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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 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)
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
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).