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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'
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?
no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications
I hear not having any will do that for you.
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.
The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.
Yep, just like Macintosh. And we all know that IBM machines survived because of Microsoft's open operating systems.
The reason Amiga died was because Commodore was completely inept on just about everything non-technical in nature - advertising, business decisions, corporate alliances, you name it.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
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
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.
The proprietary nature of the platform had little if anything to do with the Amiga's death
a world in progress...
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)
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.
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 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.