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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.'"
FTA: "this brings things up to ludicrous speed."
Prepare for the jump to ludicrous speed!
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.
..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!"
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!
Couldn't the 6 of you who are still interested just start a mailing list or something?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The wayback machine says:
http://www.archive.org/details/Amigaand1985/
Will it run Duke Nukem Forever?
die already. the amiga's time has come and gone.
//Scuze me...
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.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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*
There's something not right, here...
Something not up to Slashdot standards...
Ah... there's no "dept." caption/commentary!
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
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 :)
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
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....
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...
digitalhallucination... now phosphate free!!
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications
I hear not having any will do that for you.
Only Amiga is worth using. If you disagree, you deserve worse than death.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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?
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
In the year 2038, you will have a much bigger problem than arguing about Amiga:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
no... It's a feature!
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
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.
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
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
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
You lose all your work on Windows too but it takes 2 minuites to get a working desktop again. :)
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.
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.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
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
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd do the sensible thing: 1) migrate to ppc, 2) put in large chunks of BSD code and 3) migrate to x86.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Someone needs to read more Neal Stephenson.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
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:
.info files for executables (a local registry for each program)
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
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.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
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.
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).
...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?
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 :-)
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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.
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.
Screw that.
http://saveie6.com/
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:
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.