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.'

Comments

Wow, my clock must be broken

[manicbutt]

For a second there, it looked like I was reading a story about the Amiga OS in 2009. Ha ha ha! Silly clock radio.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey now, don't be hatin' on the flying toaster.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[R4wBon3]

..."I love you babe. I love you babe. I love you babe."

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[mdwh2]

For a second there, it looked like I was reading a story about the Iphone being able to check a website in 2009. Ha ha ha! Silly clock radio.

For a second there, it looked like I was reading a comment from someone still poking fun at the Amiga in 2009. Ha ha ha! Silly clock radio.

Yep that's right - one Amiga article in a blue moon and the jokes start, yet Slashdot covers all manner of other platforms and systems, whether they're still cutting edge or not.

Hell, we still have stories about other old platforms too (such as old Macs). The Amiga has plenty of historical importance, but I guess it's sad that the anti-Amiga posters are still here, even in 2009.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[CdBee]

I think you'll find that the idea of an Amiga article in 2009 was the joke.... or indeed that AmigaOS itself is.

Its about as relevant to us or this site as a new release of the Amstrad CPC464 firmware.... or restarting production of the Zilog Z80. yesterdays technology, amply replaced.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[ciderVisor]

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.)

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[sconeu]

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

Yes, but the Amiga did this on an 8MHz 68K with 1MB of RAM. Can you imagine an Amiga with today's hardware specs?

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Z34107]

Zilog's Z80 is still VERY relevant. I learned Z80 assembler to properly program my TI-83 and TI-84 calculators. The TI-89 and up use the Motorola 68k.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[rho]

Can you imagine an Amiga with today's hardware specs?

Yes, it would be "in development" until 2015, and then released to practically nobody, who would promptly sue.

I've ceased to be excited by the "potential" of any hardware platform. The history of technology is littered with a lot of potentially great things that failed to do anything remotely great.

If you wanted to sum up Apple's recent successes, it would be "they delivered." Apple didn't promise the world, they merely delivered a continent or two. Here's a product: you can do these things with it.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Yes, but the Amiga did this on an 8MHz 68K with 1MB of RAM. Can you imagine an Amiga with today's hardware specs?

I had an Amiga once. (YAWN) Even bought the PC emulator (bigger YAWN). The time has come and gone. Besides.... Hyperion's website is aimless and confusing just like the direction of the Amiga since the days of Commodore. It was great in it's day but it's too far behind now.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Your forgetting one important thing! MS Windows fails at everything. When 80% of users are infected with viruses, spyware, and can't utilize these supposed capabilities then Amiga still has significant advantages and potential. It is sort of like how Mac OS X. It works well- although a tad pricey. Then again MS Windows probably costs more still yet due to the cost of virus removals, anti-virus, memory upgrades, and other related expenses. Point is that the market should be more competitive given the low quality and bloat that MS Windows is-and if people would stop listening to those with your attitude of "nothing else can succeed" and "nothing else will due cause nothing else supports everything" attitude we might get some half-way decent systems. You don't need a system to support everything- even MS Windows doesn't support everything. I can't tell you how much of my stuff doesn't work with MS Windows XP, MS Windows Vista, or MS Windows 7. It does all work with GNU/Linux though. And that is largely because I buy for GNU/Linux and GNU/Linux doesn't loose support just because Microsoft's proprietary ecosystem prevents it. If you have difficulty finding GNU/Linux supported products check out thinkpenguin.com. They sell products that utilize free and open source drivers ensuring you get continued support without any headaches like in MS Windows.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Haxamanish]

Z80 is still in production, no need to "restart" it.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[dgatwood]

Yes, but the Amiga did this on an 8MHz 68K with 1MB of RAM. Can you imagine an Amiga with today's hardware specs?

It did it all with outboard hardware, though, IIRC. Saying that the Amiga did all that stuff with such a slow processor is like saying that there's a new breed of humans that can move at 65+ MPH and conveniently omitting the words "in a car".

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[MightyMartian]

And that's the lesson for any technology; hardware or software. The most successful hardware and software is often (maybe even usually) not the best, but simply the one that delivered on managed expectations. I know a lot of startups or companies on the ropes will promise the moon, but either what we get is only a shadow of what was promised, or we simply never get it at all.

The only way you can really play the hype game is if your huge like Microsoft, and have so much market traction that you can claim all sorts of features for the next version, then clawback and still have everyone and their dog buying your software.

The Amiga was an incredible machine, but its feature set simply wasn't a big seller in the mid and late 1980s. It didn't help that Commodore was going down the tubes. It's hard sometimes to imagine Amiga failing to a computer that maxed out at 640k of RAM, had, at best, EGA graphics, but PCs had the software that sold computers. Apple managed to find a niche in desktop publishing, but there was only room for one, and the Amiga, particularly as it moved to Unix, was a hot damn machine with no market place.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

You didn't video editing on an Amiga without serious add-on hardware.

Most folks using Amigas for video were doing analog video, too... digital was barely there at the end. You could use a Genlock for titling, other devices to overlay effects on video, etc. but it was still tape to tape. That wasn't for the feint of heart, and while it was revolutionary for a small number of video professionals, it was only a precursor to today's video revolution, which required digital capabilities.

An Amiga with today's hardware specs would be just like a Macintosh with today's hardware specs: it would be a PC. Guaranteed. Near the end, we were already moving toward using as many commodity parts are possible: PC power supplies, disc drives, etc. Future systems were going to use the PCI bus, and would most likely have been designed CPU-agnostic (look up the "PIOS One" for an example, if there's anything still online... that's the direction I was pushing things before C= failed).

There was a question, back in '93 or so, about the future of desktop CPUs. So we had proponents of the PowerPC, of the PA-RISC, of the Alpha. But by the time the whole Escom/Amiga Technologies adventure was over, things were changing. Shortly thereafter, Apple guaranteed the failure of the PowerPC on the desktop by cancelling Mac Cloning, and it was obviously clear to anyone who was paying proper attention that x86 was the only game in town for this class of computing.

And still the bozos at New Amiga or Hyperion Entertainment or whomever kept their sights on the PowerPC (I do not know specifically where the bozos were, but bozos there were, have no doubts). I know a few of these people, not all of them, but the collective functions as a group of wannabes without proper long term vision. I even tried to hit them in the head with a clue-by-four, even going back to the short tenure of this stuff at Gateway 2000, but there was no help.

The hardware didn't need saving... you need to reinvent computing hardware every five years or so, or it gets too complex to keep advancing. Had Commodore not failed, they would have eventually got out of the graphics chip business, just like Compaq and various other PC companies who once did their own graphics chips stopped. Graphics chips became GPUs, and any one systems company could no more make their own GPU than their own CPU. Everyone who tried either of these failed, in time, unless they built a very strong market well above the level of the personal computer. You could afford to spend $2000 on a CPU for a high-end server or whatever it if went a little faster than the next guy's... you couldn't do that for personal computers. Much less the reality that, without sufficient volume, you couldn't even keep up. The problem Apple so well illustrated with the PowerPC's rise and fall.

The software needed saving, or at least, it would have made things more interesting. There was real opportunity, if they had assembled a team of top notch OS people, like Be did... but that's not really what happened. So, after spending several times as long on AmigaOS 3.x -> 4.x as it took to get from nothing to 1.0 (or beyond), they now have what... a fairly small incremental improvement that runs on... pretty much nothing. We actually did a real engineering analysis of this upgrade in 1995-1996... moving from AmigaOS 3.x to a version, written for CPU-independence, targeted for the PowerPC, with a proper HAL, was about a two year project for the team Amiga Technologies had started assembling. Along the way, that included fixing many of the system's flaws.

When this didn't happen, and AT fell apart, we wound up doing much the same thing at Metabox AG, only this time building a modernized AmigaOS-like OS from scratch... AmigaOS enough that things like Voyager and MUI were easy ports. Took about two years.

The fact that nothing had come of this public Amiga silliness pretty much should drive home what a non-event this is. There's no much of value that can some from this, they're just too far behind.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[AmiMoJo]

It simply wouldn't scale.

AmigaOS is a single user OS, so is massively vulnerable to viruses. Windows/Mac/Linux/BSD/Be/etc are all multi-user for security reasons as much as anything else.

There is no proper memory protection, even in OS4. OS4 protects some memory, but a single app can still crash the entire system.

Even with the last version of the "classic" OS, 3.9, you need a lot more than 1MB RAM to really get much out of it. Even basic stuff like the retargetable graphics engine (basically the graphics driver system which you need unless you want to run in 320x255 in 256 colours) is bolted on and needs more RAM and resources to work.

Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice system and will always be special for me, but the simple truth is that it is fast because it lacks the kinds of modern features that make modern OSs relatively large and slow. Relative is the key word there, because you can boot Windows 7 in 10 seconds or Linux in 5 seconds with the right hardware/config, and you still get all the benefits.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[ivucica]

CPC for teh win.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[butlerm]

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.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

A true geek, you are not.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Darinbob]

The AmigaOS was relatively simple. Not as simple as DOS of course, but simpler than the Macintosh. The problem, was with having a shoestring budget, fickle investors, revised business plans, etc. Then the big competition problem of going up against an entrenched product. Amiga did "deliver". It was a very functional product from the first release.

A big snag was that it, as well as the Atari ST and Apple IIGS which came out at the same time, were bridge products between the old style home computers and professional business oriented computers. The market for a "home" computer just was not very large at all, and that never really took off like mad until the web browser. The business market for small computers was solidly DOS based, and issues of colors, video, and sound were not important to them. So these computers grabbed a lot of niche markets instead: programmer hobbyists, video enthusiasts and professionals, musicians, gamers, etc. Remember at the time that the Mac was also very much a niche market as well, and a much more expensive product.

Of course, I think another huge reason PCs won, is that they had all the clones. IBM didn't lock things down very well, so just about everyone could make a copy and sell something just slightly cheaper than the next guy. If you just needed to print memos and work on spreadsheets, you went with the cheapest no-name option. The "expectations" for the typical PC user were extremely tiny.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Darinbob]

Yes extra hardware, but if you look at an Amiga motherboard and compare it to the average 286 PC of the day, it was still simpler. The PC was never really designed, it grew through accretion as all the clone makers copied each other. Compare just about any PC clone motherboard to any non-PC to see the difference.

All that extra hardware in an Amiga is now standard in PCs. The CPU doesn't do all the audio, graphics, and video anymore, DMA is normal and expected and not an extra frill, etc.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Christ, I was an Amiga game developer from 1991-1993, and even back then, the writing had been on the wall.

A friggin' Sega Genesis (68000) could push pixels faster than an Amiga. Sure, it used all kinds of tricks -- but guess what? So did the Amiga!!! Or did you think that "bit planes" and HAM were long-lasting ideas?

And a PC had long surpassed the Amiga for resolution, speed, and # colors. You could get a 286 or 386 with standard 800x600x256 color graphics for $500 back then, and yes, it ran circles around the Amiga.

The Amiga was really great from '85 to '90 -- after that... not so much.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[uglyduckling]

In all honesty, a Mac with OS X is pretty much what I would have expected Amiga to have evolved into. The Amiga CLI was broadly based on BSD, it had lots of unnecessary pretty eye candy on the desktop, was popular with graphics, video and sound amateurs and professionals, and was considered fairly over-priced by many people (usually people who hadn't used one for an appreciable length of time). Every time I download a .dmg file, the massive icons to encourage me to drag the application to the Applications folder remind me of the huge custom icons on the Amiga Format cover disks. The white/plastic MacBook even reminds me of the Amiga 500 - wildly popular and iconic and still in production even when the better spec'ed machines should have taken over a long time ago. I just hope Apple don't drop the ball and go the way of Commodore by resting on their laurels too much.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Libertarian001]

Right. It's not Linux, so who the fuck cares? Right? You don't deserve a civilized a response. Get back in the shed.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[butlerm]

Yes. The original IBM PC monochrome cards had more circuitry than most other computers. And that was text mode only.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[adisakp]

The Amiga offered one helluva lot of bang for your bucks back in the day.

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.

(Ex-Amiga 500+ owner and developer.)

The thing that interests me about the Amiga OS was its efficiency -- the ability to do all those things and multitask so long ago. An Amiga 500 had a 7MHz 68000 (which took 4-8 cycles minimum per instruction) that had around 1.5 MIPS CPU processing capability and no FPU and came with 512K of RAM and no CPU Cache.

The current mid-spec PC is 2GHz superscalar pipelined CPU with FPU with about 3,000 MIPS capability and comes with 2 MB of cache (plus 2GB of RAM). The CPU cache alone for a PC is 2-4X greater than the ENTIRE System RAM for an Amiga.

Current low-to-mid-range PC's are at least 2,000 times more powerful on paper than an Amiga 500 in raw MIPS and probably 200,000+ times higher in FPU FLOPS (if timing fmadds) -- with SSE and/or double precision that number could go up to nearly a MILLION times faster for FP performance.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[butlerm]

Windows/Mac/Linux/BSD/Be/etc are all multi-user for security reasons as much as anything else.

For all practical purposes, the multi-user aspects of Windows were never used until relatively recently, and from a security point of view were virtually a dead letter until Vista was released. A Windows XP user logged in as an administrator has no more real security than an Amiga user did. Historically, Windows is a security free operating system, all the effort that went into the NT kernel notwithstanding. Real security just wasn't user friendly enough for Microsoft's purposes.

The main reason why Amiga users rarely if ever had virus problems was because it was largely in the pre-Internet era. I used an Amiga for a long time and never actually saw a machine with so much as a network card. Sneaker net was the rule. So unless you were pirating software from nefarious sources, virus infections were rare, about as rare as on the Mac, which didn't have any protection either, apparently not any at all until Mac OS X was released.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[HomelessInLaJolla]

I was an Amiga game developer from 1991-1993

You could get a 286 or 386 with standard 800x600x256 color graphics for $500 back then, and

yes, it ran circles around the Amiga

You are on crack. PCs with MS, OS2, Novell, or NeXT could not compete with RCA audio ports.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Vexar]

You're justifying buying the Mac when OS X came out, like the rest of us, aren't you? Even Eric Schwartz bought a Mac eventually. We're okay, then, right?

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[styrotech]

The main reason why Amiga users rarely if ever had virus problems was because it was largely in the pre-Internet era. I used an Amiga for a long time and never actually saw a machine with so much as a network card. Sneaker net was the rule. So unless you were pirating software from nefarious sources, virus infections were rare, about as rare as on the Mac, which didn't have any protection either, apparently not any at all until Mac OS X was released.

Amiga viruses were rare? I've never experienced a platform with more viruses than the Amiga had due to the way floppy disks got shared around between teenage gamers and the rarity of virus scanners. Most infected Amiga users probably didn't even realise it. On the whole the Amiga viruses weren't actually very destructive though - one of the common symptoms was not being able to format floppies anymore.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[ciderVisor]

...genuine video editing, multi-track virtual recording studio...

Yes, but the Amiga did this on an 8MHz 68K with 1MB of RAM.

An 8MHz 68K Amiga with 1MB of RAM could handle neither of these tasks - don't be ridiculous.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[idlehanz]

Not so loud! The Amiga1000 that I have in the garage can hear you and you hurt its feeling.

While good for multitasking in 1987 the emotion chip wasn't developed until Star Trek TNG so the Amiga1000 was limited to a single emotion; that of feeling superior to their pc-brethren.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[uglyduckling]

Relax, we're OK. Now go and buy Snow Leopard like a good boy.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[mdwh2]

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.

How is that relevant though? When we have Mac vs Windows battles, is it sufficient to say that?

I haven't used an Amiga in years, but it's not like they're talking about the A500 these days. AmigaOS 4 won't even run on such a machine (or anywhere near it - IIRC, it's PPC only).

Great in the day, but only interesting in a historical context. The same could be said of the Atari ST or Acorn Archimedes.

And many other platforms, e.g., the Mac. But it's all still news for nerds, historical or not, why not have an occasional story.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[mdwh2]

But there's too much missing in AmigaOS in modern terms.... you need subsystems critical to any modern OS (full networking stacks, 3D, video pipeline, device independent graphics, etc).

To be fair, I believe it has networking, 3D, and device independent graphics, and has done in years.

I do agree though, that:

An Amiga with today's hardware specs would be just like a Macintosh with today's hardware specs: it would be a PC.

I do sometimes it would be nice for a company to use the Amiga brandname to bring out new PCs with new standard hardware, in the spirit of the Amiga (e.g., small low end but with decent graphics). A few whiners on Slashdot would scream "It's not an Amiga", but there's no shame in switching to new hardware. It worked for the Mac - you never hear people say "It's not a Mac", on the contrary, these days people accept x86 PC hardware running a completely different OS to MacOS as being a "Mac".

This, NewAmiga, Inc. went forward with something they called "Amiga" for cellphones that had nothing whatsoever to do with AmigaOS.

I don't think that's a problem in itself (as I say, OS X is nothing whatsoever to do with MacOS), rather it was the confusion that they were proposing these plans, whilst also developing the classic Amiga line, when they obviously wouldn't be compatible.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[AmiMoJo]

The NT line has always been multi-user, although not as strong as Unix. The technology was all there though.

They faced exactly the same problem as the Amiga does now. Windows 3.11/95/98/ME were all single user and if they suddenly made everyone a basic user with no admin rights it would break 95% of software. That's no exaggeration, back then it was completely normal for an installer to set up loads of registry entries, add startup programs and for the program itself to write to any part of the filesystem it felt like including the Windows directory and Program Files.

That is what lead to the massive virtualisation of the registry and the filesystem in Vista. It's all just a huge hack to maintain backwards compatibility. UAC was put in not so much to help the user but to force developers to stop doing things they shouldn't be doing. I'd say it worked quite well considering how bad the situation was, as newer versions of most software does not at least try to minimise the number of UAC warnings that appear by being a bit less evil.

You are absolutely right at the Amiga and viruses though. If someone ever finds a buffer overflow in AWeb they can 0wn your Amiga completely.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't video editing on an Amiga without serious add-on hardware. Most folks using Amigas for video were doing analog video, too... digital was barely there at the end. You could use a Genlock for titling, other devices to overlay effects on video, etc. but it was still tape to tape. That wasn't for the feint of heart, and while it was revolutionary for a small number of video professionals, it was only a precursor to today's video revolution, which required digital capabilities.

I think your greatly understating the influence it had, power and usefullness for many years for both amateur and professionals. Myself, I had a 35$ genlock and a 1meg A500 in which I blew away my entire grade school class and teacher with when we had to make a "home movie", using my meak A500 and no expensive hardware able to do simple animated video titles, animated intro and credits, overlays and cut together multiple tapes from different camera angles, that draw dropped everyone who ever saw it. Sure simple, but I bet would still impress many to this day for what it was done on. For the professionals using more elaborate things like the video toasters, opened up a whole new world to people like Disney, able to make films like roger rabbit for the first time, and others to do video rendering and editing only possible with systems costing 10x more. The toaster systems where used to produce many modern films and television series.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[mattack2]

I don't think that's a problem in itself (as I say, OS X is nothing whatsoever to do with MacOS),

But Classic was there for many years (on PowerPC Macs of course), and Rosetta is still there to run native OS X PowerPC apps.

Plus, the Carbon APIs are a direct extension of the pre-OS X APIs. (I do mean extension and not just porting layer, since new advancement was done.)

So IMHO, a "generic PC in a box called an Amiga" should have *some* backward compatibility, even if just via a (legal) emulator, at least to play old games.. and I honestly don't know if such an emulator has already come out.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[MichaelSmith]

BeOs was a single user OS.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[MichaelSmith]

Software is built to be fast enough. Developers create layers of crud and only pull back when they hit performance problems. Right here I have a java application with gigabytes of binary class files and models. I don't know how they managed it. I wish I could sack the bastards who wrote it.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

> IBM didn't lock things down very well, so just about everyone could make a copy and sell something just slightly cheaper than the next guy.

IBM locked things down just fine...but they didn't believe anyone would be willing or able to reverse-engineer their BIOS.

And if you think that's as simple as "making a copy," ask Columbia Data Products or Phoenix about that!

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Agar]

Dave, programming the Amiga was a formative experience for me. The elegance of the underlying OS, the hardware cleverness, the graphics primitives, and so on just entranced me. Like many said, it was just a fun computer to work with.

Even now, I still remember the names of a few of the Amiga group, just from reading the developer docs so many times: Jay Miner (of course), RJ Mical, Carl Sassenthrass, Dave Haynie... (probably butchered the spelling of half the names, but I'm too lazy to look them up).

So first, thanks for that...

Second, do you recommend a book (or web site) that best tells the stories from those days and ideally continues through the ups and downs of Amiga Technology? I've always wanted to hear the first person tales from the darkness of Commodore management to the passion of building something new -- you know, a bit more insider-y than "where did the guru meditation come from?"

Any thoughts?

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[greywire]

as an old Amiga fanatic forced to be a PC guy for years and just recently got his first ever Mac, to some extent, I agree.

But I wont be happy until they port Directory Opus to the Mac, probably the thing I miss the most (from Windows, and Amiga before). Wouldn't mind seeing Deluxe Paint either... I've never been able to get used to any other paint program since.

PS it was great reading words from Dave Haynie again, you are one of my heroes.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hitmark]

and custom chips for video, audio and maybe even some other stuff...

kinda like how we now have GPU, audio chips, and other chips that leave the cpu doing program logic only, rather then program, video and audio logic...

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

The AmigaOS was simple OK but we're in 2009 and your parent wrote: If you wanted to sum up Apple's recent successes, it would be "they delivered."

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[jesup]

Not all that much of the OS was assembler - the biggest piece was FFS (which subsumed OFS), and honestly probably shouldn't have been in ASM - but space was *tight*. Sure, quite a few of the drivers were in assembler, and performance-critical parts of Exec were in ASM, but that was almost required at the time for low-level HW interfacing. Much of the OS was in C. (I was responsible for removing the majority of the BCPL code (look it up on Wikipedia) used in AmigaDOS for OS 2.0.)

It was all fairly carefully designed, and a lot of work went into making it bulletproof and snappy. While there are huge benefits to memory protection nowadays, most Amiga programs and certainly the OS were quite resilient to pressures, such as allocation failures, which would crush almost all apps today. Error paths were much more likely to get tested, and the path wasn't the library calling exit(1) for you when an allocation failed.

That said: it's 15 years behind the times now. No major improvements have been made (some, yes, but nothing major). Dave is basically right - and we were in the last year trying to break with the old hardware design, though there was one last big step left in it that actually got to the early prototype stage (AAA). We hadn't planned out where software would go, but if you look at what Apple did you probably get a hint of what we might have done. It would have been tough, though, since we didn't have the resources to throw at emulation at the time that Apple did. In the last year, the SW group (which I ended up running a good part of) was down to a handful of people ( 10 I think). I think the "OS" group was down to maybe 3 or so. The writing was mostly on the wall by around a year before *poof*, and much of the team left in '92-93 to places like Scala (where many still are, and where I went after bankruptcy), 3DO (which had a strong ex-Amiga and ex-Commodore influence from the start), etc.

I wish it had been open-sourced back in '95 or so. It may not have survived intact, but it might have formed the core for a strong competitor to Linux/etc and at least pushed them to improve their responsiveness much earlier on.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Meski]

You laugh about clock radios and 2009, but this is Hyperion, a planet with time tombs that move backwards through time.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[metaforest]

One key reason the Amiga appeared to be so responsive is that it had DMA, and a rudimentary graphics accelerator, slinging pixels around on a 512x384x8 bit display at a time when PCs and Macs were slinging pixels around on a 800x600x32 and 1024x768X32 bit displays in SOFTWARE... The Audio was also hardware accelerated at a time when Apple and low-end PC systems were still bit banging a tiny hardware buffer for 8-bit audio, the Amiga was streaming 16 bit stereo via DMA. Heck the Apple //gs had better built-in audio than the Mac for years!

Another key feature of the Amiga was that the graphics accelerator could be used to perform tasks that had nothing to do with graphics. OpenCL it wasn't but, the Copper and Blitter could easily be pushed into service for lots of different tasks that would easily bring a 68K to it's knees.

The custom hardware surrounding that 68K-L8 was WAY ahead of its time.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[yuhong]

Yep, Apple pointed that out back when the original Mac launched in January 1984.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[NormalVisual]

It's also still relevant because there are still a lot of production systems that still use Z80s. One example - Walt Disney World's monorails. The vehicle on-board controller on each train consists of a pair of Z80s with some other glue circuitry. The local monitoring/control unit (i.e. driver's consoles and related gear) is a Windows 2000-based PC with a touch-screen interface, but what makes the train actually go is still a pair of ancient 8-bit chips.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[NormalVisual]

Amiga viruses were rare? I've never experienced a platform with more viruses than the Amiga had

Really. Show me an Amiga user that didn't see the magic text, "Something wonderful has happened...Your AMIGA is alive !!!" at some point. I know I did.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[NormalVisual]

Not only did it have DMA, but cleverly the memory ran at 2x the speed of the CPU, with alternate cycles being given to the CPU and custom hardware. Often, the Amiga could be doing some fairly intense stuff without impacting the CPU *at all*, and when the Copper/Blitter did end up stealing cycles from the 68K, it was a fairly good bet they could do it more efficiently than the CPU. You could be updating the display (complete with sprite collision detection), playing four channels of sound (although audio via Paula was 8-bit, not 16), and formatting a floppy disk while the CPU sat totally idle.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[metaforest]

I'm sure with memory running at twice the bus clock... the external chipset had a lot of freedom.. The 68K seldom generated back to back bus cycles. I imagine that even if the chipset was stealing cycles the 68K hardly noticed.

I may not know much about the nitty gritty of the Amiga's custom chips, but the clunky old 68K CISC is a familiar friend.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[Anonymous Coward]

One key reason the Amiga appeared to be so responsive is that it had DMA, and a rudimentary graphics accelerator, slinging pixels around on a 512x384x8 bit display at a time

You mean x4 or x5, x8 wasn't available until the AGA chipset came about at which time PCs had completely outpaced the Amiga.

the Amiga was streaming 16 bit stereo via DMA

The Amiga's sound hardware never advanced beyond four channels of 8-bit samples played at below 30 kHz. Expansion cards were available for the expandable models, but that's no different from any PC.

the Copper and Blitter could easily be pushed into service for lots of different tasks that would easily bring a 68K to it's knees

On later models, games used to paint polygons using the CPU because it was faster than using the blitter. The chipset was advanced when the Amiga was released, but it soon became a millstone around the machine's neck. Eg. using bitplanes was a clever way of getting more colours out of slow memory, but hopeless for high resolutions and bitdepths.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[blackest_k]

You did tremendous things with the Amiga (wasn't the 3000 largely your design?) and you should still be proud of your part in the Amiga, although it must hurt the under appreciated engineering and mis selling or not selling that went on with commodore escom and the rest.

I guess amiga's are a bit like vintage cars and steam trains , no real use these days but they have their enthusiasts. It was something special to us and it didn't matter which version. The costs were wrong one of commodores biggest failings an inability to generate sales after selling you a system. People loved the amiga but apart from convincing friends to buy, users struggled to bring in any money for commodore.

The amiga made the most of its hardware and its hardware is well understood, perhaps Linux or BSD might benefit from a reference platform or 3 of well understood and well documented hardware. The Linux ability to run on almost anything is a weakness as well as a strength there is nothing to sell , nothing to hold up and say this is a Linux box.

Linux is probably the successor to Amiga OS as its the users and developers that set the environment. Amiga and Linux are both about having fun. Windows is work.

Sorry to sound like a rabid fan but the amiga was like that. Being an ex amiga user is like being an exsmoker still want to smoke from time to time.

Amigas were special and brought out an unmatched enthusiasm, the atari st users were never so devoted.
I guess announcements like this just rub salt into an old wound, It was a painful breakup we didn't want to move on but we had too. PC's are such soulless boxes nobody misses a PC when it dies.

For those of you who have no connection with the Amiga beyond playing a few games (of which there were thousands) Dave Haynie was perhaps the top engineer at commodore after jay miner designing the aga chipset which powered the a1200 cd32 and a4000 and designing the a3000 and the zorro III bus.

Real people made Amiga's , faceless corporations make PC's

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_haynie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[NormalVisual]

I *loved* working with the 68K - the register layout in particular just made things so damned easy, especially when compared to the x86.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[sg_oneill]

I believe the 'glue circutry' you refer to is called a flux capacitor. It uses an awful lot of power, and for that , the options are either a small thermonuclear reactor, or the smaller and more politically correct Z80 processor.

JMP #FFFF

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

Yeah, I was one of the chief guys on the Amiga 3000.. also Greg Berlin and Hedley Davis, and a couple of others on individual chips (Scott Hood did the flickerFixer clone, Jeff Boyer did the original DMA controller.. Greg redesigned it later). And yeah, I'm very proud of the work we did there. It's shame, though, how things ended... there was vastly cooler stuff in the works.

The OS is certainly still usable for hobby purposes, though if that's your main concern, the emulators on any old PC provide an experience dramatically faster than anything we dreamed of in the days of 25MHz 68030s and 68040s. I don't have a problem with folks doing this stuff for fun... in fact, I try to make it out to Commodore shows (yeah, they still have these) when possible.

I just question the expectations anyone ought to have for any kind of commercial future for AmigaOS. And the really sad thing is, had this been open sourced after Amiga Technologies failed or Gateway were through not using it, the situation would have been much, much better today for Amiga fans.

FYI.. I didn't design the "AGA" chips (what we originally called Pandora, and later, AA), just the first computer that used it (Amiga 3000+)... I'm not a chip designer, though I did a couple of gate arrays (the "Buster" chips that drive the Zorro II bus in the A2000 and Zorro III in the A3000, for example). AA was designed by Bob Raible and Victor Andrade. George Robbins did quite a bit of work on the register architecture, and I worked out the signaling for some of the chips together with Bob, to ensure I could actually do something with the chips in an Amiga 3000-based architecture.

I did the Zorro III stuff pretty much on my own... had to keep pace with one of those huge PC industry committees (EISA bus). In retrospect, there some bad decisions in there, but some of that was driven by the idea I wanted this to last another 5-10 years. Had I known the A3000/A4000 was the last one, I might have made things a little simpler. As it turns out, we would have gone to PCI in the next major generation, anyway... they did autoconfig pretty much the same way we did. The main reason for making up way to do things on the Amiga was simple: no one else had done it right yet. When there were working solutions already, we had no problems using them... it's not like we were Apple.

Linux can certainly be fun, though I have done real work using it, too. Unfortunately, some of that's REAL WORK... asynchronous I/O, for example... trivial in AmigaOS, a big pain in the bollocks under Linux. What were they thinking? Ok, it's not quite fair to pick on 70s technology, is it :-)

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

The Amiga CLI has nothing to do with BSD... it was adapted from TRIPOS. Sure, we ran some of the same GNU ported shell tools as everyone else, but there was no UNIX in AmigaOS... and that was a good thing in most ways. Believe me, I had been using UNIX since System III in '81 (a summer job at Bell Labs), there was an intention to not copy UNIX. Not a slight against modern UNIX, but it was impossible to do anything remotely multimedia-friendly in an 80s vintage UNIX system. That's why most of the workstations used DSPs if they wanted audio... they could offload the whole audio job to an RTOS on the DSP. The OS couldn't keep up. That was fixed, to an extent, in modern Linux, but back then, no way.

I tried really hard to be a Macintosh fan, but after Apple did their best to kill my Mac Clone making company (PIOS Computer, first shipping 300MHz Mac Clone in the world), I decided I did not have any use for proprietary systems like this, where one guy could just arbitrarily cause hundreds of millions in lost cash, on purpose (Jobs ending the MacOS licensing thing). It's hard enough not doing that to yourself accidentally when you're in the startup game.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

Well, it's relevant in the same way that 65xx chips have been long relevant.. they're hidden in everything.

At Nomadio, my current company, I helped launch a fairly revolutionary product into the radio controlled hobby market. This was a digital radio, first of its kind, which ultimately became the fastest R/C radio on the market (latency-wise), as well as the only one upgradeable over USB.

One other feature.. it was 2-way. The "receiver" could accept a number of sensors, to monitor temperature, voltage, or motor speed. The motor speed device uses a hall effect sensor, a tiny CPU, and a magnet to measure speed, pretty much anywhere you could hack it in (like the early computer days, most serious RCers are pretty skilled at tweaking their stuff). I originally used a Cypress PSOC, a tiny 8-bit microcontroller with flexible digital and analog function blocks. Unfortunately, that year, Apple was using these to read that silly ring control on the iPod, so all of a sudden, I couldn't get those. I put a junior engineer on the job of finding a replacement... turned out to be a Z80 variation... in the 21rst century. It worked great.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

Hi Randell!! See you Saturday!

Yeah... part of the end-game at Commodore, for those of us who did stick it out in '93 and into '94.. to the bitter end, was still kind of hanging onto the idea that there was a technical solution to the problem of corporate stupidity. There never, ever is. That's why I only made the one film [frogpondmedia.com] about why a company failed. Much of it shot at Randell's old house, in fact (see the extended trailer here [youtube.com]).
--
-Dave Haynie

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

Well, much the same observation was true comparing a Commodore 64 motherboard to an Apple ][. The Amiga was made, by necessity, very much in the usual Commodore fashion.. full of custom chips and gate arrays. The original IBM PC was a few Intel interface chips and some hundred TTL parts... it was massive. No integration, no time for integratiion, they tossed it together in something under a year.

Now, that's one reason they cost so much, one reason the motherboard was so huge. But also, a big reason the IBM PC was cloned. Even neglecting software issues, you couldn't easily clone a C64 or an Amiga (yeah, sure, today you can, but it takes a reverse-engineering of the custom chips and a nice FPGA or two). But all the forces lined up behind the PC. It didn't even matter if it was any good, really... the was this pent-up demand. Many people wanted to be in the personal computer business, few were capable of launching something like an Apple or a Commodore or Atari -- there were plenty of attempts, plenty of failures.

With the PC, you had a perfect storm: easy to clone hardware, reasonably easy to clone BIOS, and the OS and all chips you could buy, off-the-shelf essentially, from companies who were not IBM and were really happy to have you as a customer, too. It didn't really matter that early PCs... sucked. Eventually, they fixed big chunks of the architecture, and most of those bad ideas are relegated to a tiny chunk of silicon in the corner of a big system chip, anyway.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

I'm not sure how the old stuff would have been emulated... but sure, that could all be emulated. Amiga emulators abound, and they're pretty good. I usually recommend Amiga Forever, which includes emulator, many ROM images, and other goodies in the same package. Run this on a modern PC and it's the fastest Amiga ever, by far. There's a low cost downloadable version, and several options on DVD.

68K emulation built-in on an AmigaOS of 1995 or so would probably have been done more like the 68K emulation in MacOS, so you could mix and match PPC and 68K binaries, libraries, etc. That would have been an effective way to get to full PPC code without the need to have it all ported before testing could begin. If you did it today, it might make sense to run a full "boxed" emulation like Amiga Forever. Either way, this proves the concept of Amiga emulation.

There have also been projects aimed at re-implementing Amiga hardware, such as Minimig (designed by Dennis van Weeren), which basically gives you an A500 in a Xylinx Spartan chip. He's even duplicated the resistor-ladder DACs of the A500's "VIDIOT" hybrid device :-)

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

I used them nearly every day for over 10 years, and never got a virus.

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[hazydave]

Depends on how many cycles you actually steal.. going full out, in deeper color modes, the 68K could grind to a halt for many, many cycles in a row.

The double-cycling of the memory was pretty much old-hat...they did the same thing on the Commodore 64, albeit at 1MHz (eg, RAM cycles at 2MHz, alternating between VIC and CPU access).

There were other memory tricks, too. In the A3000, we did some clever hacks that enabled the CPU to hit chip memory as 32-bit-wide memory, though the chipset was still 16-bit. In the A4000 (and any other AA machine), memory was mapped 32-bit and cycled in burst mode, so you really got 64-bits per chip access.

The big problem here was Commodore management.. they spent dramatically less on engineering and dramatically more on executive salaries than the typical computer company of the day. We had learned how to run lean and mean, but there are limits. You can get the best engineers (anyone who didn't measure up usually left of their own accord after a few months), never let them sleep, etc... that's useful. You can design a good hardware and software system, to optimize their efforts. But, in a system dependent on custom chips, you can't improve it if the powers-that-be won't fund new chips. In those days, there was no good reason for Commodore to have fallen behind in graphics chips... the bad reason was, they just didn't spend money wisely.

Even with proper funding, it wouldn't have lastest, though there were two generations of new chips (AAA and Hombre) in the works at the end. We actualyl had AAA, the "Advanced Amiga Architecture" in first prototype. This one did planar and chunky pixels, and some weird "hybrid" pixel types useful for hardware assisted video compression (nothing as sophisticated as MPEG, but similar to some of the other schemes being used in the late 80s and early 90s). Still had a blitter, much improved, and 32-bit or 64-bit memory access, with VRAM support.

Then came Hombre, which its own processor with 3D operations, and cool modes like four playfields of 16-bit chunky pixels. This was being designed in CAD, it wasn't built before the final days of Commodore.

But beyond that, I'm sure Commodore would have found, just like everyone else, that you need to be a real chip company to develop graphics chips... you need more customers than any single computer company will have. Same idea as being a CPU company. And curiously, today, two out of three of the GPU companies out there are also the leading x86 companies (nVidia makes some ARM processors, but no x86 yet).

Re:Wow, my clock must be broken

[adisakp]

Not only did it have DMA, but cleverly the memory ran at 2x the speed of the CPU, with alternate cycles being given to the CPU and custom hardware.

This is only half true. The DMA did have priority access to memory on alternate cycles. However, the memory did not run 2X faster than the CPU.

The first 1MB of memory (CHIP MEM) was considerably slower (up to 50%) to access than higher addressed memory (FAST MEM) if you had a memory expansion due to the fact that CHIP MEM shared cycles with DMA and DMA took priority over the CPU.

let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I'll be flamed, but in all honesty, is the Amiga platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989, but 20 years later, is it really something all that different?

Re:let the flames begin

[Lord Lode]

And they will even make future versions of the OS! I wonder who those are for.

Re:let the flames begin

[BuR4N]

is the Amiga platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989

Thats 20 years after Unix was released, right ?

Re:let the flames begin

[MrMr]

Ok, you convinced me. Now where can I get a version to run on a piece of hardware that is within two orders of magnitude from any practical relevance.

Re:let the flames begin

[Richard_at_work]

is the Amiga platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989

Thats 20 years after Unix was released, right ?

Yeah, because UNIX was the last and latest OS to be revolutionary, its impossible that something else, after UNIX, might have been revolutionary.

Now, the question remains whether the Amiga was revolutionary, but my point stands - UNIX is not the be-all end-all.

Re:let the flames begin

[rossdee]

The amiga was still a good system in 1994, but unfortunately C= went bust. I owned amiga computers from 1986 til 2002 and the only reason I sold the last of them was I emigrated and couldn't bring all my stuff with me.

Re:let the flames begin

[runyonave]

You've obviously never used an Amiga.

Re:let the flames begin

[theeddie55]

Wow, did you miss the point, that being that UNIX, even at 40 years old is still relevant, so why can't a 20 year old platform like amiga still be relevant?

Re:let the flames begin

[Richard_at_work]

I used an Amiga extensively between 1992 and 1999, before switching to firstly Linux, then FreeBSD and ultimately ended up on Windows 7 and OSX 10.6.

The Amiga can be considered technically revolutionary in its day, but that day is passed imho - significant investment would be needed to rejuvinate the platform today.

Re:let the flames begin

[Gleng]

AmigaKit.com (and a few other resellers I forget the name of) sells OS 4.1 + ACube Systems' 733MHz SAM440ep.

Yeah, it's not fast, and it's very expensive, but considering that the platform has been through lawsuit/scammer/hoaxer hell for the last 15 years, it's pretty amazing that anything exists at all.

There's a lot of love for the Amiga out there.

Re:let the flames begin

[mdwh2]

"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?

Re:let the flames begin

[mdwh2]

So it turns out you're an Apple user - I do find it funny when we get these arguments between users of niche platforms.

The Amiga can be considered technically revolutionary in its day, but that day is passed imho - significant investment would be needed to rejuvinate the platform today.

Same could be said of the Mac. Oh wait - to be fair, they already did that. MacOS and the hardware was ditched.

It wouldn't require significant investment - they could just go the Apple route, and release some PCs with an Amiga logo on them...

Re:let the flames begin

[Richard_at_work]

What, how did we get onto Apple bashing here? Seriously...

Have you seen the state of AmigaOS these days? Its pretty pathetic, plus Amiga lost that 'cool' factor a decade ago - it has no base to build upon unlike Apple (the new style iMacs were released well before OSX, Apple basically rebuilt their styling with an existing customer base). Plus theres the application base and getting big names back onto the platform.

And no, this isn't a case of 'if you build it they will come'.

You also seemed to miss out on the fact that I'm also a Windows user...

Re:let the flames begin

[Richard_at_work]

No, I didn't miss the point at all, but you seemed to have misunderstood both my post and the post I was replying to. There is no reason why something other than UNIX could be revolutionary, regardless of whether UNIX came first.

Re:let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an old Amiga user/programmer but you have a good point. For one, all the bankruptcies and bad hardware/software has run enough people off from it to even be able to make a real profit or become relevant again.

The best thing that could come of this would be to open source the operating system and let the hackers convert some of that goodness over to something usable with Linux or BSD.

Re:let the flames begin

[mikael_j]

...note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows,...

Of course, the pro-Windows arguments tend to be even sillier (including such classics as complaining about shortcomings that OS X or the hardware it runs on got rid of ages ago, I've encountered people IRL as recently as a few months ago who were utterly unconvinced that Macs supported mice with more than one mouse button, and that they actually ship with mice with more than one button (technically "no" buttons but that's just semantics) was unpossible).

/Mikael

Re:let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the world of zealotry -- a land where facts don't belong.

Re:let the flames begin

[MBGMorden]

I've looked at that and similar systems for a while now, but honestly, I just can't justify that sort of price premium. In all reality if they had wanted to spur adoption, then they should have built it for plain-jane x86 hardware. No need to support everything under the sun - hell just approve a specific combination of hardware as a reference platform and go from there (for non-gaming applications there are several motherboards where the whole of everything a user would need is right there on the board, making testing easy).

I mean, honestly, $550+ for a motherboard/cpu that would have been fast-ish about 8 years ago (and is only good for an Amiga), versus ~$125 for an x86 motherboard/cpu that's several times faster and can be used for any other OS if I decide that AmigaOS isn't for me?

That's a pretty easy decision, and the results don't favor the Amiga.

Truthfully, if I wanted to play with a vaguely Amiga-inspired OS I'd try Syllable before going for the official AmigaOS these days.

Re:let the flames begin

[mdwh2]

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!"

Re:let the flames begin

[countach]

Wouldn't the appeal be to play the old games and software that runs on the original architecture?

Re:let the flames begin

[Gleng]

I agree with you. It's far too expensive, and I doubt you'll find too many Amiga users who would disagree. It's a way of keeping the platform alive while the problems with Amiga Inc. were sorted out though.

The decision to go PPC was made way, way back when there was a lot of money around, and m68k -> PPC made the most sense with regard to endianness.

Since then, with the contract with Amiga Inc, and all the legal difficulties, Amiga OS has been effectively nailed to PPC.

I remember reading that the developers would love to port it to x86 if they had the resourses, but for the moment it's PPC only.

For a couple of cheaper Amigalike options, the Amiga OS compatible MorphOS has just been released for the G4 Mac minis, and the open source AROS (in the form of Icaros Desktop) is available for x86 hardware.

Re:let the flames begin

[iroll]

DERP

In one corner we've got a global powerhouse of a company that commands 10% US market share (shipments) of personal computers, with even better numbers if you look at laptops only, and a huge share of the smartphone market. That's about 6 million computers per year. Oh, and their OS has no problems dealing with Windows-centric networks and filesystems, and is POSIX-Certified. On top of that, major software houses produce software for the Mac OS, in addition to Apple's in-house software which (in some cases, like Shake) is recognized as some of the best in the industry.

In the other, we've got the defunct today, not-quite-dead tomorrow zombie remains of a corporation that was cool but probably didn't ship that many computers in its HISTORY. Oh, and their OS really *is* a niche OS--it's has no developers, no compatibility, and nothing special to recommend it over anything else.

derp derp derp yeah, questioning the relevance of Amiga is "just" like questioning the relevance of Apple. If you want to try that line of reasoning, you should pick a better target for your angst: drop some trash-talk on FreeDOS, or Minix. I was going to throw in VMS, but then I realized that I actually use VMS all the time and people are paid to use VMS. Amiga, not so much.

Re:let the flames begin

[tverbeek]

So it turns out you're an Apple user - I do find it funny when we get these arguments between users of niche platforms.

Um, one of those "niches" is approaching double-digit market share in the US. By comparison, the Amiga is a "microniche". Which doesn't mean that the Amiga isn't worth talking about, of course. There was a time when Windows was a niche product, after all (I was there, I remember), and will be again some day.

Re:let the flames begin

[drinkypoo]

You can do that with an Amiga 500 or 1200. There are dozens, hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of these sitting unused in attics and garages around the world. Post a want to buy and you can get one for less than $125, probably from someone in your town.

Re:let the flames begin

[Troy]

The difference is that what made the Amiga so revolutionary was it's ability to get mid-90s quality media and performance from mid-80s hardware. While the OS doubtlessly played a role in this, the question of the relevancy of AmigaOS in 2009 goes back to that same issue: does Amiga have the potential to out-perform contemporary hardware to the same degree that it did back in 1985?

Given the people at the helm today and the rate of development of modern PC hardware, I would be kind of surprised if they could. It's a shame, because I upgraded from a Commodore 64 to an Amiga 500 back in 1987, and used it faithfully for several years until I went to college.

Amiga had its chance to make its mark in the mid-80s, and Commodore unfortunately squandered that opportunity.

Re:let the flames begin

[KnownIssues]

As much as I love (or at least loved) the Amiga, to be fair, there is a difference between 20 years of near stagnation (notice I don't say complete stagnation) with Amiga development, and 20 years of continuous development for Windows, Mac, and Linux. And while the goal with Amiga seems to be to keep it as much like the original product as possible, Windows, Mac, and (as far as I know) Linux have each had almost complete transformation since their original releases.

This argument has nothing to do with the quality, impressiveness, or relevance of what the Amiga was, but of what it is now. Legal dispute has kept the product from evolving with the market as the other operating systems have done. That's not a slam against the Amiga. Its simply the reality of where the product is.

I sincerely hope that this latest development can change all that and that the Amiga's inherent quality will let rise from the ashes, like something that, er, rises from ashes.

Re:let the flames begin

[itsdapead]

"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..."

...they have been through 20 years of intensive development in order to stay competitive in the market. The hardware platform has changed fundamentally - twice - and the original Mac OS has been torn up and replaced. Enough software developers have been kept sweet to ensure a substantial set of quality applications for the platform. Because Mac has a non-negligible market share, there is reasonable support from peripheral manufacturers.

Basically, Mac has been a going, evolving, concern with a significant user base for 20 years, while AmigaOS has been in the doldrums, kept dimly flickering by a few die-hard fans.

However, as a media-optimzed OS, I'm a re-vamped AmigaOS might be able to make serious inroads into BeOS's market share. :-)

Re:let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

And significant investment and improvement has already been done and is continuing to be done. OS 4.1 is way ahead of previous versions and large parts of it has been rewritten from scratch to make it work better on more modern hardware.
WIth OS4.1 we already have a modern browser, composition hardware acceleration and so on.
OS4.2 will also get support for SMP cpus. It is still not for the average person, but is improving with every new release.

Re:let the flames begin

[ArmyOfAardvarks]

While I'm not a huge fan of Macs, they DO have an actual user base. But Amiga? I'll admit, obscure systems can be kind of cool, but in all honesty, they're not relevant enough to warrant these kind of debates. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the OS. It just means that no one really cares.

Re:let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

The new boards aren't original hardware anyway: they're PPC machines with no custom Amiga chips in them. "Old" software is just run on top of UAE. There's no reason that can't be done on x86: in fact, AROS are working on doing exactly that.

Re:let the flames begin

[Skuld-Chan]

I've looked at that and similar systems for a while now, but honestly, I just can't justify that sort of price premium. In all reality if they had wanted to spur adoption, then they should have built it for plain-jane x86 hardware. No need to support everything under the sun - hell just approve a specific combination of hardware as a reference platform and go from there (for non-gaming applications there are several motherboards where the whole of everything a user would need is right there on the board, making testing easy).

Some of this is a bit of legacy. Back when Commodore went bankrupt there was a lot of talk about moving to PowerPC since Motorola basically EOL'd the 68k series of cpu's and the Mac used PPC chips it seemed a logical path to take. ESCOM even talked about moving to PPC before they went bankrupt, and Phase 5 came out with the Cyberstorm CPU card for the 3000/4000 - which essentially was a 68060 and a 604 PPC cpu on a single board - these machines effectively became a development platform for the next version of Amiga DOS.

So there is a decent amount of PPC development already done for the Amiga - even though now most of it is obsolete (arguably). The PPC platform has never been a really mature environment - every PREP machine I've ever had (even the Pegasos II) had buggy firmware that took hours to get working just to boot the base OS. Every step of the way you felt like the machine you had in front of you just barely made it out of the prototype stage.

So yeah I'd welcome a x86 version. Amiga DOS still has a lot of potential for being user friendly, but extremely powerful and flexible at the same time - which there really isn't an OS out there that covers this fully. Even if it means re-writing a lot of software already written to take advantage of PPC cpu's.

Re:let the flames begin

[IntlHarvester]

"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?"

If someone came out with a modern Mac Quadra that ran all your old System 7 programs, then yes, it would be safe to say it's irrelevant.

The impression I got is that the modern Amiga is a hobbyist machine for nostalgic users, they're not really attempting to be "relevant" in the modern PC market.

Re:let the flames begin

[CarpetShark]

is the Amiga platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989, but 20 years later, is it really something all that different?

Certainly not. I clicked a menu on my PC back in '94, and it responded this last Saturday. Now that PCs have finally caught up, I can forget the amiga and move on.

Re:let the flames begin

[Hal_Porter]

There was a time when Windows was a niche product, after all (I was there, I remember), and will be again some day.

Ze Windows Reich vill last for ein thousand years!!!1

Re:let the flames begin

[Skuld-Chan]

When was Windows a niche? The first year of Windows 3.0 sales they sold over 3 million copies of the OS which dwarfed all Mac hardware sales to that date (keep in mind the launch date for Win 3 was 1990 - so outselling 6 years of Mac sales in its first year is nothing to scoff at). I got that number from Cringely's Accidental Empires (decent book).

I can't find the sales figures for Windows 1.0 or 2.0, but they did go from 140 million in revenue in 1985 (Windows 1 launch date) to over a billion in 1990 (Windows 3 launch date). If it was a niche it was for a very very short period.

Anyhow as someone who had a bunch of Amiga's (I still have 2 - an A4000 and an A1200 - as well as a Pegasos II) - it was always a niche because the only killer app it had was Video Toaster. The killer app for the Mac originally was Pagemaker, and then Photoshop.

I have a Mac, and to be honest it doesn't have a single app I use that makes me want to buy the machine over anything else. Its still running 10.4.x, but the UI experience is really honestly nothing to write home about. It never remembers any of my window positions in Finder, and there are situations where its easy to lose dialogue boxes (for example - if a save dialogue pops up in Firefox it will let you click on the Firefox window moving the save window back (this is something MS-Windows will not let you do) - and its really hard to get that save window to the front again...). Even when I worked in the print industry at one point a stronghold for the Mac - however no-one used Mac's there anymore because they were too expensive, and Quark/Adobe stuff ran on Windows just fine and would read all the Mac files just fine. Most all of EFI's stuff runs on Windows these days - Mac's just interface with it.

Apple has essentially positioned OSX for people who like the software/hardware or people who think its hip to use a Mac. While I agree its gaining marketshare and that is a good thing, I wonder to what end. Its an interesting position really - I don't think any other computer company has been able to sustain a market based on user experience or hipness alone so it will be interesting to see how it all pans out.

Re:let the flames begin

[wastedlife]

Please reread the post you replied to and the post they were replying to. The very first post of this thread was asking how a 20-year old OS could be relevant. Then someone quipped that UNIX is 20 years older. Meaning that UNIX is much older but still relevant, so yes a 20-year old OS can be relevant. You then made your sarcastic rant about how nothing since UNIX could be "revolutionary", which is a far different thing from "relevant" and has nothing to do with what was said. For example, XP is far from revolutionary, but discussions about it are relevant because so many out there still use it on a regular basis.

Your contributions to this discussion have been neither relevant nor revolutionary. Perhaps I am feeding a troll here, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Re:let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

I do believe you are missing the point. The point is not that is is 20 years old and therefore can not be relevant, the point it that is was relevant 20 years ago, but no longer it. It's the same as saying she was beautiful 20 years so, but now at 40 she is not. That statement does not imply that no 40 year old women are beautiful, quite the contrary (women don't even start to get really interesting until their 30's and while the part might be a little firmer at 20, they sure as hell now how to use them better in the 30's), but only states that at 20, she was beautiful, but 20 years later, she no longer is.

To go further, and talk about the Unix reference. Unix today is not even in essence the same Unix it was in 1989. Unix (and its successors) have/has been continually in development as has kept up with the times quite well, adding support for the newest networking architectures and newer hardware. AmigaOS, by comparison has not. Mismanagement and lawsuits and general apathy by the community at large let it linger. Yes, some progress was made, but not as fast as the market changed and not as fast as hardware changed.

I started out with Commodore. I owned a Vic-20, C64, C128 and finally an Amiga. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for all of those machines, but lets not have a soft spot in my heart create a soft spot in my head, none of them are truly relevant platforms anymore.

Re:let the flames begin

[LoadWB]

Could this possibly mean the release of OS4 for the Mac Mini? I, for one, would certainly hope so. Heading on over to AO and the rest to see the fireworks...

Re:let the flames begin

[cheesybagel]

You can do that using a software emulator.

Re:let the flames begin

[hazydave]

You ARE comparing Apples (sic) and oranges here.

The Mac platform was revolutionary... well, the software anyway (the hardware sucked from the get-go, despite the pretty plastic). 20 years later, they have actually fixed the OS (eg, went from a fairly poor low-level design to the Mach kernel and some other decent underpinnings), they have a growing user base, you can actually buy one in a store, there are many modern applications, and the company behind the Mac is making gobs of money. None of those things are true about anything related to the Amiga. And don't get on me for Amiga bashing -- I designed a bunch of them, I love the Amiga. I just hate what happened to it. It has gone nowhere significant since the mid 90s, and things were shakey even near the end, between Commodore's slow death and the year+ it took between that and the sincere attempt to bring things back at Amiga Technologies.

Sure, you may find a few things in AmigaOS that are still better than Windows. You can find that in just about any OS... Windows is an easy target. That doesn't make AmigaOS a useful choice for getting most kinds of real work done today. And it also doesn't remove the fact that the only real platform for AmigaOS today is software emulation of AmigaOS 3.x on a PC, under some other PC OS.

Telling the truth about something is not the same as bashing it; dreaming about what might have been doesn't change what is. But keep in mind... the AmigaOS has been in post Commodore, even post-Commodore/Amiga Technologies neglection longer than it had existed before this. That's a pretty harsh way of looking, but it's the truth. It was 10.5 years from the introduction of the Amiga 1000 (September 1985) to the functional end of Amiga Technologies (March 1986). It's largely been in the hands of lawyers and bozos ever since. Is there anyone really holding their breath for an AmigaOS re-introduction of any kind, much less one that invites a thriving user and developer community? I'd love to see that, but I don't believe in it.

Re:let the flames begin

[hazydave]

Again, that's an invalid comparison.

You can download Opera free and try it out, see if you like it.. the cost is very small. It's a completely modern browser... in fact, it's added a number of innovations, such as tabs and bookmark synchronization, well before IE or Firefox had these (and in the latter case, only via plug-in).

Forget the whys... where should I send someone to buy either AmigaOS for the PC (native, not something from the early 1990s running in emulation), or a modern computer with AmigaOS pre-installed? Where's an application I can use to edit high definition video, or make a DVD or Blu-Ray? Since I can do that in Windows, MacOS, and Linux (the latter for free), I think those are completely reasonable standards. This really has nothing to do with the technical merits of AmigaOS, and everything to do with what happens to any OS that has a decade plus of non-development.

Re:let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

See, if I posted that to every Mac story, I'd get modded down in an instant.

...maybe because Macs have been in mainstream production, development, and use for the last twenty years? Sorry, but no, your comparison doesn't wash. I was and Amiga head. It was ten years ahead of its time. And I don't think the parent questioning how Amiga is relevant today is flamebait. It's actually the first reasonable question of nearly everyone who's heard of the system, and deserves to be answered.

(It's not even a hostile question. Try it this way: "Amiga's back? Narg! So... what's it do now?")

Re:let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

Syllable is a fork of AtheOS, which was a rough clone (at the conceptual level) of BeOS.

Re:let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, did you miss the point, that being that UNIX, even at 40 years old is still relevant, so why can't a 20 year old platform like amiga still be relevant?

And what makes you think UNIX is at all relevant? Unless you mean linux / OSX?

Re:let the flames begin

[MBGMorden]

Syllable is a fork of AtheOS, which was a rough clone (at the conceptual level) of BeOS.

Syllable is indeed a fork of AtheOS, but you're a bit misplaced there. AtheOS originally set out to be a clone of (and was "inspired by") AmigaOS, not BeOS.

Re:let the flames begin

[g00ey]

I understand your point but what I really like about AmigaOS is its transparency. I've never had an OS where I could fully understand all components the way I did in the AmigaOS. Everything was so intuitive; the libraries in libs:, the drivers in devs:, ...

I don't understand a fraction of Windows and the registry and it's usage of virtual RAM is a disaster. Linux is better than Windows in this regard but the learning curve is pretty steep.

I really don't like the "/" in Linux. I think the way devices are mounted in AmigaOS is much better and the volumes/devices can be named to "Whatever you want:" and not just A:\, B:\, C:\. I also like the assign command (similar to SUBST in MS-DOS) which does not only let you assign one path to : but several paths.

The datatypes were really revolutionary. If say JPEG2000 came recently, all you would have to do is to install its datatype and then all graphical software would automatically support that file-format without update.

So what I really miss in the world of modern technology is an operating system that is truly transparent, organized and intuitive even on a technical level. The AmigaOS sure sets an example of how an OS should look like in my opinion and I think this is particularly important when considering all the viruses, trojans and other security issues one has to deal with on a regular basis. And don't think you can always trust your virus killer, firewall or root-kit detector. The only thing you can trust is your common sense and there is no excuse for an OS to not be designed to support that.

Re:let the flames begin

[mdwh2]

Who cares, they're both niches compared to a platform like Windows (which was never a niche, as another commenter points out). Apple only got to improve their lot by ditching the Mac, and using the brandname for PC hardware running a new OS they bought out. (Citation for approaching double-digit share?)

I just love the double standard, that's all - it's supposed to be cool to think different and use something other than Windows, but then Mac users slag off the Amiga. Why should the Mac market share be the "optimal" level of users?

Either Amiga users can say they're cool and thinking different by not using Windows or a Mac - or I as a Windows user can make joke about the few Mac users and how little it's used compared to Windows.

Which doesn't mean that the Amiga isn't worth talking about, of course.

Exactly.

Re:let the flames begin

[tverbeek]

When was Windows a niche? The first year of Windows 3.0 sales...

The fact that you start by talking about Win3.0 pretty much demonstrates my point. That's the first version that most people (at least those old enough) ever used, because that's when it hit the mainstream. I used to have "Windows 1.04 thru current" on my resume, and I had interviewers ask if I was kidding, because they'd never heard of "Windows 1". And these were people who were already adults in 1985. But they never used it. Most people didn't.

Throughout the 1980s, DOS ruled. Even after Windows was prematurely pushed out the door. I used a PC at my summer office job, and was a cutting-edge technodweeb who convinced my boss that this new GUI from Microsoft was worth buying for its task-switching capabilities. It was not. In fact, it was pretty much useless. Hardly any native apps (Write, Reversi, Clock... um....?), feeble support for DOS apps, lack of drivers, resource hungry, and... it didn't even have the BSOD yet; it just rebooted a lot. Like most other people who bought it, I didn't actually use it.

Then Win2.0 came out, and I upgraded (the first of many times). It was... better, and had a few good apps such as PageMaker and WinWord becoming available for it, though its multitasking still sucked and it locked up a lot (still no BSOD). It was good enough though that a niche of people emerged who actually used it productively on a day-to-day basis for things like DTP. But still just a niche. The WordPerfect-, 1-2-3-, and dBASE-using masses found it didn't meet their needs.

Win3.0 changed all that, with the sales figures you cite, because it finally had usable multitasking, a wide array of apps (e.g. Lotus, dBase, and WordPerfect had finally been ported, and Microsoft Office was even better), universal driver support, etc. More importantly, it came preinstalled on most new PCs, so you no longer needed to seek it out and figure out how to install it. That's when it stopped being a niche operating environment. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either A) an ubergeek who didn't realize at the time what an isolated early-adopting outlier he was, or B) too young to remember any of this.

I have a Mac, and to be honest it doesn't have a single app I use that makes me want to buy the machine over anything else.

As long as you have a Mac, you might want to explore a little more to see what else is out there. You risk cutting yourself off from the option of switching (back) to Windows by using Mac-only apps, but there are quite a few developers out there doing nifty stuff for OS X.

Re:let the flames begin

[tverbeek]

Windows (which was never a niche, as another commenter points out)

Sure it was. What's the first version of Windows you bought? If it was 3.0 or later, you're just another mainstream johnny-come-lately. Before that, Microsoft had to literally give it away, by bundling a "run-time" version of it with apps like PageMaker, which were themselves only used by a small segment of the PC-using market. I don't often play the Old-Timer card (because it requires me to point out that I was born during the Johnson administration)*, but I clearly remember when Windows was a niche operating environment, and if you don't... either you're not old enough to know what you're talking about, or... you don't know what you're talking about for other reasons.

(Citation for approaching double-digit share?)

Gartner puts them at 8.8% for 2009Q03, up 8.6% from 2008Q03. IDC puts them at 9.4%. Dell and HP lead Apple comfortably, and Acer/Gateway is still out of its reach, but Apple has lately surpassed Toshiba (and any other PC vendor) in unit sales in the US. If Win7 turns out to be less of a turkey than Vista, and people turn back to PCs with Windows, that could easily deny Apple an actual 10% market share, but the historical delta is on Apple's side: they are approaching 10%.

Either Amiga users can say they're cool and thinking different by not using Windows or a Mac - or I as a Windows user can make joke about the few Mac users and how little it's used compared to Windows.

Actually both are permissible; you're welcome to be as uninformed and in denial or reality as you want to be. It's a free world, after all. :)

*Lyndon, not Andrew

Re:let the flames begin

[NormalVisual]

If you've got a PC that's newer than 10 years old or so, you can also do it for $30, and save some desk space in the process. :-)

Re:let the flames begin

[erikdalen]

But don't forget you will need to buy some Tac-2 joysticks and build converters for those.

Re:let the flames begin

[node 3]

"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.

Rightfully so, because it's an extremely idiotic thing to say.

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?

Because Amiga *isn't* relevant today. Since you have such a hard on for Apple, you probably know of at least 10 people who currently own and use a Mac, at least 50 who currently own and use an iPod or iPhone. How many people do you know that currently use an Amiga?

Media interest, market share, available hardware, available software, retail space (even *outside* of Apple's own stores), their own stores... In which of these categories is Amiga even *remotely* similar to Apple?

Hell, how many people do you think would even recognize the word Amiga as applies to computers? How many do you think don't know about Apple as applies to computers?

go to an Apple versus Windows debate, note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows

I use Macs because of their usability, the quality of the hardware, the overall feel and polish of the apps (both from Apple and third party software), and things tend to "just work". Any "Apple versus Windows debate" will have pro-Mac arguments just like mine. You clearly haven't thought this through.

[pro-Mac arguments are just anti-Windows] and therefore note they can be applied here in favour of the Amiga too

Not really, *because the Amiga isn't a modern platform*. An argument against GM in defense of Toyota is not also an argument in favor of a Model T or a Gremlin.

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?

If you think simply being "not Windows" is sufficient to garner support on Slashdot, you are woefully clueless. There will always be supporters of pretty much *any* platform here, but the hive-mind here doesn't just go, "not Windows, then it's good!". In fact, there are a *lot* of Windows supporters here.

Your powers of observation are severely lacking.

Re:let the flames begin

[node 3]

I've noticed almost all of your posts in defense of the Amiga end up slamming Macs. This signifies a lack of confidence in your position. If you want to promote the Amiga, try promoting the Amiga.

The problem, of course, is that that's a fundamentally difficult proposition these days. The Amiga was an *amazing* system back in the day. But today? Not so much.

But hey, bash the Mac, and Mac users, and *somehow* that will make the Amiga a modern system. Or, at the very least, it will give you a target for your impotent anger over the current irrelevancy of such a once great platform.

If you want some sort of similarity to Apple, Newton users are your best bet.

Re:let the flames begin

[bhtooefr]

There is MorphOS for the Mac Mini G4...

(Different OS, and I don't know the difference between the different Amiga OSes, other than they're made by different companies.)

Re:let the flames begin

[Anonymous Coward]

just try Icaros Desktop. It's the only distribution of AROS, a open source re-implementation of AmigaOS which runs on any PC system. You can get a Live (DVD), Light (CD) or Virtual Machine (VMware) version on the site. If you need help setting it up, just look at the PDF documentation or connect to www.aros-exec.org. If you donwload the DVD version and you're on Linux, don't forget to rename the archive from .7z.exe to .7z alone. This will help you extracting the ISO and the other files (which are useful to Windows users, to run it in a window). Icaros Desktop is the nearest thing to a modern implementation of AmigaOS you can find on x86. It's not perfect since the system is still alpha-quality software, but it's enough polished for a test run. Further advancements in AROS (not provided yet by Icaros) is 3D acceleration using Gallium3D and Nvidia cards. Regards

Re:let the flames begin

[MW383]

Hazy, No flames....I like the insights and comments. I'm more of an C= 8bit / Jim Butterfield burnout of days past but did get hooked into Amiga after this to some extent, retired from it, and re-enlisted in Amiga a few years back. Since re-enlisting I resurrected an A3K that now sees little run time. My impressions? My motives are probably nostalgic and based on remembering when this computing thing was all a new concept and it was fun as hell being a part of it. Pounding on an old Pet or C64 used to be my version of fun. Now adays I try to use Amiga for some usefulness (or any computer for that matter). I have to use a PC because I have to use Solidworks. For the Amiga it still has some very good uses. My latest is for early chilhood learning - interactive presentations. I switched from AmigaVision to Scala MM400 recently and was stunned at what can be done in Scala. So I make teaching videos with it because it is far easier to do this here than on another computer (at least for me). I might add that anything Amiga I do anymore is through emulation. It is the most logical way. I always look at what is happening in the various hardware / software camps. Cool things happening out there for sure. Where it all leads - I haven't a clue. I suspect that many of the post C= fragments will stay this way and have whatever followers that wander into them.

Hardware?

[bcmm]

Why? Is anybody still making consumer boxes that can run this? Does the OS support MMUs yet?

I can only see this being interesting of the source is released and ported to things.

Re:Hardware?

[Gleng]

The SAM440ep exists.

Now that the legal troubles are out of the way, Hyperion are free to port the OS to whatever they like.

Re:Hardware?

[Hal_Porter]

You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.

Re:Hardware?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If only it were possible to build careful programmers into a few bucks worth of silicon...

Re:Hardware?

[Abcd1234]

You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.

Yeah, fuck virtual memory!

Re:Hardware?

[Skuld-Chan]

Ironically one of the developer tools Commodore shipped with the SDK was Enforcer - which used the otherwise unused MMU to detect improperly referenced pointers and invalid access to memory.

Still a pretty crappy way to save money on all those Amiga's with 'EC' 68k's.

Re:Hardware?

[uncoveror]

This announcement would have meant something in 1997. In 2009, not so much.

Not quite

[cjfs]

Having a lawsuit-free OS

Software patents have been abolished too? About time.

Re:Not quite

[Zordak]

Any patents the Amiga OS infringes have probably long since expired.

Re:Not quite

[Samurai Crow]

The OS patents have expired and the last AGA chipset patent will expire in 2010. Next year the hardware starts to look a bit more familiar than what the Sam440Flex looks like. Let the fun begin!

Amiga filter

[Ltap]

heh, I bet that's not used too often any more. In all seriousness, though - the Amiga community is pretty stubborn. Most of them have a single machine, and just order new parts as stuff breaks - some of them are pretty brilliant about diagnosing problems and hacking their software. It'd actually make a pretty interesting study - take a group of computer hobbyists, then give them the same hardware to work with for 20+ years. It'd be interesting to see what they could probably reverse-engineer if they had a mind to.

Re:Amiga filter

[mdwh2]

I'm not sure what your evidence of this claim is - my experience of looking at Amiga forums is that most people there have a range of computers, including PCs too (much like Mac users, according to that recent survey).

It's not like the OS and hardware being talked about here is the same OS that most people remember - some of the comments here are like making "Macs can't multitask" comments, or joking about DOS and Windows 9x. Sure, it's not cutting edge or used by the majority anymore, but Slashdot covers plenty of OSs and platforms that aren't, or in some cases, have never been.

Brutality

[Anonymous Coward]

There is little good in them coming out of their litigation.

Winding back the clock a little, Amiga Inc came out of the broken bones of the old Amiga organisation. They came up with some plans, most of which broke down.

What they did do, was ally themselves up in an evil triumverate, with two other companies.

Amiga Inc, Hyperion, and a third company, Eyetech.
These three cooked up a goofy plan to ship a half baked OS, on severely half baked PPC hardware, so broken it became an in joke. The worst lunatics in the 'community' bandwagoned this complete junk, and the vast majority of people who fell for it, paid a lot of money for over priced junk. The warranty was worthless. A great many people walked away during this time, and a great deal of friction arose because of these antics.

The fact that two of these were killing themselves through litigation led to a hope they might destroy themselves, if for no other reason than they be denied the ground to sell their next 'release' on the unwise, the ill educated, or the stupid.

Putting that aside, its hard to consider Amiga OS, and the hardware choices are appallingly bad (unless you like crippled and old PPC equipment tied to old junk from the PC world) - so unless this 'new' start comes up with very serious improvements in every area, including warranty and support, and merchantable quality in their goods and services, and decent, reasonably priced hardware, then there is no reason for them to even exist. And on past events, they don't deserve to.

Re:Brutality

[mdwh2]

Yes, it's sad that a series of PC companies drove the Amiga into the ground. It says something that the Amiga is still around in some form, despite all these set backs (remember the jokes we used to get about a new Amiga being vaporware? Then witness the back-pedalling when one was released (years ago, in fact) - they're suspiciously silent in this thread).

Imagine what computing might have been like today? We might have had something better than a choice between one monopoly, and a niche platform that still did all the same tricks as the aforemented platform.

Re:Brutality

[AmiMoJo]

If the Amiga has been allowed to "die" back in the mid 90s I think it would probably be in a much better position than it is now.

Endless promises and outright lies over the years have slowly destroyed the community that was once so strong. If people had just accept that it was a retro system, much like the Archimedes and Atari ST guys I think more people would be interested in the Amiga today. I sold my last one (yes, the "Ami" part of my handle is short for Amiga) in 2004. I was just so fed up with the whole thing I just wanted rid of it.

The World of Amiga 2001 was the final nail in the coffin I think - we (the organisers) had been promised a new Amiga and OS4 running on it for the show, we even had a full page magazine ad for it. Then they tell us two days before the event that actually they have not even started planning the new hardware and OS, let alone prototyped it. How could we ever trust them after that? We didn't even like what they were promising: a final classic OS update and then something called AmigaOS but otherwise baring no relationship to it at all and running on mobile phones and set top boxes. Even the classic OS update seemed pointless as there would be no new software to run on it and the last chance to keep the few remaining developers with us was fast slipping away.

Up until that point people were still doing stuff with Amigas, making new hardware and apps and generally getting a lot out of them. On that day people kind of realised that all the effort and energy they put in had been shit on by some lying arse holes who a decade later still have not delivered a single product. All they wanted to do was milk the community for all it was worth while making plans to simply discard all the things we loved and produce a VM that had already missed the boat Java sailed in on by about 5 years.

The best thing that could have happened to the Amiga would have been for it to die in 1994 and the source to the OS to have been leaked. If that had happened I imagine I may well still be running one today.

Re:Brutality

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga fanboys were so obnoxious they make Open Sores zealots look like boy scouts. Whenever another story came out about how they'd been jerked around by another company for years, I can't help but to smile.

Re:Brutality

[mdwh2]

Got out of bed the wrong side today did we?

As your post demonstrates, the only fanatics are those who have a problem with an Amiga story once in a blue moon. Perhaps there were some zealots back in the day, but they're the ones on other platforms now. In my experience, Amiga forums these days contain people who are rational and realistic about the platform.

It's a good thing when companies jerk people around? What a disgusting and petty - and yes, obnoxious, as you are the only one here displaying that attitude - sentiment.

If you want zealots, look at Apple fanatics - those people who actually believe that Apple did everything first, that they are number one in the mobile market, the Iphone is something special because it can access a web page and so on. Not to mention that their zealotry is over nothing more than a brand, where as Amiga users are just people who've stuck with a product like that. Why on earth does that bother you so much?

Re:Brutality

[Anonymous Coward]

It is nearly "sad" that this "half-baked OS" as you call it runs stable and more smooth on my 1 GHz Amiga than
Windows Vista runs on my state-of-the-art dual-core PC. "The Application does not react", no blue screens, no minor quirk in reaction time when you just press a save button on your editor and wonder why the **** the system should need 20 seconds for it. The system just runs smoothly. Even things like 3D Hardware support are in (despite Dave Haynie's post
where he shows he does not really know what he is talking about, talking about "missing 3D/Networking..."
and lists several things which are actually in the OS). So why Half-Baked? As there is no Mozilla/Word/etc.
running on it? That's the only reason I could find someone could call it that.

And to the "A500 times are over" people who always pop up on slashdot when the term "Amiga" comes up.
Amiga has nothing to do with A500 since a VERY long time. Do Amiga say "haha, 80286 system"
everytime a news-item over x86 hardware comes up? No, they don't. The Amiga is to A500 what
the 80286 based PC is to a modern PC. Just get that and accept it!

Asides from the missing 3rd party support (I listed Mozilla, Word, etc.) IMHO AmigaOS 4 is currently
the best OS out there (though Linux and OS X I also like) or at least one of the best. Asides from
the missing 3rd party support. Ah, and hardware support. That too, sadly. 1GHz systems are not
actually modern anymore. Still hoping recent events will give Amiga a chance for a new hardware.

A little late?

[EdIII]

I would think this would be a little "late to the party" situation here. Does Amiga even have the resources or funding to create ground breaking or even interesting new hardware? Can they seriously compete with Intel, Motorola, AMD, NVidia, and Texas Instruments at this point?

Do they have any IP or expertise to develop a new OS that can provide a reasonable alternative to Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows?

Resurrecting a brand name might be one thing, but I am somewhat skeptical that Amiga can begin producing hardware and operating systems that are going to compete with current market players in any meaningful way.

What's next? Coleco announces they have a Windows 7 killer in a brand new updated ColecoVision 2009?

Re:A little late?

[Jugalator]

I agree, it sounds so much out of the loop that the only way out might be to open-source the whole thing.

Re:A little late?

[mdwh2]

Indeed, they probably can't, but would they have to?

Apple realised they were no longer able to compete with their MacOS, or hardware, so now we have Macs that are PC hardware running an OS derived from Next.

Does anyone mind? On the contrary, Apple fans seem to love the new platform better than the old. They seem to be doing better than before, now they've made the switch.

can begin producing hardware and operating systems that are going to compete with current market players in any meaningful way.

But you're conflating things - just because they can't compete on hardware doesn't mean they can't compete. I don't see how it isn't "meaningful", when you can make money and sell computers doing it. The market's moved on - people don't make custom hardware anymore, not even Apple.

Coleco announces they have a Windows 7 killer in a brand new updated ColecoVision 2009?

More like Apple announces they have a Windows 7 killer in a brand new updated Mac.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

You got it all wrong.. Amiga or Hyperion is no hardware company. Hyperion could port it to whatever hardware that suited them and i am pretty sure they are working on something behind the scenes. Why would they plan SMP support for OS 4.2 if they dont plan to port it to modern hardware?

Re:A little late?

[Darinbob]

Well, some people mind. I am seriously disappointed that now x86 is the only game in town. It's like if COBOL became the dominant language. All alternative CPUs are essentially only on embedded systems. Even Intel can't manage to get better designs of their own accepted. So we're stuck with a CPU on just about every desktop computer that still has a strong family resemblance to the old Intel microprocessors from the 70s and 80s; the modern versions are instruction set compatible with the 8088, which is compatible with the 8080, which strongly resembles the 8008, which derives from the 4004, which was the first 4-bit microprocessor chip. Seriously, the EAX register is essentially the same beast as the 4004's accumulator if you follow the genetics down the family tree.

Maybe it's not that big a deal really to the pragmatic engineer side of me, but the idealistic engineer side is disappointed :-)

Slashdotted

[Jugalator]

Database Error: Unable to connect to the database:Could not connect to MySQL

I guess it was running on an Amiga... :-(

Re:Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

Even worse: it's running mySQL.

Aye, I had no idea these existed anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a second year student of software engineering, which means I was born after Amiga came to markets. (Sorry for any "Am I really that old?" feelings that I have invoked)

It is a famous system so of course I have heard of it but I certainly had no idea that some sort of Amiga Inc. company would still exist. For a moment, I actually thought this was some sort of a joke.

Re:Aye, I had no idea these existed anymore

[mdwh2]

For a moment, I actually thought this was some sort of a joke.

It's sad that there's so much ignorance around here.

Personally I thought it was a joke when I saw the "Iphone can access a website" story.

Re:Aye, I had no idea these existed anymore

[mikael_j]

Well, the Amiga still had plenty of enthusiastic (read: Zealous) users as late as the early years of this millenium, really, I've been to demo parties where there were guys still running their A3000 towers with NetBSD and telling anyone who wanted to listen how awesome their rat's nest of a machine with soldered on components, G3-expansion cards and all that was. The Amiga scene seems to be pretty dead these days though (but the even older 8-bit scene has made a comeback since it somehow attained some sort of "retro cool").

/Mikael

Re:Aye, I had no idea these existed anymore

[hattig]

The Amiga Inc company was running the brand into the ground via incompetence and very weird behaviour (asset switching between companies to avoid bankruptcies, etc). Hyperion have been trying to develop the market for a long time, so it is good that they have control now. I hope they port to ARM for upcoming Smartbooks.

It's well worth reading reviews c. 1985 - 1992 of the Amiga, to see how special it was back then. Hardware-wise, any modern PC in the last ten to fifteen years has been Amiga-like, with dedicated co-processors for graphics, audio, etc. OS-wise, AmigaOS is behind modern systems, but it had some niceties, I found the filesystem layout nice for example, nicer than Unix. In 1985 to 1995 it was simply far ahead technically. Lack of investment killed it though.

However my Amiga related shortcuts live in a bookmarks folder alongside my 8-bit computing links - the folder's called "Retro". I wish them all the best of luck, but I think they're five years too late. Actually, in 1998 I made a post here saying that AmigaOS would be perfect for a Palm-like device. Shame.

How do they even keep the doors open?

[rimcrazy]

What are these companies running on besides fumes?

Re:How do they even keep the doors open?

[melstav]

Really, really sad drugs.

Re:How do they even keep the doors open?

[laejoh]

Windows probably :)

Re:How do they even keep the doors open?

[Anonymous Coward]

MySQL, evidently.

Anyone have a mirror link for TFrA?

Re:How do they even keep the doors open?

[Samurai Crow]

Amiga Inc. had contracts to support Windows and Windows Mobile. Hyperion Entertainment didn't do so, in fact they used to port games from Windows to Linux, Mac, and Amiga and made their bread and butter by it for a few years that way.

Of course not

[MikeRT]

If they're smart they'll either work on support for fat binaries for x86 and powerpc or powerpc and arm. If they couple that with a solid WebKit or Gecko-based browser and get Flash ported over, Amiga would be a very competitive platform for netbooks.

Re:Of course not

[dammy]

There is already a open source version of Amiga OS called AROS which is x86, x86_64, PPC and shortly ARM. http://www.aros.org/

Re:Of course not

[mlts]

There are a few niches where an OS that is dedicated for video and audio would be nice. When I mean dedicated, I mean with the facility for as low latency as possible, and full realtime capabilities.

Combine this with hardware that has multiple cores (not just the same type, but perhaps some cores that turn on for higher CPU tasks, while basic I/O loops are handled by low power cores, as well as cores for DSP use.)

Of course, ports are necessary. USB ports on different I/O channels (so the hard disk would be doing I/O on a separate bus from MIDI controllers.) IEEE 1394 (400 and 800), AES/EBU, S/PDIF, multiple channels of analog in/out, multiple MIDI channels, gigE, and eSATA channels would all be a must. IMHO, historically the two machines which had the "ports for your musical storm" were the Amiga, but there was another machine which had an amazing amount of things, and that was the SGI Indy.

The result would be an OS and hardware platform that would be genuinely idea for a studio or video production system. The low latency would mean that one can pile the tracks on (with quality ADCs and input hardware, 48-96 isn't out of the realm of possibility.)

Now, take all the above and focus on optimizing for A/V work for not too high a price, and the Commodore successor would have a place in every home studio and video lab out there.

The key would be having the machine not just have the DSPs and the cores to throw at A/V jobs, but have the software available that can handle stuff like VST plugins out of the box. This way, someone buys the machine, takes it home, plugs the I/O stuff in, and starts jamming.

Filesystem wise, it would be nice to see a later generation filesystem like ZFS present. This way, data integrity is assured (64 bit CRCs), adding storage space becomes easy, snapshot functionality allows recovery of corrupted/deleted files without requiring a restore from backup, and backups become easy because one can just make a snapshot, copy it off to disk or tape and call it done. It would take some UI design work to make a robust interface so a nontechnical person could get the most out of ZFS or btrfs, but it can be done.

Last, but not least security: Probably the best way to implement modern security is to have a hypervisor that does its tasks on a dedicated CPU core. The music stuff sits in one VM, the Web browser sits in another (or at least in a BSD-like jail), and so on. This way, if a blackhat managed to take over one VM, the whole system wouldn't be at risk. Of course, signed executables, ASLR, install-time profiles [1], TPM [2] and disk encryption would be present.

Conclusion: If someone took the time to bring AmigaOS up to speed and aim for the audio/video niche with hardware in the machine to handle the demands, I'm sure that this would be a machine that would sell well. It won't sell as well as Macs, HPs, or Dells, but it would always be needed and a profit center if done right.

[1]: Upon installation of an application, it comes with a list of access lists that it requires, another list of stuff that would be nice, and a maximum permission list (so a program that touches untrusted stuff like a Web browser isn't accidentally run with root rights). Once the program is installed, unless a patch is applied that asks the user for more permissions, it doesn't get any more access than what it originally asked (and got approved for). This limits the damage a hijacked app can do. For example, if a spreadsheet tries to access an unrelated database file, the OS will deny it access.

[2]: TPMs are controversial, but here it would be a net benefit to the user to detect if a blackhat has tried booting from OS media and resetting passwords in order to gain access, or some malware tried editing the boot area.

Re:Of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have a Webkit browser on OS 4.x. Also scores a nice 100/100 in acid 3 test and renders most sites perfectly. We also now have gnash which at least works fine for flash videos like youtube and such. Firefox is also currently being ported by some of the OS4.x team.

Re:Of course not

[hazydave]

Some of that's actually going away, slowly. It certainly depends on your workflow.

I used to have MIDI, with Bars and Pipes, on the Amiga, which led me to Cakewalk on the PC, and one of those MOTU 8-port MIDI devices, all kinds of stuff. These days, while I could record on the computer, I'm more likely to record on my Fostex portastudio, then bring all the raw tracks in for mixing on the PC. If you're in a big studio, you're going to have external digital ADC/DAC and mixing, so the PC itself needs just some good digital ports.

Curiously, the "PIOS One" project at PIOS/Metabox was exactly the idea of this... a personal computer optimized for audio/video work. Even in 1997, though, it made sense to think most I/O was going to be external. I had a good sound chip (Aureal... another good company that failed, largely do to evildoers from the outside.. I hired some of the Aureal engineers briefly at Metabox USA), with separately regulated and filtered audio power supply. But going beyond four channels, you would hook an external box to the audio expansion port, and bring it in digitally.

Lots of ports, sure. Firewire was critical to video, but that's going away... tapeless is coming on like crazy, and it's great. I bought a little pocket-sized camcorder awhile back, a Sanyo VPC-FH1, which records on SDHC cards. My goal was to reduce wear and tear on the expensive HDV camcorders, but the video quality out this bad boy is crazy.. and it can shoot at 1080/60p, twice the rate of any Blu-Ray mode. But the real key.. flash memory means fast, totally reliable transfer. There are a number of low-end pro cams doing the same things, and even on the high end, lots of people using SxS cards are loading up two SDHC cards into an adapter.

For DSPs, I don't think so... they're just not cost effective. This is the same thing Be realized, going from their original Hobbit+DSP3210/07 prototype to the PPC model. Signal processing on the main PC is really fast these days, and you get to use that power for general purpose computing, not just some specialized bits. There are interesting areas of computing acceleration, but I would look at GPU and FPGA computing, not DSP. If you really like DSP, you could always build one in a system with some kind of FPGA resource. Not just build it, but build a different one optimized for the specific work involved. Both of these run into software issues, too... special support not needed for native signal processing work. So the benefit has to be large.

You definitely want a 64-bit file system, and one tuned to do media well. The last time I built Linux video servers (just over a year ago, eight x86 cores in a 1U rackmount), I got better performance from XFS than ext2 or ext3, which wasn't a shock. I didn't mess around with ZFS, and ext4 was still a work in progress, though they seem to have been moving in the right direction. One nice thing about Linux... all these FS choices. The same thing that optimizes streaming HD video doesn't necessarily optimize a zillion tiny file accesses in a web server.

The best way to implement security in a multimedia environment is simple: don't connect the media network to the internet. Problem solved. Of course, if you're paranoid, go ahead and run the web browser in a sandbox, that's fine.. you don't want the rest of the system slowed down by VM overhead.

Re:Of course not

[mlts]

Excellent observations. I appreciate comments and corrections from someone who is versed in the field.

You are right about FPGAs. These days, instead of DSPs, buyers of this device would be better off with a FPGA solution and a software stack (OS/drivers/apps) that is able to reconfigure and use the hardware in the best way possible. This way, an audio app and a video app could have completely different configurations. The downside is that it would take engineering on all layers (hardware up to the UI) to have this ready to go for users.

Even though video is moving to SDHC cards as opposed to DV tapes, FireWire will still be something people want. A number of keyboards and dedicated musical instruments still use mLAN (even though it is becoming antiquated.) Of course, IEEE 1394 has better constant transfer rates which are vital for the large blocks of I/O needed for A/V work to and from disk drives. USB 3.0 is also a must have because this should be in day to day use when a device like this ships.

As for security, any general purpose computer these days should be built from the ground up with this in mind, perhaps throwing in a core or two hardware wise just to deal with the overhead of a hypervisor and the context switching it would require. Dedicated musical instruments that have a limited interface might not need to worry about compromise, but anything past that (especially any device that has a TCP/IP stack) needs to have security factored in from the design state on up. If solid security is not factored in, the arms race on that OS and hardware between blackhats and security patches may cause people to abandon the platform. The battlefield for the security battles needs to be determined early on, rather than try to be fought on the blackhats' turf. Ideally, the core music stuff would be in one VM, while general purpose computing (as almost everyone wants to run a variant of UNIX, and perhaps Windows) would be in another VM (of course, the owner of the device would have the option of replacing the installed OS with whatever he or she feels like unlike the PS3, but having the ability to run Windows in a VM is likely a small sales point.)

We should be happy

[Vexar]

You know, the Amiga community is probably pleased that the announcement page got slashdotted. I really wish that things had worked out differently, that when Escom AG or even Gateway 2000 bought them, they would have committed to the platform. There were some ideas in the later Amiga OS designs which are only just now showing up in Vista. And, if I'm correct, they pulled it off without the same, disgusting overhead of Vista. I think, to honor the dedication of the Amiga community, we should all enjoy a moment of their perspective on things. Let's not forget where a lot of the Amiga community went, shall we? XFree86 seems to have a few high-profile Amiga developers working on it, or did when it was created. My co-workers, there seems to be a distinct lineage of former Amiga users, and if you run into someone who is a good programmer, it's worth the trouble to ask if they used to program on the Amiga. That clapped out old beastie was really fun to program, and I, for one, miss it.

Re:We should be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck you and your furry bullshit.

Re:We should be happy

[Shinobi]

Someone who learned programming on the Amiga checking in.

For me, it was the most awesome platform ever to learn on. Full hardware docs, very cleverly constructed hardware where a lot of stuff could be bypassed etc. Taught me about multithreading, message passing, modularity, the beauty of micro-kernels and similar architectures, and the flexibility afforded by those. Moving on to Windows and various Unix-derivatives/plagiarisms was, and still is, painful, and you run into too much stuff that's obviously created for short-term benefit, but in the long term is just pure trash.

Considering how, on a global scale, few developers come from the Amiga scene, there's a disproportionate number of us in the top end of many fields, like HPC(Developing Infiniband and similar drivers for example), embedded stuff(software for jet fighters, radar systems etc), graphics and video(Given the niche the Amiga had, this is the least surprising field, especially since the Amiga, with the Video Toaster, kicked off the Small Computer Based Editing Studio before anyone else, even though Apple-tards try to claim differently)

Re:We should be happy

[hollywench]

I wish things had worked out differently, i.e. before C= went bust. We know who to blame for that (and not Jack Tramiel.) :-p Some of the Amiga community is still here reading /. I may not own a Miggy any more, may not post all over FidoNet and AmigaNet via dial up or uucp either, and I don't give a damn about Hyperion or Amiga Inc any more... I quit doing those quite a while back.. but I still consider myself a member of the Amiga community. There are a number of people I met via Fido's Amiga echo that I am happy to say are still my friends, 15+ years later. Married one of them, and not just because he programmed in C on the Amiga either. :) I like to think that he's the best thing I ever downloaded. ;)

Re:We should be happy

[Blakey Rat]

There were some ideas in the later Amiga OS designs which are only just now showing up in Vista. And, if I'm correct, they pulled it off without the same, disgusting overhead of Vista.

Like what?

Re:We should be happy

[mdwh2]

Oh, I can't explain it - you just have to use it, then you'll see.

It's not about "feature lists" or what it can do "on paper" - it's about the whole experience, man. It's not that it does anything new, it's about how it does it. It integrates it better.

Or that's how an Apple fan would argue it, anyway...

Re:We should be happy

[node 3]

Oh, I can't explain it - you just have to use it, then you'll see.

It's not about "feature lists" or what it can do "on paper" - it's about the whole experience, man. It's not that it does anything new, it's about how it does it. It integrates it better.

Or that's how an Apple fan would argue it, anyway...

Except none of those things are applicable to the Amiga *today*. They're actually fairly useful to comparing the Amiga to the PCs and Macs of the era when Amigas were knew.

However, both modern Mac users and olden days Amiga users can be much more eloquent than your affected mischaracterization.

Re:We should be happy

[hazydave]

You know, you're right... one reason I decided to write a bunch here.. I figured some Amiga fans would look.

Escom actually did commit to the platform. Not to the extent we all wanted, right off the bad, but in hindsight, I think at least part of that was due to their money problems, which we didn't fully realize at the time. The did establish Amiga Technologies, AT brought in Andy Finkel and me to work with them on what they'd like to do, and what it would take to do that. It was all done at a level that, had it continued, would certainly have been successful... not this kind of quagmired stuff that happened post-Escom. Shame they blew it in the PC market enough to fail so fast.

Amiga people went all places after C= ended. There were a number of Amiga software people on the BeOS team, even more in the BeOS community, at least back in the day. And I know a bunch who got into OS/2 as well. Particularly if you meet someone complaining about all the stupid things, single threading, serialization, etc. in Your Development OS of Choice, you'll win more than lose betting they learned to program correctly on the Amiga.

Oh, and thanks for video link.. I had not seen that . Even the simple fact of an animation genius like Eric coming into his own on the Amiga should make people who don't understand it all think a bit. It's also evidence we were there... art is usually more persistent than technology.

Belongs to...

[gEvil (beta)]

It's official! AmigaOS belongs to...the past.

Worth the legal fees? Who uses this OS?

[strangemachinex]

How does this company stay in business, and why would they pay legal fees to fight for ownership of this dead OS? Does anyone aside from a few dozen hardcore devotees use this operating system? If someone could give me a good answer, I would appreciate it, as I have wondered this for awhile.

Re:Worth the legal fees? Who uses this OS?

[hattig]

There's about a thousand or so users I guess.

The past ten years have been gutting for the platform. Poor owners of the trademarks, poor hardware that was late, late delivery of the new OS (although bringing an OS from 1991 on to a new platform ten years later isn't easy), community splits (Genesi, MorphOS), and more killed it.

The hard work of the OS developers and a few small hardware companies have kept the platform trundling along. Now the OS developers own the OS rights, maybe things can be done to move forward. A port to ARM Smartbooks seems the most logical step (or creating PowerPC Smartbooks using embedded PowerPC cores), the competing platform are Android and Chrome OS, Windows Mobile, and netbook remixes of traditional Linux platforms.

Re:Worth the legal fees? Who uses this OS?

[Gleng]

As far as current guessing goes, there were around 1500 AmigaOne systems sold, and there's been around 300 SAM440ep boards sold. (Disclaimer: This is purely what I've read elsewhere.) Those systems run OS 4, so that's about 1800 users. (There's way more users of OS 3.x out there, though.)

I think Hyperion also do contract work outside of Amiga stuff. I'm not sure what though.

On the Amiga Inc. side, one of their main financiers, Pentti Kouri, died back in January. Whether this has "encouraged" the end of the legal action is open to speculation. Whatever's gone on in the background though, it's good for the platform that Hyperion have come out on top. Amiga Inc. have done almost nothing productive with it for the past 9 years. There's been a lot of weirdness going on on the Amiga Inc. side for a long time, but that's another thread entirely.

Why use Amiga OS in 2009? It makes me smile. It's fun. It really is as simple as that. I wouldn't run a business on it, but that's not what it's for. :)

Decades too late...

[argent]

Introducing a completely new OS was barely possible in 1985. If the OS had developed with unbroken continuity it might have gotten somewhere, but by the mid '90s the writing was on the wall. OS/2, BeOS, consumer QNX... if an OS didn't already have a committed user and application base, if it wasn't UNIX or Windows, it was doomed... and even then it wasn't anything like certain.

The operating system is like the roads. Most people don't care how the roads are built, and they're not going to buy a new car just to go down your driveway.

Re:Decades too late...

[sqldr]

my driveway is a monorail, you insensitive clod!

Re:Decades too late...

[hazydave]

Right... it was possible in the 1985, it wasn't so much ten years later (BeOS was first out to developers in 1995). Or MacOS in 1984, if you want to look at something that's still with us.

Some of that's based on the competition... there was no PC GUI of any major impact in 1985. All personal computers were pretty horrible, too, so true innovation was something people at least took note of. And it was still possible to do that. In modern times, not so much... you pretty much have to be a major chip company to make a significant piece of a modern PC subsystem. No more systems folks like me experimenting with gates or PALs in a lab somewhere.

BeOS was a very good thing, too, but unfortunately, they made a few mistakes. Launching a whole new platform at that time was difficult at best. The BeBox was very cool, but too expensive for anyone but a geek. They could have made a Be motherboard that fit a bog standard PC... but where's the fun in that :-) It's tough, when you're a techie, and evaluate things on the basis of knowing how they should work.. you can see something beautiful, but you have to calm down and realize that most people just want to get their work done and then go yammer about it on Facebook.

Anyway, it seemed reasonable to go software-only, once actual dual processor systems were becoming more common, but that turned out to be a mistake. There was this curious de-valuing of operating systems around 1998-2000... Linux was free, Sun put out lower-end versions of Solaris free, MacOS updates were still free or at least very cheap. Really only Windows was being sold for significant per-copy cash.

Even with Windows, the in-box licensing was a larger business than end-user upgrade. And they successfully blocked the inclusion of any alternative OS... it was a violation of the Windows licensing agreement to build-in a boot manager and allow another OS to run. So, while a few companies wanted BeOS, they didn't want it to the exclusion of Windows. So they went to BeIA, the BeOS for advanced set-top boxes.. but they screwed that up, too. And they were late... I had approached them in 1998 about a set-top-box license, they were sticking strong to the $50 per copy, no hassle price. We wound up using OS/2.. $10 a copy... IBM understood the embedded market. Linux was still not ready for multimedia.

The old tradition of home computing was really about having a computer-centered hobby. You might play games, use a wordprocessor, etc... but the computer itself is the focus. You got Commodore or Amiga magazines, Fish Disks, you joined a user group about that computer, wrote on usenet groups, etc. A PC today is just a tool to help you do something else. I use Altium software for electronics design and Sony for multimedia content creation, and I care a bit about those programs.. I have some loyalty there. But as long as it's a day when Windows isn't biting me in the butt, it's just a means to an end. The OS really doesn't matter. If I could run these under Linux, I probably would, but it's not a big deal either way.

It's pretty clear Microsoft and Apple don't really understand this, either, or at least admit to it. I do recall when the introduction of a new OS was a big, class-A geek event. But, despite Microsoft's creepy videos, does anyone even care if Windows 7 is coming out on Thursday? Sorry, not me.. I'm planning to spend the next 2-3 weeks drooling over the Motorola Droid. Now that's excitement.. finally a pocket computer to make all those iPhone users around me a little jealous. Though I suspect mostly, that'll be along the lines of "wow, you get a signal here...".

In other news....

[HanzoSpam]

...Ford reintroduces the Model T! All new for 2010!

Re:In other news....

[vlm]

...Ford reintroduces the Model T! All new for 2010!

Maybe not Ford, but in about 30 seconds I found two places to buy new Model T / Model A parts. Not junkyard specials but newly manufactured for the classic enthusiast market.

http://www.superiorglassworks.com/Ford-Model-T.html

http://www.rootlieb.com/html_files/ma_spd_kit/ma_spd_kt.html

Personally I'm tired of cookie cutter cars, and would pay good money for a new model T, just to have something unique. That strategy worked for the "new VW bug".

Re:In other news....

[mdwh2]

And Apple introduce the Jphone! All new for 2010!

Re:In other news....

[DNS-and-BIND]

Uh...dude? You do know that the Model T is one of the most uncomfortable vehicles known to man? And by that I'm including a bus station bench as a "vehicle". (Some Slashdot users have never sat on a bus bench before - if this is you, then imagine sitting down to Starbucks for one of their incredibly cheap and yet so addictive coffee flavored drinks, and then finding that all the seats have had their cushions torn out, and the staff is utterly indifferent.)

PS the "new VW bug" had nothing, absolutely zippo to do with the VW Bug. They just reused the name because it had brand recognition, that's all. TNVWB is a boutique product totally the opposite of the "people's car".

Re:In other news....

[arielCo]

...Ford reintroduces the Model T! All new for 2010!

Maybe not Ford, but in about 30 seconds I found two places to buy new Model T / Model A parts.

Taking the car analogy further, there's not much fun in commuting every day at 45 mph, without a/a (be it to cool or heat), etc etc; if that's not what the funny GP post meant, I don't know what.

Personally I'm tired of cookie cutter cars, and would pay good money for a new model T, just to have something unique. That strategy worked for the "new VW bug".

Oh, the Model T is sure a cookie-cutter car (indeed the first to be churned out in an assembly line, and had very few design changes along its life); they just don't use that recipe anymore. The WV New Beetle only salutes Porsche's original shape to make it cute and likeable and youthful, but it was a new car: a modern 2.0l water-cooled front-mounted engine, airbags...

By the same line, AmigaOS has a lot of catching up to do.

Re:In other news....

[mattack2]

Oh, the Model T is sure a cookie-cutter car (indeed the first to be churned out in an assembly line,

[citation needed]

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/assbline.htm

Re:In other news....

[arielCo]

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/assbline.htm

Ahh, I remembered that there was some controversy about it but didn't know what it was about - thanks.

Ok, maybe second, but still a cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all car. My point is "don't confuse retro with unique/original". Come to think of it, everything recognized today as retro was almost necessarily a staple of its time.

What I hate about Slashdot

[bigsexyjoe]

I wake up on Monday morning, do a quick Slashdot check. Then I see a story about the new Amiga OS. From there, I feel compulsed to find out why a business actually developed a new version of Amiga, why anyone cares, etc. From there I found out that not only did this happen but the people involved were actually in a lawsuit for many years. How much could this product be worth that you'd actually litigate over it? I suspect the litigation ended primarily because the parties ran out of the crack they were smoking and realized they should just bring whatever they had to market. Now I'm down on time, confused, and have nothing to show for it.

Re:What I hate about Slashdot

[imakemusic]

How d'you think I feel? I just wasted a minute reading your complaints. (apologies to anyone reading this)

Re:What I hate about Slashdot

[mdwh2]

I know, it's annoying when on a news for nerds site, we learn about tech companies that you might not have read about in the mainstream news. Please take me back to the three stories a day, where we can learn about accessing websites or downloading apps on one particular make of phone, as if no one ever knew you could do that.

Re:What I hate about Slashdot

[abigor]

I take it you have issues with the iPhone, given the number of "can access a website" posts you've made. Maybe you should just learn to relax.

A decade a head of it time 20 years ago.

[jellomizer]

The Amega OS was almost 10 years ahead of its time in features, however that was 20 years ago. Because of the rather stagnate growth in Amega it is now basically 10 years behind the times. While that is a far way it isn't as bad as it seems.

Because of Vista failures most people are still using XP (Windows 7 hasn't gone out yet) so right now Microsoft is about 8 year behind the time... However because of Windows 7 and the fact they they learned from vista. They are expected to be caught up real soon.

Linux in terms of graphics and User Interface it is about the same now as XP... With some more modern elements so I will be nice and say Linux is about 5 years behind the time, in GUI. Some of the internals are state of the art the other are 30 years old and probably should be re-looked at but probably won't in fear of breaking compatibility.

OS X is mostly pretty modern. However some parts like Linux are 30 years old tech that are left behind. (Having to reformat my drive because of bad iNodes remind me of that)

So Amiga has a chance to get caught up. And I think there is a hungry market for an other OS.

Sure Most people use Windows however people want a good choices.

OS X will only work with Mac Hardware... Although Mac Hardware isn't more expensive then PC for the same specs you really have a limited choices for models and specs.

Linux for desktop and UI still isn't that great. And there is a lot of idealism that the average joe just doesn't care about... Why can't linux support this driver? Well because the manufacuture won't make it open source so We will not put it in our pure distribution. So what I want my hardware to work for the OS! And if you get people who are above grandma and below Tech Geek. You get a lot of questions on how you do a lot of rather basic (advanced) things.

Hyperion/SDK

[jDeepbeep]

Hyperion also provides AmigaOS SDKs for developers

If it contains anything like their Hyperion Intelligence Designer (IDE-wise), I'll pass. The API leaves much to be desired. If it's just a barebones toolchain, might not be so bad.

Re:Hyperion/SDK

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong Hyperion.

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, the way is open for new Peterodactyl harness companies to prosper-- the basic patent has been overturned.

Amiga comeback

[Atrox666]

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.

Re:Amiga comeback

[Anonymous Coward]

What Amiga taught me most was that you would not win in the computer market by being better.

It also taught me that, plus that users cannot rely on proprietary software.

Sure, I wanted the Amiga to "win," but as a user, what was really important was not whether it won or not, but whether it continued to be maintained and developed. Even with a small marketshare, a platform can totally kick ass and make that minority wonder why they're a minority. But if you don't get a serious update since 1992, then there's really nothing to wonder about.

When you get down to it, proprietary means "killable," whether killed by competitors or the parent. Linux may not win, but at least it's not killable. The only person who has any say in whether or not I can use Linux forever, is me. The Amiga OS copyright holders (whoever they are), not me, is who decided that I don't get to stay on Amiga OS. Never again will I spend a lot of money on something and remain vulnerable to that.

Re:Amiga comeback

[Darinbob]

Yep, better does not usually succeed. I had an Amiga, and an OS/2 machine. Of course, the nice thing is that eventually stuff does catch up. Even if some products never seem to really take off, you need to have them out there to serve as the guideposts. If there had never been any OS except those from Microsoft, do you think Windows 7 would look the way it does? If we'd only ever had CISC CPUs, do you think we'd have something resembling the modern Intel CPUs? If we'd never had Smalltalk or Lisp, do you think we'd have something like Java today?

Re:Amiga comeback

[Speare]

I'mma gonna let you finish but

It's like you stepped on a kitten, Atrox666.

Re:Amiga comeback

[yuhong]

On OS/2, MS was themselves partly to blame for choosing Windows instead of OS/2 back in 1991, and then attacking OS/2 afterwards. If MS chose OS/2 instead, Win32 would not even exist! Even worse, OS/2 did not require DOS while Windows did back then. Considering the attacks on DR-DOS got to the point where they ended up attempting to detect DR-DOS using the so-called AARD code and putting out a non-fatal warning message if it was detected, it would have been very important.

Oh good, I can breathe now

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I have been holding my breath waiting for the return of Amiga since 1994.

I'ld buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up with the C64 and Amiga 500, I remember it being ahead of any other pc functionality wise, until fps's were made.
THAT was the only thing this machine lacked I remember when PC's were catching on with the public, and the average Joe Schmoe was able to afford them..
I wouldn't break the bank if they started producing things again, but I would definately support them and buy stuff...

I mean cmon, even until 1998-99, my high school used a Video Toaster setup for video editing.

If you look at movies and the timelines, the original Stargate was fully created with the Amiga video editing powas...and it was incredible for it's time...

Yes, times have changed, and the world is in an Intel vs Mac vs Microshaft vs Nvidia vs ATI vs every other company...
And the Amiga is nowhere to be seen, but as soon as it is mentioned, the old support base comes out of the woodwork.

It's not the hardware, it's the people and ideas behind it, and they made it work once, whos to say they can't do it again, they've got my vote.

Anyways, I've still got a pic of Bill Cosby and a promotional setup selling a C64, he can't be wrong! :D

OK, I'll buy it, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga heads all. I agree the Amiga was totally ahead of it's time in many ways... etc, etc.

What I'm curious about is (and I ask this without a hint of trolling) what do you use your Amigas for now? Are there still relevant contemporary uses for this system?

The brilliance is hard to see but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...there are GREAT things to come out of this, and I'm surprised no one caught on or figured out how this will ~.,,,(a6 ** GURU MEDITATION ERROR **

Why do people still fight for Amiga?

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine there are patents involved with the hardware and operating system that earn $$.

The hardware chips in the Amiga were years and years ahead of anything similar in the PC world.

Toooooo little waaaay tooooo late

[McNihil]

word!

mo3 down

[Anonymous Coward]

it. Do no7 share

Oh god, I see it is that time of year again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Man I really hate this. Time flies by so fast that without me even realizing it, it is April first again. I really hate this time of year, when slashdot is filled with a bunch of annoying April Fool jokes that try to be funny but... :(

yayayayayayaya

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who still uses classic Amiga HW/SW (along with windows and linux on x86 and morphos on ppc), these two companies have been so far below my radar for so long, this news is new, but less than newsworthy, IMO. I did buy AmigaOS 3.5 andd 3.9, but I never really used them much as it seemed to me that the benefits were outweighed by the hassles of upgrading. I also have a copy of that AmigaDE SDK thing that was basically Tao Group's ElateOS, but I never got very far with it. I *can* say that my ca. 1991 A3000 running AmigaOS 3.1 is a far more dependable system than newer (dell) windows boxes we've bought at work. So when I need to do stuff that isn't impossible to do on a 25Mhz 68040, I use my desktop. If I need more speed, or resolution, or whatever, I use my WinXP/Inspiron 8600 (6 years old). All my web stuff runs on my CentOS x86 server. And if I want to hack, I turn to my Pegasos I running MorphOS. (As long as one of my cats hasn't already commandeered it for mouse research purposes.) IMO, this story is about as useful as an announcement that scientists have discovered that chocolate and peanut butter taste good together.

Not all programmers are careful

[tepples]

You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.

So how do users defend themselves from uncareful programmers?

Re:Not all programmers are careful

[Hal_Porter]

By not buying their programs. Or by powering off the computer when they crashed. Seriously back in the days where the OS was in Rom and you booted games off floppies and rebooted when you were done, protection didn't make an sense. Plus the in the 68K days there wasn't room for an MMU on chip. And privilege transitions (e.g. user to kernel) were prohibitively expensive for system calls, as was flushing the TLB on a context switch.

It's a different world from now where machines can be attacked from the internet by worms, malware, viruses and the like.

Re:Not all programmers are careful

[tepples]

You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.

So how do users defend themselves from uncareful programmers?

By not buying their programs.

Stores don't take returns.

It's a different world from now where machines can be attacked from the internet by worms, malware, viruses and the like.

My point is that Amiga has to sell into this world, not the old world.

Re:Not all programmers are careful

[Anonymous Coward]

A multi-tasking OS where you only dare to run one application at a time sounds awesome.

best pc experience

[iphonetune]

Dreaming back the old computer days, I must say that the Amiga times where the most fulfilling of all of my computer times I ever had. I know it is nostalgic to say that now but it feels like thinking back to my first real love in my live. That is something nobody can take away from me, although I am happy I am where I am now. Thanks to all the people that made this possible!

Re: Who uses this OS?

[TaoPhoenix]

Epic protection against malware!
"I betcha the malware jerks aren't writing for an OS they never even heard of!"
Bonus points if it resists MS's browser intrusions.

guys.. let it go

[synthesizerpatel]

Every time I hear about the Amiga now I remember an NPR story that talked about how the clothing you wear in your 30s is usually slightly updated versions of the same things you wore in your 20s -- for the simple fact that you equate the clothing you wear with a more youthful and fun time and have a sub-concious comfort in persisting.

If you ask any 'hip' 20 year old, no matter how hip you were 10 years ago -- whatever you're wearing now is stupid and you're completely out of touch with whats cool now.

I can say this as a die-hard Amiga user (die hard until C= folded that is..)

Those who dwell in the past are doomed to repeat it to anyone who will listen. And those people are also doomed.

So which is better, and why?

[zogger]

We see these nostalgia OS articles all the time, but I have never personally used any of them (outside of mac classic, which we will leave out for this discussion). So...all you greybeards, which is better, AmigaOS, BeOS, or OS/2? Which would you like to see REALLY resurrected with a lot of interest and development?

Not the world as it is...

[petrus4]

...but the world as it could be. That has always been the nature of the Amiga.

I've always had a strange feeling that the Amiga was like something out of an episode of Sliders.

It was almost as if, with this system, instead of being something from our own world, at some point a brief window to a different and more positive reality was opened; a place where the priority systems of people was aligned with what truly worked, and said place's inhabitants cared more about creativity, and community, and real innovation, and less purely about the profit motive, than they do here...and that for the few seconds said window was open, an A500 fell through it, was found by someone here, reverse engineered, and then reproduced.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_1PjOEFPTk - This is an example of what I'm talking about. A comparison with Linux on a very old machine. The Amiga always demonstrated the kind of performance which logically, just didn't seem as though it should be possible... ...and yet somehow, it was.

Re:delivered what ?

[Brigadier]

  Apples OS is based on NeXT and BSD, wrapped in a fuzzy window manager. I know your not trying to say apple just made this wonderful application. Same thing for the iPod They were just the first to put an mp3 player in a friendly format. Even the mp3 had existed for years prior to that. I'm sure your going to say the iPhone was all there also ? I love the company to death but what they do well is packaging not software or hardware.

The amiga os is still usefull...

[Anonymous Coward]

I constantly see people post, 'let it go', or 'how is it usefull', well personally I STILL USE the Amiga OS for a number of reasons. I use amikit with os3.9 almost entirely for using arexx. Often I find it easier and faster to whip together an arexx script to accomplish a vast number of things that I either can't do on other platforms or it takes much longer to do. For example not long ago I needed a way to automatically cycle displaying a group of websites. It took me about 2 minutes to script this in arexx. I also use it simply because it's fun. I often find myself wishing windows or mac os could be skinned and altered as easily as I can the amiga os. And I find myself wishing there was a shell (for any other platform) that even came close to kingcon. I find myself wishing other os's had the simple amiga windows push/pull button for windows stacking. And I find myself constantly missing the application control of arexx. (sorry, applescript sucked but nice try). So... yes, I still use the amiga os, and still find it usefull. (and yes I also use many other os's, linux centos, win xp & mac osx)

Let me just be the first to say...

[Narcocide]

LONG LIVE AMIGA!! :)

Re:delivered what ?

[kimvette]

The current Apple OS, OS X, is based on NeXT and BSD (it's basically the new version of NeXT). The original MacOS had no relation at all to any *nix version.

"real artists ship"

[vaporland]

Steven P Jobs

Re:delivered what ?

[metaforest]

It is indeed ironic that when NeXT surfaced a couple of years after SJ's ouster Tee-Shirts were printed and distributed within the Apple Macintosh Teams that had printed on them the NeXT logo modified to read "NeVR"

Ironic then that a little more than 10 years later SJ saves the company that had forsaken him, with the very operating system and SDK that was so hated by the Rank & File engineers at Apple.

AFAIK, JS was justifiably shown the door... He had become the tail that wags the dog. Sure he started the company with Woz, but he was functionally, little more than a very powerful product manager by the time the Macintosh was introduced.

His influence diminished rapidly as his bad-boy attitude and Apple's fortunes grew. When Apple broke $10M net in the 80's Apple was pushed aside by Real Executives with bona fide MBA credentials. While I personally feel that SJ was not ready to head Apple back then, (I was there when it all went down... still learning where the breakrooms and restrooms were) I don't think his "betters" were any more competent.... they just had better looking CVs.

----

Earlier comments about shipping products.... That is the key. Apple gets that right more often than not.
Apple had their own still-born Vista well before SJ rode in on a white horse with NeXT Step in his hip pocket. There was this PoS OS that had been designed, to once and for all fix the deficiencies of OS 6 and it's predecessors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)

It died a slow horrible death, and almost took Apple down with it.

I was ROFLMAO when I recently heard that Microsoft had named their Danger/SideKick inspired, iPhone-killer, project "Pink."

Amiga to Omega, Amigos

[Anonymous Coward]

I always preferred the Atari ST. Much cheaper and less crash prone.

But now I've installed a TRS80 emulator, I'm thinking we should all go back to TRSDOS.

Amiga Forever - Emulator

[7bit]

I loved my Amiga. It made working with a computer fun and exciting! Bit for bit it was faster and more capable than an PC or Apple or Mac my friends had in the 80's. It was so far ahead of everyone else that it took MS 10 more years to even start coming close (Win 95). As a result it's been impossible for me to be impressed by anything MS does...

Anyway, I could go on for hours about Amiga and how it would have changed the world if the oil baron who bought it out, bled it dry and illegally bankrupted it for his own profit hadn't gotten involved, but I originally started this post to share the link to the most "Official" Amiga Emulator around:
.

Amiga Forever - Amiga Hardware/Software Emulator
http://www.amigaforever.com/

It comes with several actual Amiga Kickstart ROM images as well as Workbench OS images and a huge collection of Amiga software and Games to play with! Plus, many more features that can make it easier to use and more fun even than using the original hardware. And it's cheap enough to buy on a lark. I would recommend it to anyone who has any fond memories of their Amiga. Oh, also, I might as well link to the same companies Commodore 64 Emulator package, which I also highly recommend:
.

C64 Forever - Commodore 64 System Emulator, also emulates : PET 2001, CBM 3032, CBM 4032, CBM 8032, VIC 20, CBM 610, C16, Plus/4 and C128
http://www.c64forever.com/

Enjoy!! :D

Amiga = Quantum Leap

[master_p]

The name "Amiga", for me, is synonymous to a quantum leap in computers: when the other computers had 4 colors in low res and simple "beep beep" sounds, Amiga had multiple hires color displays and stereo sound of the highest clarity.

An Amiga, today, in order to do the quantum leap, would have to:

A:
1) have hundreds of CPUs.
2) provide a multi-threaded programming model.
3) have the fastest memory interface.
4) be able to do real-time ray-tracing of movie quality.

or B:

1) provide the performance of a $5000 PC at the price of $199.

A new AmigaOS is a nice thing to have, but it only has sentimental value. No one is going to run it as a major O/S. Even Linux, with thousands of man work days behind it, has difficulties in being adopted by the mainstream.

Nostalgia thy name is Amiga

[joetrip]

I won an EMMY-award for a documentary I produced that contained 100% Amiga animation, titles and effects. I had three Amigas all genlocked with each other, overlaying multiple graphics in real-time to a 3/4" linear editing system. The trick was to have another operator trigger the effects on the furthest computer, since your arms couldn't reach that far. Otherwise, you had to be quick and have a well-oiled rolling chair. See clips here: http://bit.ly/wvECq

Many people still use the Amiga regularly

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga is a strong platform, What other computer platform is still alive from the 80's? Amiga has a large following and the user group is strong. I myself still use my A4000 that I towerised along with a Video Toaster Flyer, I have over 200gb of SCSI Audio Video drive space attached to the flyer and it still works flawlessly. Its 20 years old, PC's never last that long!

Is the Amiga ever going to become what it was? No. But its fun and its not as outdated as some say. It was way ahead of its time.

AmigaOS could still teach us a thing or two

[asteinmetz]

Yeah, the ship sank long ago and if we raised it we wouldn't want to sail in it. Still, I never tire of these nostalgic reveries that the occasional Amiga article triggers. I'm not a musician or an artist or a programmer, for that matter, but the Amiga allowed me to be quite the dilettante and be part of a community where we felt like we where really pushing the envelope. I was writing Mandelbrot set generators, sampling and sequencing music, rendering 3D animations with image-captured texture mapping, etc. (and there was a lot of etc). Ahh, good times...but no big deal by today's standards. There is one feature that I wish would catch on in the PC arena - inter-application scripting. Why can't Excel talk to Photoshop? By 1990, just about every Amiga application could talk to each other using ARexx. I commend Microsoft for implementing VB scripting across Office apps but wish this had caught on. I use past perfect tense because I think this ship has sailed (to reuse the sailing metaphor). With everything moving into the cloud we are seeing incredible mash-ups of apps, but it is all out of the hands of the casual user.