying to say that even the way back x86 cards inside the A3000UX with its offical Unix port/support can still compare rather well to these massivly more expensive server grade boxs?...

if you have never owned or used these tricked out Amiga boxs and kit and are willing to listen, it seems this thread (well done btw for keeping it civil/helpful/informative etc) is full of the old helpful amiga crew that can try and give advice and info to help you understand.

i always liked the (forgive me if i get it slighty wrong syntax been a while LOL)
----------------
makedir s:web
assign web: s:web add
mount tcpweb:
assign www.big-arse-super----------------duper-long-url web: 1
----------------

i forget if thats the right syntax but you get the picture, web: is infact the added s:web dir made earlyer
and you can add as many assigns as you like and have the system search each one as though it were one dir etc.

i also liked requestchoice "this-window" "quit" "Ok" "1" "2" "3"
for makign quick and easy GUi scripts, shame these request* cli/shell commands and kingcon: shell
were never ported to windows and linux as then anyone could use something aproaching a super small quick cli/GUI amiga script.

mount speak: say "this is amiga speaking" LOL.

OT

[Da VinMan]

Faith is a rational response to faithfulness.

Errr.. just a quick question, what the heck does your sig mean?

Re:OT

[iangoldby]

It's intended to make people wonder what it means, so it worked ;-)

It is a response really to those who associate 'faith' in the context of religion (and Christianity in particular) as something that is unreasoned, based on no evidence, blind, believing something you know not to be true, etc. That's very strange, because in other arenas of life 'faith' is to do with trust, and trust is usually earned. You don't normally put your faith in someone unless you have some past experience of them being faithful (trustworthy) and a reasonable expectation that they will continue to be faithful in the future. I'm a Christian, and I think that faith in God (by the more 'every day' definition - i.e. based on experience, not the strawman definition of it being blind) is quite a rational and reasonable thing.

Re:OT

[Da VinMan]

Well, it worked. You seem open to discussion, so let me throw this at you.

First of all, I like your definition of faith. I looked up the word on Wikipedia earlier (yeah, that kind of frame of mind today) and found this quote you might like:
"William Sloane Coffin counters that faith is not acceptance without proof, but trust without reservation."

So, here is the question I have: For what reason do you place trust in Christianity?

Before you answer, consider that Christianity requires belief that Jesus Christ was God, died for our sins on the cross, and rose from the dead. And that doesn't even take into account all of the rest of the Gospels.

Every Christian I know gets rather uncomfortable when I mention the more supernatural aspects of Christianity. When asked, many of them will let on that don't believe those things literally themselves. They usually get hostile atthat point and change the subject. The ones who do believe in the supernatural aspects say "you just have to have faith" that those things happened. The sub-text to this is that "you have to have faith that those things happened because if they didn't we'd all be wrong and do you really think that the millions of people alive today and all of our ancestors would have passed this lie down to us if it weren't true?". All of that combined is a huge emotionally weight that people don't really know how to handle and so the questioner normally backs off at that point.

But, someone who has had time to become immune to those overtones still has questions. Why believe it?

Re:OT

[iangoldby]

This is about as off-topic as it gets on Slashdot - shall we continue this discussion off-list? Please email my gmail account - user name ian.goldby, and I'll get back to you and say something about how I see the issues you raised. Cheers.

Re:please..

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's commonplace for car manufacturers to reuse brandnames for newer models of cars, there's nothing misleadning about that.

It sure is. Now go ask a 60's Pontiac GTO fan whether the current rebadged Monaro is a real GTO. :-) The original Amiga was a cutting-edge machine in almost every respect, which was a large part of its appeal. What exactly is cutting edge or even notable about the new system?

Many thanks

[meosborne]

Here's a heartfelt thank you for all of the things you created for the Amiga. They gave me many enjoyable moments and I still appreciate them even after all these years.

I salute you! :-)

Lets Review...mistakes (was: Re:I don't get it...)

[3t3rn4l]

I don't get it either; I guess this is why my good friend always tells me: "But it doesn't have to make sense."

The team working on the current Amiga architecture are just as backward as Commodore ever was. They apparently can't learn from Commodore's mistakes and are doomed to repeat them. Perhaps it's because Amiga is Spanish for girlfriend; no rationality included?

So this "new" update to AmigaOS is out. There isn't any hardware to run it on because the designers wanted to lock people in to their hardware--Well, produce more proprietary hardware darn it! Yes, I understand it was a reference board and that there was at least a second production run of the reference board in an ITX form factor, but this is all hype with none of the backing.

Amiga's website isn't very forthcoming about hardware non-availability and I spent quite a bit of time researching a few months ago t find that I couldn't even purchase a reference board, but my hopes were up that I could purchase the OS and load it into a virtual machine of my choice! NOPE! (It reminds me of back in the late 1980's or early 1990's when I wanted a 2 line cordless phone with caller ID and all I got was laughed at, but now said phone is less than $20 at Walmart!)

Although, with as long as I've been waiting for a Nintendo Wii, maybe I'll be able to get an Amiga mainboard before quantities are sufficient to get a Wii.

What a waste to lock people into hardware when the hardware isn't being mass produced or readily available; pick an off the shelf PowerPC board with standard BIOS / boot firmware and run with that, then see if more people will buy your OS! Wait a few OS revisions after adoption, then begin the proprietary hardware lock-in if necessary. I think Apple made this same silly mistake, locking people into their hardware after switching to x86 platform. How many OS licenses do you think Apple would sell if your average Joe could purchase OS X and load it on their Dell for $90-150? (Oh, but that's too many drivers and hardware configurations to support--boohoo, at least two "competitors" already leverage this "feature")

"The Amiga is dead, long live the Amiga!!!"

I want my CPM!

[Billly Gates]

Screw that.

Re:I want my CPM!

[ggvaidya]

A Slashdot user named Billly Gates wants CPM?

*head explodes*

Ever read that one article by SquiggleSlash?

[StreetStealth]

This was a real eye-opener to me (though the guy never actually submitted it):

http://science.slashdot.org/~squiggleslash/journal /140205

FTA:

The thing I realised over the last few days was that the Amiga was going to die at about the same time as all the companies that killed it killed it. That may seem a weird thing to say, but my fundamental point is that the two things that made the Amiga - the operating system and the hardware - became "obsolete" in the late nineties. I don't mean the last version of each wasn't fast enough, or, say, AmigaOS's lack of a native TCP/IP stack meant it wasn't feature complete, I'm talking about the fundamental designs themselves. And I think this was a major reason why every Amiga owner after Escom failed.

Duke Nukem 3D / Linux source code

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes "Duke Nukem 3D" is ported to AmigaOS4,

AmigaOS4 community makes good use of Open source code from Linux/Windows what ever, the biggest problem we have whit Linux source code is it deepness on GTK / QT and Fork()/Clone() commands .

THE AUTHOR JEREMY REIMER IS A CHARLATAN FAKE

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeremy Reimer does not even have a degree in this field of computer science, let along professional hands-on experience in computer science, but is being cited by arstechnica as some kind of expert that has some sort of insight into this field and skills to judge it by? The funny part about Jeremy Reimer is his plagiarized "history of the gui" from Englebart's works, and yet Jeremy Reimer himself has never written a gui program. Give us a break slashdot. If I used DOS or UNIX years ago, does it qualify me as well to be some expert on it everyone here ought to listen to? It seems Reimer showed how little he really knows about this field here:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?art icleid=41095&cpage=189#feedbackAnchor

And got his ass kicked along with 1/2 of arstechnica trying to take that guy on & he got Reimer frothing at the mouth, writing libellous songs about the guy and doing edited photos of him as well. Reimer is a childish moron imo.

Article explains why it won't take off

[Sloppy]

The article's 3rd and 4th paragraphs explain why it has taken so long to be developed, and why nobody knows how much long-term maintenance there will be. The software was held hostage by dying companies. And it still is.

Fool me twice, shame on me. Open it up, if you want it to live. Until then, it's going to have the same kind of maintenance problems it has had for the last 15 years, and the next major update will be in 2022, if ever.

And as usual, freeness has technical consequences and isn't just a damn fool idealistic crusade:

Adding full memory protection would break too many existing Amiga applications

In earlier versions of AmigaOS, when you asked exec for memory, you passed some attributes to AllocMem(), one of them being MEMF_PUBLIC, which if set, meant "this indicates that the memory should be accessible to other tasks." The catch is, with AmigaOS up through 3.x, this attribute didn't actually do anything. But theoretically, it could have been fairly easily used to add memory protection to an Amiga with an MMU. Just give each task its own address space, except for its public blocks which could all share memory. This would have given the Amiga most of the stability of modern systems, while also retaining its blazingly fast IPC. But, as the article says, adding this feature would break many old apps, because those apps were written either before the MEMF_PUBLIC was added to the spec, or the programmers just didn't do it right, or whatever. If AmigaOS had implemented memory protection, those unmaintained apps would allocate their IPC buffers privately, and fail when they tried to pass a message.

Now, imagine if this situation happened with Free Software, such as GNU/Linux. What would people do? They would fix the broken software, duh! It doesn't really take a lot of effort to grep through source looking for AllocMem()s and adding an attribute if it's being used to allocate a message buffer.

But on AmigaOS, you didn't have the damn source to most of your apps. A lot of really popular programs were no longer maintained by developers that had left the platform, and some source had even been completely lost. D'oh!

Being unmaintainable retards technological advance. It's that simple.

I don't know what how the AmigaOS 4 guys finally decided to implement memory protection, but from the article's description, it looks like they had to make serious compromises. Then they admit that maybe with AmigaOS 5 (due out in 2022 by my above predictions) they'll finally get to Do It Right (probably by throwing away the legacy apps, or running all the legacy stuff in a single virtual machine which just can't talk to the rest of the system). Heh, reminds me of how OS/2 or Windows deals with MSDOS apps. In my Amiga days, a comparison of AmigaOS to MSDOS was fightin' words. ;-) This just ain't pretty, and yet, being pretty is what the Amiga excelled at.

Re:Missing options

[Anonymous Cowled]

LOL... I am a retard!! cheers for that! >.

Re:please..

[misleb]

And what exactly is "classless" about the AmigaOne with AmigaOS4? It's as real an Amiga as you'll get.

Indeed, that *is* as real an Amiga as you'll get. That is my point. Isn't the AmigaOne more or less just a common PPC based motherboard? Wasn't the major draw of the original Amiga the hardware... including the m68k CPU? WIthout any of that you've just got a PC running an archaic OS that doesn't even have proper memory management.

My AmigaOne is just as much an Amiga as those are, and a LOT classier.

If you say so.

-matthew

Re:please..

[misleb]

It's more like a brand new Studebaker was built and a bunch of whiners went around saying "but it's not a REAL Studebaker", despite it having the same look and feel, being able to use all the same accessories, feeling the same to drive (only much smoother and more powerful) and so on, while having some new body streamlining and a modern efficient engine under the hood.

But *can* it use all the same accessories? I thought all plans of making the AmigaOne-4000, for example, were scrapped. And basically the current AmigaOne is just a common PowerPC based motherboard with very little "Amiga" about it besides the OS and the brand name. Am I mistaken?

I'd have much more repsect for someone who showed up at an auto show with an ORIGINAL Studebaker, than some guy who managed to get a modern car with the "Studebaker" label on it. Seriously, which one would you want to see at an auto show?

-matthew

Blessing and Curse...

[Lodragandraoidh]

I got an Amiga 1000 in 1985, and used it extensively. Now, this was before my exposure to DOS - my two machines before that were a TI99a, and an Atari 800xl.

It shaped my concept of what an operating system should be at a time when Windows was little more than a dos shell application, and the Macintosh was a monochrome icon holding tank - neither of which would do preemptive multitasking then - or for many years to come. It was a multimedia computer before there was a concept of that in the mainstream. It had many of the capabilities that we take for granted today - as others have mentioned.

In the late '80s and up until the early '90s I was stuck with using DOS and Windows applications and programming environments - neither of which were satisfactory after my experience with the Amiga. So having the Amiga was both a blessing and a curse; while it gave me a window into the future, I had to suffer with the substandard Intel single-tasking PC clone systems, which took off. Thankfully Linux came along - and I was one of the early adopters of that - over a decade now.

Is Amiga dead as an OS? Many of the things that people found useful in the Amiga can be found today in Linux (applications that just work, less resource intensive, preemptive multitasking, excellent development environment etc). I think from a practical perspective, there is no need to use the Amiga. Nonetheless, it does have some advantages, not the least of which is its small installed base - a similar benefit that Linux once had (tight knit community for assistance, lack of a serious attack from crackers, etc).

P.S. -- I remember playing 'Arctic Fox', and using an IBM PC emulator on the Amiga in the mid-80s. What other software did folks fondly remember using on the Amiga?

Re:please..

[YttriumOxide]

Indeed, that *is* as real an Amiga as you'll get. That is my point. Isn't the AmigaOne more or less just a common PPC based motherboard? Yep - essentially that's right.

Wasn't the major draw of the original Amiga the hardware... including the m68k CPU? Not to me and many others. To the gamers of the day, perhaps that was the case... but old school Amiga gamers probably have very little reason to care what goes on with AmigaOS since many of them never used it anyway (instead just booting straight to games from their floppy disks).

WIthout any of that you've just got a PC running an archaic OS that doesn't even have proper memory management. I'd disagree about archaic. AmigaOS4 is a modern OS. True, it doesn't have things that many people have come to expect from a modern OS such as being multiuser or having an advanced memory management system, but for a HOME DESKTOP OS, you'd be surprised how well you can get by perfectly happily without these things. What's more important by far is whether I can do whatever it is I need to do and that it doesn't quickly and reliably. Which, other than a minor shortage of software, I can (my biggest current concern with using the platform is a lack of software, however as a hobbyist/professional coder I'm doing my part to work on that, as are many others).
Don't expect AmigaOS to ever be a server, nor expect it to be too graceful with shockingly coded apps... but you CAN expect it to run quickly, reliably and be easy, intuitive and fun to use.

Unix

[pip1]

apparently a new-age fanboy there; but ignoring most of what you said its interesting to note for reference "emulated mac better than a mac shame linux was not out it probably ould have dusted a pc at running it ..." true the 3rd party mac emulators and the hardware 68k mac add-ins etc were faster... many of these were 3rd party amiga hardware/software devs btw. as for Linux , well we had to make do with official payed for ports of AT&T Unix System V Release 4 at that time... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix did anyone try loading that into one of the emulators BTW?, that might be interesting to see.

Re:please..

[misleb]

Don't expect AmigaOS to ever be a server, nor expect it to be too graceful with shockingly coded apps... but you CAN expect it to run quickly, reliably and be easy, intuitive and fun to use.

Without proper memory management, I wouldn't expect it to be particularly reliable, but whatever.

-matthew

Re:please..

[YttriumOxide]

By "same accessories" I really kind of meant the car accessories (radio, seats etc), not the computer hardware (graphics cards etc). It was supposed to be a reference to running the same software - sorry for the bad analogy.
As for the hardware, yes, the AmigaOne has little to nothing in common with classic Amigas, but Amiga really isn't about the hardware - trying to build a new hardware platform would be suicide (can any small independent motherboard manufacturer dream of competing with ATI/NVidia on the graphics front? Or Creative on the sound front? Not really!). Amigas in the 21st century are defined by the fact that they run AmigaOS.
And the auto show and veering a little off topic... I actually freely admit to having no idea what a Studebaker looks like - I'm not from the US! If we're talking classic cars I do know though, give me the super modern version any day - I was pretty excited to see the rerelease of the Holden Monaro in 2001 and onwards (sold in the US as a Pontiac GTO I believe) - enough of the stylings of the old one to make it instantly recognisable while still being a gorgeous modern vehicle.

Re:please..

[YttriumOxide]

Without proper memory management, I wouldn't expect it to be particularly reliable, but whatever. You're obviously far too used to living in a land of badly coded apps then. There's no reason for well coded apps that expect to be running in an environment with only limited (or no) memory protection to cause any problems. I can happily run my OS4 box for over a week of fairly regular usage without a single crash because the apps I'm running EXPECT to run in that kind of environment and so are friendly enough to not trash each others memory.
There's a good chance that many embedded operating systems you use every day have no memory protection, but when was the last time your cellphone crashed? (if the answer is "recently", I feel sorry for you, but MOST cellphones don't crash on a regular basis). If memory protection was such a "MUST HAVE", then it would've been unthinkable for a multitasking OS to ever be written without it, but there are plenty of examples of ones that do. I'm not saying it's worthless of course - I'd love to have a full and advanced memory protection system in AmigaOS, but my main point is that it still works reliably without it.

Re:please..

[misleb]

Amigas in the 21st century are defined by the fact that they run AmigaOS.

I'm sorry, but that just seems lame.

If we're talking classic cars I do know though, give me the super modern version any day

When I was a kid I used to wonder why people didn't collect modern coins. Like if I found a penny that had a mint date of the current year, I thought it was special.. I mean, it was shiny and new, right? Eventually I learned that it is the old coins that people want to collect because they are rare interesting reminders of the past.

-matthew

Re:please..

[YttriumOxide]

Amigas in the 21st century are defined by the fact that they run AmigaOS.

I'm sorry, but that just seems lame. Why? If you use Linux, do you define the box by the OS or the hardware? Do you say, "my P4 2GHz" or "my Linux box"? It's exactly the same sort of thing. I have a couple of Linux systems around here - one's on PPC hardware and one's on intel. They're both just "Linux boxes" to me.

Eventually I learned that it is the old coins that people want to collect because they are rare interesting reminders of the past. If you're interested in being a "classic collector", then absolutely. But that's a whole different ballgame. I'd expect a classic car enthusiast to prefer to the old cars, and I'd expect a coin collector to collect the old ones (collecting current ones doesn't make much sense, since they aren't current for long!). And in the same vein, I'd expect a classic computer enthusiast to prefer an Amiga 500 to an AmigaOne. But AmigaOS4 isn't for "classic enthusiasts" - it's for people who want a modern OS and like the AmigaOS way of doing things. Just as a 2006 model car is nicer to drive than one from the 1950s, AmigaOS4 is a nicer OS than any of the classic versions.

Re:please..

[misleb]

You're obviously far too used to living in a land of badly coded apps then.

It doesn't take a bad programmer to accidentally write to memory outside of the application. And the problem isn't so much that it happens, but that that if you dont' have proper memory protection in the first place, you may never know if it is happening until it really messes up your system. When I am developing on an OS with proper memory protection, I instantly get a seg fault.. and I know exactly where to go to fix it.

There's no reason for well coded apps that expect to be running in an environment with only limited (or no) memory protection to cause any problems.

So you are asking me to believe that only Amiga programmers are so awesome that they never write to memory that they are not supposed to. Because every unprotected OS besides DOS that I have ever run has been an unreliable piece of crap. And the only reason DOS wasn't so bad was because it basically only ran one program at a time, so there wasn't necessarily much harm in writing to random bits of memory (within reason).

I can happily run my OS4 box for over a week of fairly regular usage without a single crash because the apps I'm running EXPECT to run in that kind of environment and so are friendly enough to not trash each others memory.

Oh, sure, they are "friendly." As if programmers in memory protected environments really love seg faulting.

There's a good chance that many embedded operating systems you use every day have no memory protection,

But the programs they run are also a lot simpler and known. But get a general purpose computer with a random set of applications and all bets are off.

but when was the last time your cellphone crashed? (if the answer is "recently", I feel sorry for you, but MOST cellphones don't crash on a regular basis).

Cell phones these days run Java. And I'm pretty sure that Java has certain protections.

If memory protection was such a "MUST HAVE", then it would've been unthinkable for a multitasking OS to ever be written without it, but there are plenty of examples of ones that do.

Nowadays it is practically unthinkable. The only reason it wasn't done in the past was because MMUs were expensive in terms of both cost and performance. Today, only inexpensive embedded devices go without an MMU and memory protection... and I've certainly seen may fair share of unstable embedded devices such as consumer grade wireless routers.

I'm not saying it's worthless of course - I'd love to have a full and advanced memory protection system in AmigaOS, but my main point is that it still works reliably without it.

Yeah, you have uptimes of up to a week. Congrats.

-matthew

Re:please..

[misleb]

Why? If you use Linux, do you define the box by the OS or the hardware? Do you say, "my P4 2GHz" or "my Linux box"? It's exactly the same sort of thing. I have a couple of Linux systems around here - one's on PPC hardware and one's on intel. They're both just "Linux boxes" to me.

But it completely fails to capture what made teh Amiga special. Linux is special at least partially BECAUSE it can run on just about anything. So running Linux on any random piece of hardware is actually part of its appeal/charm. Amigas are kinda like Macs in that part of the appeal is the hardware and the way the OS is well integrated with it. Like they are designed as a whole package.

But AmigaOS4 isn't for "classic enthusiasts" - it's for people who want a modern OS and like the AmigaOS way of doing things.

AmigaOS4 is only "modern" the way Mac OS 9 is modern. I'd even go so far as to suggest that OS 9 is MORE modern and AmigaOS4. But if you like it, that is what matters, I suppose. I'm not trying to make you not like it. I just though you were using it because you were more the "classic enthusiast."

-matthew

And the Microsoft Zealots will be...

[Dareth]

...telling people that Microsoft's newly released OS "LongintheTooth" will have all the problems worked out shortly, as soon as SP1 is fully tested and ready for use.

Re:please..

[mdwh2]

Fair enough, I guess there are probably a few people still using classic MacOS who would bitch about OS X not being a Mac, it's just a shame the Amiga stories always get a lot more of the "it's only using the trademark" comments.

PPC aros

[pip1]

"YttriumOxide said: I've said it before (and will therefore probably get my first ever "redundant" mod) but if he's wanting OS4, then AROS is *NOT* the answer. Unless you consider Win95 the answer to someone looking for Windows Vista!" sure , you have said it but it seems your under the impression that AROS being at its original base a 1.3 clone is in some way restricting it to that old version as its limit. take a look at some of the current AROS screenshots http://aros.sourceforge.net/pictures/screenshots/ and tell me thats your idea of a restricted 1.3 AOS clone.... the fact is AROS can become anything you want it to become (within the Amiga realm/idea's etc) all it takes is your time to code it up and submit it. btw Dammy, you should also tell them your the AROS bounty treasery guy, and that CURRENTLY the PPC port hasnt started yet, as it appears the current devs are all x86 based and favour that atm. unless its changed in the last few days perhaps?, is there any new or old amiga devs now hacking on PPC AROS perhaps ready to load/run a usable AROS PPC compile on the coming UK/EU PS3 soon!. perhaps someones now cross-compiling to the http://www.powerdeveloper.org/8641d.php but you have not seen fit to make it known yet ?, or perhaps non of the above as i note you said elsewere your finding it hard to get new PPC based OSS devs involved?. so are there any OSS PPC devs here or infact x86 devs that are thinking of getting and playing with PPC linux/AROS/whatever on the PS3 once it arrives ?, will you consider taking one or more of the bountys or would you work on somthing else that interests you and ask that a bounty be put up for it as your reqard for your efforts in PPC AROS perhaps...?

Re:PPC aros

[YttriumOxide]

Perhaps you missed it, but I didn't say "1.3", I said "3.1"... and yes, all those screenshots look very much like 3.1 with some fancier icons and running on a system with a graphics card (which realistically, any serious Amiga user has). I'd even go so far as to say those screenshots look significantly more primitive than OS3.9, which itself is dwarfed by OS4 in almost every regard.

The TCP config tool is a good step in the right direction, but looks primitive compared to OS4's Sys:Prefs/Internet

There's nothing really there that would make me want it *OVER* OS4 (if I didn't have OS4 of course, AROS would be my preferred OS for sure (that said though, if I'm allowed to emulate in this hypothetical scenario, I'd probably go for OS3.9 under WinUAE instead))

ARexx Port == DCOP

[Sloppy]

I've often wondered why Python, Ruby, and other popular scripting languages can't be used the same way.

They can. KDE apps support something called DCOP, which is a lot like an ARexx port. Install the dcoppython package, and now Python is ready to do the stuff you used to do with ARexx.

For example, here is a list of how Amarok (a KDE music player) can be manipulated, queried, etc through DCOP. If you have that stuff installed, then go ahead and start up Amarok, load up a playlist, then start a python interpreter and type these lines:

import pydcop
amarok=pydcop.anyAppCalled('amarok')
amar ok.player.play() # don't know why slashdot is adding that extra space
print amarok.player.nowPlaying()

640x0? I'd love to see that.

[serodores]

Am I missing something? Wouldn't 640x0 resolution be invisible? (640 columns but 0 rows)

If the Amiga had lived, I might be working in IT

[rbgemini]

I sometimes think that if the Amiga had lived on, I would be working in an IT or tech-related field today.

I had an A500 as a kid and later got an A1200 when I was about 13. On the A1200 in particular, I learnt the ins and outs of how AmigaOS worked including the command line, not just the GUI. I just loved all the clever things you could do to it, like assigning volume names to a directory or set of directories, the ease of multitasking, and how easy it was to plug in new libraries, new fonts, or any variety of new OS extension you wanted just by putting it in the right directory. I also loved the way that what you got on your screen in terms of the GUI actually represented the way the directories were set up on the computer, unlike the Windows of the day with its Program Manager.

Not long after I got the A1200, Commodore went to the wall and within a couple of years it was clear that the Amiga was dead. You couldn't get one here in Australia anymore for the most part and it didn't seem to be doing any better overseas. There was no commercial software and the magazines were closing down. I lost interest in computing generally, and when I finally replaced it with a Windows 98 PC a few years later, I didn't bother to learn the ins and outs of it - I just used it like a regular user.

I don't know what it was, I could just never get into the Windows PC and I still don't care about them today. I can still tell you the specs of my A1200 (OS 3.0, 14Mhz 68020, 10Mb RAM, 560Mb HDD in the end) but about all I can tell you about the one I have these days is that it has a Core Duo processor and it runs XP.

Re:If the Amiga had lived, I might be working in I

[John Muir]

You sum it up quite nicely there.

I feel the same way about my Mac today. Know it much better than the pc's I used before, can do much more with it, and take part online and in person with the userbase. You don't get that with Windows. The closest you can approach it is just talking about single apps, i.e. games.

An old friend of mine was really into Amigas back in the day too (I never was, I had a 286 Amstrad and ran GEM without realising how much it stunk thanks to being a kid!) and he used to be the über geek among us who did 3D renders and mixed up module music. He eventually switched to Windows and basically became a normal user much like you, getting his geek on with games instead of the tech itself.

Interesting perspective.