Slashdot Mirror
Amiga and Hyperion Settle Ownership of AmigaOS
HKcastaway writes "Amiga Inc and Hyperion Entertainment announced a settlement over ownership and licensing over AmigaOS 4.0 and future versions. Since the bankruptcy of Commodore, Amiga's history has been littered with lawsuits that have affected the development of Amiga hardware and software. Having a lawsuit-free OS probably will help a great deal to the continuity and recovery of the Amiga heritage. Hyperion also provides AmigaOS SDKs for developers.'
"I know I'll be flamed, but in all honesty, is the Mac platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989, but 20 years later, is it really something all that different?"
See, if I posted that to every Mac story, I'd get modded down in an instant. Please, mod the parent down, as it's no different a troll. Why must every Amiga story (it's not like we get them often, unlike the three Apple stories a day) be bogged down with these flames?
In answer to your question - go to an Apple versus Windows debate, note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows, and therefore note they can be applied here in favour of the Amiga too. E.g., you don't have to worry about viruses, DRM, bloatware. Or perhaps borrow from Iphone arguments - e.g., "it doesn't matter that it gets features later, it just does them better. Amiga are a market leader, because other companies looked to them in the past. If it lacks certain features like Flash or Java, that's obviously a good thing, as they're obviously bloated".
See? I used to have trouble arguing for the Amiga in the late 90s, but now supporting a non-Windows platform here on Slashdot is easy :) A shame the anti-Amiga trolls are still around though - why not moan about the platforms we hear more often about?
Well indeed, in general it's true that most "pro-" comments are simply poking criticisms (usually in an unfair manner) at other platforms. But for certain products, like the Amiga, it gets held to some unreasonable standard of "But you must tell us what this can do, that no other platform can do, otherwise what's the point!"
I see it with other products too - e.g., Opera. Internet Explorer is disliked, Firefox is loved. But when there's an Opera story, despite it also being a decent alternative to IE, that was around long before Firefox, it still draws out legions of "But tell me why I should switch to Opera when I'm happy on Firefox!"
I'mma gonna let you finish but OS/2 came out with the greatest OS that's going to take over the world. I always hear about these OSes like OS/2 and Amiga OS, BeOS, and Linux that are going to take over everything. I had an Amiga. It was a great machine and it took a long time for the PCs and the Macs to catch up(Long after it was dead). What Amiga taught me most was that you would not win in the computer market by being better. I also learned to let go of past technology.
The Amiga offered one helluva lot of bang for your bucks back in the day. The OS was relatively slick from both the user and developer perspectives. The graphics and sound hardware was pretty decent, too. A good quantity of third-party software and games. Genlock abilities and TV-standard screen modes made for great video-captioning abilities, etc.
But come on. Even a mid-spec'ed Windows PC can handle genuine video editing, multi-track virtual recording studios with awesome soft synths and effects plug-ins, 24-bit colour to massive resolutions. All without having to work too hard in order to play nice with other apps and the OS itself.
Great in the day, but only interesting in a historical context. The same could be said of the Atari ST or Acorn Archimedes.
(Ex-Amiga 500+ owner and developer.)
Squirrel!
Everything a stock Amiga did was done with careful programming and a small amount of well designed hardware assistance. In fact, most of what it did outside of the games arena is entirely due to careful programming.
The original Amiga 1000 shipped with 256KB of RAM and 256KB of (quasi) ROM. With that you got a fully preemptive multitasking OS. You could open smaller programs in dozens of windows. Multiple command line shells, a paint program. That is the kind of efficiency you get when you hand code a simple kernel in assembly language, and have much of your software written by people who are used to working in extremely constrained environments.
Virtual memory is nice, but it really slows things down. It makes programmers lazy. Most modern machines (and Linux machines in particular, no matter how much RAM they have) aren't as "snappy" as an Apple II with 64K of RAM. Virtual memory is the primary culprit. Walk away from your machine for a while, or run an I/O intensive task and everything ends up paged out to disk, and the system sputters to a start in a few seconds once you start poking at it again.
And then there is X - terminal independence is nice, but is there any real doubt that X kept the world of affordable Unix graphics about a decade behind systems (like the Amiga) that just used a simple frame buffer? Even today, native X is pretty much useless anywhere off the local LAN. It wasn't designed to succeed in its native element, i.e. as a terminal.