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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 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.
'Same speed C but faster'
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?
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
From your eulogy:
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
:p ), and someone mentioned that they should port it to the PS3. That would be awesome.
:D Hehe
I think I read this article last night (thanks Firehose
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
which is totally what she said
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.
which is totally what she said
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).
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
...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.
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.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.