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

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?

[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.

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: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: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.

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.