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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.'"
The wayback machine says:
http://www.archive.org/details/Amigaand1985/
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.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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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!
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
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.
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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.
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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).
Actually on linux the behaviour is tunable. /proc/sys/vm/swappiness (default 60) to get the new behaviour immediately.
Just change the value of
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.
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.
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
> 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.