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The Amiga, Circa 2010 — Dead and Loving It
Orion Blastar writes "While many Amiga users have moved on to Linux, Mac OS X, and even, gasp shock, Microsoft Windows, some of us don't want to give up so easily. There are two open source projects that are keeping the Amiga legacy alive even if Amiga Inc. seems to be deader than a doornail and not really doing much but selling old Classic Amiga games for new platforms. Like WINE, there was a project to run AmigaOS 3.1 software for Linux and other platforms, but it evolved instead into an open source operating system named Amiga Research OS, or AROS. AROS is best run inside an emulator, and while it is not a modern OS like Linux, it can be downloaded and run inside of Linux (and the downloads section has more). While it is not ready for prime time yet, it is a promising OS that is being ported to many platforms and uses the user friendly Amiga GUI we Amiga users grew up with." Read on for more.
"OK — maybe AROS is not modern enough for you, and you like Linux instead. Then you might like Anubis OS, as it is a hybrid of AROS and Linux. Much like when Apple took NextStep (based on *BSD Unix and the MACH kernel) and the classic Mac OS to make Mac OS X, this project wants to take Linux and AROS and do the same thing.
For those who want the classic Amiga, there is UAE, the Universal Amiga Emulator, which needs kickstart ROMs and boot disk images to work. You can buy them from Amiga Forever; the emulator comes with all the files you need plus other goodies.
For the classic Amiga 68K series, it is recreated via the Minimig, which uses SD cards instead of floppy disks; a must for retro computer hobbyists. AmigaOS 4.1 exists for PowerPC based SAM 440EP systems like the SAM 440Ep systems and parts sold here. (I am not associated with Amiga Kit or Amiga Inc. or any Amiga company. I am just an Amiga user since 1985 and very much into retro computing.)"
For those who want the classic Amiga, there is UAE, the Universal Amiga Emulator, which needs kickstart ROMs and boot disk images to work. You can buy them from Amiga Forever; the emulator comes with all the files you need plus other goodies.
For the classic Amiga 68K series, it is recreated via the Minimig, which uses SD cards instead of floppy disks; a must for retro computer hobbyists. AmigaOS 4.1 exists for PowerPC based SAM 440EP systems like the SAM 440Ep systems and parts sold here. (I am not associated with Amiga Kit or Amiga Inc. or any Amiga company. I am just an Amiga user since 1985 and very much into retro computing.)"
..Year of the Amiga Desktop
. .
I wanted to try this out, but I couldn't find my AROS with both hands!
Atari TOS/GEM ( And later the open sourced MiNT ) was/is still better! So take that! Seriously tho, see where all that bickering got us? Compartmentalized and marginalized into oblivion as the world of mass produced, consumer oriented mediocrity won in the end.... But I suppose at least we are in the same boat now, going nowhere.. A shame really, as a 'PC' just has no soul.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hey man, I loved the Amiga as much as anybody. We had an A1000 in 1986 and got an A3000 thereafter. Fine computers, if they had had Apple's marketing acumen, they might have ruled the world. However, it really is time to let go now. Mac OS X is superior in just about every respect, and the hardware is lightyears beyond what CBM had. Emulators are great for nostalgia, we'll always have Nuclear War.
Wow, the Amiga system makes Mac systems look cheap by comparison, almost $600 for the motherboard alone that only gives you 512 MB of RAM and a 533 Mhz CPU! You can get twice that with a Mac mini. While I do realize that this is a niche product, its still -very- expensive.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I never owned or even used an Amiga, but I can't help but respect the longevity of its influence. /.
Don't listen to the disparaging remarks on slashdot. I would never have known even the little I know about Amiga, had it not been for the articles here on
Obviously reality matters (time and commitments etc) but if you guys can build a system in your own time that works keep doing it, it may even become a big deal to every one some day. enjoy
Oddly enough, the link wasn't a rickroll. But a tribute video to the Amiga set to "still alive"
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Cut 'em some slack. It's a slow day.
I would want to find out more about what sort of PowerPC core you get before jumping to conclusions based on the clock frequency. As for the RAM, you can get by on 512MB unless you are using software that hogs memory -- people still use systems with less that cost more.
Keep in mind that a PS3 has even lower numbers, at least if you want to run Linux, but still provides outstanding floating point performance and is still suitable for many tasks.
...not Amiga
We have the vaporware award, now we need a Dead Horse Beaters Award. Seriously for all those hanging onto their 8-track tapes and Beta tapes and Amigas. No significant commercial software has been released for the Amiga since the mid 90s and very little open source or freeware/shareware. You might as well have a 325 chevy engine setting on your computer desk just waiting for some one to build a car to put it in. I had a few Amigas back in the day. They had a lot of potential but they had their flaws too. Personally I liked the hardware more than the OS at the time. Also some features like being able to put ram on cards and such was a lot of fun back when PCs had a 32 meg line drawn in the sand. An Amiga 3000 had better than a gig of potential memory even though the hardware didn't exist. Amigas were very advanced but now they are very dead. Amiga's death blow was really when processors got fast enough so they could do with math what Amigas did with hardware. Ironically that's starting to reverse and more work is being shoveled onto video cards and such. Have your Amiga bronzed or gold plated and move on. You might as well be saying the south shall rise again as saying the Amiga OS will be viable again. It's so badly out of date now you might as well start from scratch.
My first computer was an Amiga 500. It was 1991. I was 4. It was the most amazing machine on the planet. I could draw pictures on it. I could play Thomas the Tank Engine. I could even make it say things out loud.
We only got rid of it, when the video chip fried itself. It was better than the Mac in it's day. Too bad it's almost gone.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
It beats someone trying to recreate them later using Frogger DNA.
rewriting history since 2109
Sound is more important than graphics! Amigas can't run GS/OS! //gs+ is coming out any day now !!1!11!!
Apple
(If you don't understand this, please don't rate it.)
Amiga had a "say" command before the speaker: device ever got devised. Yes, it can do some of the same stuff, but the difference is that "say" is a utility. To run it from a program you need to fire off another process running the utility and pass the data to it. Speaker: was/is a device,
so that all a program needs to do is open that device and write to it.
A program that knows how to write sequential files (or a pipe or a tee or ...) can be made to speak output for you without altering
the program itself. If it would have written a sequential file, it can be made, without changing the program, to speak its output with
a little device-independent I/O which has after all been with us since the early 1970s at least. (Check out the old pdp11 DOS-11 which
had a very complete such system, though no speaker: device.)
The speaker: device (speak: if you like) was a great idea. It is also suggestive of a form of I/O plumbing we don't see much, where
perhaps something other than speaking could be cast in similar ways. Trivially, consider voice input. Less trivially, some forms of robotic
controls or drawing or...
Just think of any operation that might be described via a set of commands, where it is desired to have the program NOT have
to know any of the details of implementing the commands (or conversely for inputs). Gradually things like this are being done, by
making browsers act as the OS and similar moves. Of course they have often been done without considering the security implications,
but device permissions can sometimes be useful in such a context, where having the permissions buried in some browser's source
code are harder to control or fix. Had the Amiga way been continued (or were it to be continued) perhaps that could be ameliorated.
Wat?
DVD set is a must (Ofcourse The various Kick's are needed but that is simple to get from the original disks or rom's.) Running all old code projects and to get at old content not available anymore because ooffice does not support Final writer and so on...
http://www.last.fm/music/16+Bit/INAXYCVGTGB :-)
The 1960's: "I was at Woodstock!"
The 1980's: "I had an Amiga!"
The Amiga crowd might be placated by an X-Windows interface skinned to look and behave like Amiga. Then port everything to keep it alive on Linux.
Yes I didn't read the whole thing and the part I skimmed I didn't understand, but I have the moral right on /. to comment especially after not reading properly.
Here are a few things that personal computing lost when the Amiga died.
* Abstraction of data handlers from apps. Datatype handlers were stored in their own directory. You could drop new ones in, and more or less *every* app of that type (sound/video/images/text/etc) would suddenly be able to read the new format. No farting about with "this app only handles image formats X and Y, but not Z". Drop in a datatype for Z, and it now handles Z. Sound editor didn't support saving in mp3? Drop in a datatype. Now it (and every other sound app on your system) does. It wasn't perfect, and some apps didn't support it, but many did.
* Single metadata format for everything. We now have 92340860159 different file formats, many replicating the same functionality as other ones. The Amiga had IFF (Interchange File Format). Ok, eventually all the stupid PC formats (then typically without any metadata to speak of and far less well designed) were supported, but originally IFF was just about it once you got above ASCII. Apps could be built to handle just a subset of the data from a file- e.g, just the sound from a video multimedia file, for example. You could parse the container without having to understand all the data in it. Granted, there are many other formats now which do that, but in the 80's it was groundbreaking, and with ONE container format instead of a million, you stood a much bigger chance of any given app supporting the scheme. To boot, it was open: most apps published their storage formats, and were typically good about using established standards for images, movies, sound, etc.
* About 10 years of time loss while DOS and later Windows PCs caught up to what the Amiga started out with. Who knows where we'd be now if they hadn't been so far behind from the start.
Yes, the say command was in the earliest a1000s with 256KB of memory, in 1986 or so. Mac preceded it in time but did not multitask, did not then have color. (Did not preemptively multitask; it could do some fast switching and keep several programs in memory, shades of the old 1970 1-8 user BASIC monitors. The Mac did more than the IBM PC with MSDOS, but Amiga was in keeping with workstation
systems' concepts. It was interesting that the requirement not to clobber the other programs in memory, with no hardware protection,
forced programs to play by OS rules pretty effectively. In that era people were discovering how hideously chaotic it got when two or
more programs tried to steal the same interrupt on a PC...or when one of them tried to exit...
Playing by OS rules also meant that the OS was forced to have facilities to control all aspects of sound, screen and so on. MSDOS
did not have this, but people programmed hardware directly. That kinda/sorta worked, but failed as soon as more than one program
tried it at a time. It wasn't until W2K, where hitting the hardware directly was prevented, that the Windows folks had to insist on an OS
that could control all functions of the hardware. Amiga had that at the beginning.
oh dear you had to read a story you weren't interested in. I think you should sue slashdot for emotional damages.
I don't mean to be a whippersnapper, but ... why would one install this? What does one do that constitutes "play"? Are there games you're nostalgic for, or is there something useful about it? I can understand running a VM of a current OS for development or sandboxing, but ... there's tasks there that can be made useful by that. What's one do with an Amiga VM?
Back when I was in college one of my dorm mates had an Amiga.
It had a two-player tank game where you basically raided the other guy's base. You could drop mines, and shoot his tank or his base.
Does anyone know what this game was called? Is there an online or PC version?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I find it odd that no one has mentioned MorphOS.
the amiga was dead 20 years ago if we want to be truthful about it guys. this is just a case of people doing stuff because they can. there's also a guy out there who collects brown paper bags.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"While it is not ready for prime time yet, it is a promising OS that is being ported to many platforms and uses the user friendly Amiga GUI we Amiga users grew up with."
Yeah, Amiga's a promising OS. It's just like my ex-girlfriend's promise to be loyal to me.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Atari TOS wasn't really an operating system in the modern sense of the term. More like a nice version of DOS, complete with 8.3 filenames and no multi-tasking to speak of. GEM wasn't half bad, but it was woefully limited compared to the Amiga windowing system, unless a single running application with a small number of windows was all you needed.
I really liked the Atari monitors though - they were extraordinarily crisp. And the Atari ST hard drives were faster (and more common at first) than ones for the Amiga. Atari STs often had more RAM too. And the Atari monochrome mode (with the right monitor) produced much more stable displays at high resolutions - no interlacing required. That was a disadvantage of the Amiga until the Amiga 3000 came out, especially for desktop publishing applications.
Besides AROS and UAE, Hyperion is keeping the old OS updated. It seems you can buy it online for the current 'mig powerpc board (and the hardware if you lack it). http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=839
Well there's also (C) Projects that recreate the hardware and (D) Projects that integrate the OS with Linux. I believe it is unique in this regard, dead 15 years and still going strong.
Well, it wasn't more than a few days ago he was crying about a lack of Amiga coverage on Slashdot, now he's gone and created his own submission. That would normally be fine, but the asshole makes remarks like "gasp shock, Microsoft Windows". It might surprise you to learn that after years of nursing a dying machine with a dried up software library that many of us didn't want to move to yet another platform with a limited selection. I personally knew six other Amiga users "back in the day". None of them gave two shits about anything Unix related. To us, the Amiga was about ideas that move computers forward, not trying to recycle old ideas. Only one of them moved to a Mac, the others moved to Windows, including myself.
For the record, when you mention emulators you give people a link to UAE, which is horribly out of date. UAE is far behind WinUAE, the Windows port. As usual on the emulation scene, the Windows version is better developed and has far more features. What does that mean? It means if you want the fastest, most accurate Amiga emulation, you need to be using Windows.
Turning to a Linux advocate for thoughts on Microsoft is like asking Hitler how he felt about the Jews.
The whole Amiga OS story is utterly misplaced and foolish. Amiga, for those who were into PCs, really, was a story about hardware that was way ahead of its time for the price. You had a 32 bit processor in the 68k married up with 4 channel waveform audio and hardware accelerated bitmap graphics. It was amazing, it really was. But as someone who learned C on the Amiga, I never thought the Operating System was really all that great. Indeed, I had a really fun summer working on a game engine with a friend of mine and our biggest triumph was NOT to use the operating system to manage the Blitter because it was too damned slow. I mean, Intuition had its upsides, for sure, but overall, the whole Amiga story was about the hardware. People bought that Hardware Reference Manual because it was so well written, and, in those days, you had IBM PC's with CGA / EGA graphics and the best sound you got from them was a dopy Adlib or SoundBlaster with tinny crappy FM synthesis and Amiga had faux true-color displays with quadraphonic sound playing. It was a revolution.
For me, to get that same kind of hardware buzz, since then, has really been in workstations. I loved my Dual Pentium II with first a FireGL and then a Voodoo2 and then an nVidia GeForce board, that was Amiga to me. I loved my Dual Opteron, that was Amiga to me. And right now, I have my dual Nehalem Xeon with a GeForce GTS, that is Amiga to me. Amiga's not a software story, never has been. It's about hardware that makes you imagine entirely new kinds of applications with just the sheer power available, power that makes you drool, or at least, is really fun to screw around with.
This is my sig.
That low-level access gave the Amiga several firsts:
Hardware accelerated 4-channel digital audio
4,096 colors (when the PC was limited to 16... Hercules offered hi-res monochrome)
Hollywood acceptance as an A/B video editor + SFX engine (commercials of the 1980's & Babylon 5 + others)
The exclusive screenshots to every PC title for a decade
Granted, computers have come far today. Consider their inspiration. The Amiga really did pave the way for advanced technology. It was a brief moment in PC technology that shaped the entire industry. Had Commodore had decent management, they would have ruled the world. The Amiga was at least 10 years ahead of everything that followed. Claiming superiority more than 20 years later is slightly lame. Of course we've surpassed the original hardware. You still need to acknowledge the masters of history.
Hardware accelerated 4-channel digital audio
The best part about Amiga audio was the per channel 6 bit volume modulation, which made it possible to effectively have four channels of fourteen bit digital audio, each with independent sample rates and excellent dynamic range, using hardware that was much superior to that common on PCs for a very long time. Sampled digital audio cards weren't common on PCs until what, 1995? If you didn't have a sound card at all you got wonderful one bit sound, like the Apple II.
4,096 colors (when the PC was limited to 16...)
When the Amiga came out, the only common bitmapped graphics support on PCs was CGA, which had four selections of four fixed, extremely ugly colors. You only got 16 (fixed) colors in text mode. When EGA came out, you still only got a set of 16 fixed colors to choose from. PC graphics were pathetic until VGA became common, and then only for low resolution games.
If someone could recreate an amiga on an ARM cpu netbook.
Imagine Amiga OS running on 512mb of memory and 16gb flash drive.
You could probably run every amiga program ever made on a 16gb flash drive!
Now imagine if you had a button that would bring up Amiga OS and another button that would bring up a C64 screen.
Well, I'm all for taking out everyone who develops a inner platform, and shooting him.
That will work great when the day comes where we are all running essentially the same operating system, with the same graphical environment, libraries, utilities, and all. None of this KDE vs. GNOME stuff.
And isn't virtually every programming language on the planet just an inner platform for C and kernel level system calls?
I bought my Amiga1000 in 1985. I also have a genlock, the 256 kb memory expansion pack, and another 2 MB of ram on the side. Kickin' stuff there. Also a Progressive Peripherals Framegrabber. I think I still have all of this stuff somewhere (along with kickstart and workbench disks, somewhere). Oh, and Amiga Basic and an Amiga Basic compiler. Somewhere. I know I didn't sell any of this stuff, but haven't used any of it for more than about 20 years. I currently have Linux on a Corei7-920 (I've had for about a year). It kinda beats the Amiga in speed and graphics ability (Nvidia 9600GT, twin Samsung p2270 monitors, 12GB of triple channel memory, 1.5 TB of disk space in the box, plus another 320 GB outside the box). The Amiga is a real nice, 20 year old machine. My motherboard can accept a Corei9 (and I'm tempted). The Amiga, try as it might, can't compete against that.
[begin rant] X is precisely everything the Amiga was not, an innovation that set open systems graphics back by at least a decade. Aside from an SGI app here or there I never saw an X interface that looked good until 1998 or so. Functional yes, attractive compared to the alternatives, not in the slightest.
X was so poorly designed that network transparency, which should have been its greatest strength, was essentially unusable anywhere other than the local LAN, and still is to this day. RDP runs circles around what X can do, for example, across any real network. To get X to perform like RDP you have to have an intermediary layer like NX that uses all sorts of tricks to work around the design deficiencies of X in the first place. You have to use some sort of wrapping protocol just to get rudimentary security, so you can actually open a remote terminal session across the Internet, a wrapper for which there are no real standards, and which doesn't come configured or installed on a default basis practically anywhere. Let's run SSH, map a bunch of ports, and set a half dozen environment variables! No thank you.
Regrettably, the history of X largely consists of undoing or making extensions to work around the severe limitations of the original design, limitations that (among other things) made X programming more difficult than practically any other graphics system on the planet, with the possible exception of (horror of horrors) Win32.
[end rant]
Twenty years ago? I don't think so. Twenty years ago Amiga popularity was at its peak. Fifteen years ago, on the other hand (especially with the advent of Window 95), it was clearly on the decline, and virtually dead not too long afterwards.
I think you are neglecting the merits of having a (preemptively) multitasking operating system with a decent user interface in the first place, something that was a major attraction to a lot of people. Windows was ugly by comparison, up until the day Windows NT 4 was released.
The OS overhead could be a bit much for games, but slow compared to not having a blitter at all? There were plenty of games that didn't need to go outside the operating system, other than occasionally writing to the frame buffer of course (which was perfectly legitimate). Why reinvent functionality that is perfectly adequate (for what you are doing) in the first place?
The operating system made a *big* difference though. The Atari ST had decent hardware, and lots of great games, but the operating system was basically a DOS clone with a non-multitasking (and rather simple minded) graphical environment thrown on top of it. On the Amiga, open a half dozen command line shells, an editor, and a paint program - no problem. On the Atari ST, with its comparable hardware (in most respects) it was all one program at a time, which made it *much* less fun in real life. That is the difference the OS makes.
One of the things that really sold the Amiga was, of course, its amazing graphics. EHB mode was better than anything EGA could offer, and had no restrictions, and HAM6 has of course amazing, even with the odd restrictions on it. Ok, but this was all compared to EGA. Problem is, PCs kept moving. By 1995, PCs had SVGA chipsets, these could do 800x600 and even 1024x768 in non-interlaced, high refresh rates. They also could do high and true color without special restrictions. All that, and they were cheaper.
So one of the big wow factors, and one of the big things that helped justify the Amiga's price went away. Their graphics were second best to a much cheaper system. This was a problem, particularly since so much of their market had been around graphics use.
There wasn't any single thing that lead to Amiga's death, it was a combination of factors.
seen here.
Makes Perl look like fucking Shakespeare.
Other than that - it's an OS created to run games, that doesn't run games, but has the GNU toolchain ported. Is this Linux?
Rather than simply mod your post flamebait, I think I'll respond to it point-by-point.
For one, software. At the time Linux didn't (and in many ways still doesn't) have a robust commercial software library.
Pure 100% distilled fanboy bullcrap. Posix. Go read up on it. Java might be a nice follow up read - Linux runs that just fine too. I'll leave it up to you to determine their industry impact.
Next, there is the Unix philosophy and culture, which for many of us seemed like yet another group of people desperately holding onto the past.
Seemed is the big word in this sentence. The Internet is still primarily Un*x boxes. You know it, we know it. Get over it.
This isn't the first time I've had to defend Amiga from Linux zealots like you. We do not like Linux and don't wish to ever be associated with it, period.
All of us, huh? I loved my Amiga too. In fact I still own one. But that doesn't mean you get the right to speak for me.
About the only thing we had in common was a juvenile dislike for anything Microsoft simply because it was the competition. Well, guess what. Some of us grew up. The ones who didn't? Well, I bet you can figure out what happened to them.
I have no problem with Microsoft. Juvenile hate is juvenile hate - even yours.
I was hired in to a firm to write Linux drivers in my post Amiga days. That same firm gave me a job that paid off my mortgage. That's what happened to one of them.
And yes, I also do Microsoft work there too. I'm not a platform bigot of any kind. Some problems require a hammer, other problems a screwdriver. Use the appropriate tool for the job. Learn them all. Limiting your worldview simply makes you less useful. Learn MacOS, learn Linux, learn Windows. Know what each does best and use where appropriate.
And cease with the fanboy whining.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
There was a titlebar button (where minimize is on windows) that rotated the z index of the window, it didnt automatically shunt the in-focus window to the front of the screen. You've no idea how obviously useful the seperation of these two things are until you use the system in anger. Personally i'd like modern desktops to allow you to control the z index of a window by holding the left mouse button down on the title bar and letting you use the mouse wheel to pull it closer r push it backwards (seen as you can already move it in the X/Y plane by dragging the title bar the step isnt that massive) you could get what was called a commodity on amga to fine tune the z index interaction, i had it set up so that double clicking a title bar would bring that window to the top, and see no reason why this cant be emulated also (KDE, at least, allows you to do this)
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
You're painfully comparing apples and oranges. RDP, VNC and their ilk are just remote framebuffer protocols. X11 ran the whole GUI stack across the network. The difference is that RDP-style solutions do all rendering in the main computer and export copies of the screen across the network, while with X11 the rendering is done on the end computer, while the main computer only runs the application. X11 scaled better on the main computer end, since it didn't need a virtual framebuffer for each user to be exported. It was not meant to be run over modem lines, and worked nicely on 10M LAN with dozens of X11 terminals per server. For modem-line usage, you should check out NoMachine's NX and it's spinoffs, FreeNX and Neatx.
Even nowadays, you can use X11 on LAN and get almost identical feel on the applications as on local computer, with opengl and all. Running X11 apps over SSH tunnels, for example, is very nice. For low-bandwidth remote usage, plain terminal over SSH is still the king. You can easily do it on most cellphones, for example.
Atari ST also ran a version of OS/2 which at the time, was the bees knees... I learned to write posix C on one of those systems when I worked for an Atari subsidiary. They were faster than PCs of the day too. Some of the graphics compression code I wrote in support of a NES game I was being paid to develop could only be run on that ST because it had enough CPU and RAM to get 'er done. None of the 80x86 PCs in '88 could touch it for raw processing power, RAM and HD speed.
this post is nothing more than information that most Amiga fans already know
So, what, all five of you? Or are there a few more left still? I already knew most of it because I try to follow operating systems developments, but for most readers on this site (you know, the one for nerds) this is something geeky that they didn't know. It's also a chance in a new year for people to reminisce about the Amiga, the platform that a lot of people grew up with.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, the big problem with X with regards to network transparency is xlib, not the X11 protocol. The protocol is very well designed for remote use (although not as nice as NeWS or DPS), but xlib was designed to make X11 programming 'easy' and so wrapped an asynchronous protocol in a synchronous API. Run a typical xlib program over the network and you'll see that the network is not saturated and the CPU load on both machines is tiny. The reason for this is that the client is spending most of its time in blocking xlib calls. If you have a 100Mb/s network with 100ms latency, you can only make ten blocking xlib calls per second, which doesn't come close to using the network throughput.
XCB does a lot to improve on this. It's very close to the protocol and designed for asynchronous use. If you write good XCB code, your app will be very responsive over the network (or all apps using your toolkit, if you are using the XCB to write a toolkit).
Xlib is too low level to be nice for writing apps and too high level to be nice for writing toolkits.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They just teased us today with some new photos of a coming motherboard wtih pci express and most like at least dual core.
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=30351&forum=2&start=0&viewmode=flat&order=0
Hey! Back to fannation
You could plug two mice into the Amiga and play 2 player split screen lemmings.
I haven't seen this emulated anywhere yet. Anyone know how to get two mice running on an Amiga emulator?
Cheers
[Intentionally left blank]
Floppy disc eating piece of garbage pwned by 520st
OS/2? On a 68000? Are you sure about that?
Those monitors were amazing. And with the Specter Magic-sac you could run Macintosh software on the ST on a better looking monitor at a higher resolution.
Ugg Classic Spam Chinese Sweatshop bizkickz.com
Let's see what Google does with that !
I believe he may be thinking of OS-9.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
You know, I love my Amigas. Have a 1200, a 1000, and a bunch of 3000 boxes.
but talk about a computer with so much promise and serious epic fail.
Here's what I don't understand.
Why back when, when whomever bought and decided to go with some non common (and expensive) hardware to keep the Amigas alive past it's prime, what the hell they were thinking?
Seriously, The Amigas natural procession (IMO) would of been a desktop/workspace over a linux kernel.
Don't worry about backwards compatability, seriously, screw it.
of course, now it's too late to do that, and I guess they are sort of trying a work around.
But they left me behind years ago.
Be seeing you...
Yes, that is what I was looking for! I loved that game! Gotta see if there is a PC version.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This guy still uses his (updated) Amiga. Running AmigaOS 4.1, it looks real snappy.
Be sure to watch part 2 and 3 for a demo
part 2
part 3
Here are a few things that personal computing lost when the Amiga died.
*
I think you missed the point Amiga it is still alive and kick(start)ing... :-D
Perhaps modern AmigaOS and MorphOS have REGGAE stream data muxer and demuxer system.
It is something other OSes will catch (again as usual) in next 20 years from today.
#3 is taken care of by the little known mac command line "say". I just tried and "ls | say" read out my directory from the terminal.
So Macintosh got a command line and SAY command after 20 years since Amiga did?
Certainly Mac is not the smartest guy in the town... :-D
Ehi Houston, listen these news: A little step for Amiga requires a giant leap, much money, a whole change of OS Kernel and huuuuge amount of time for Macintoshes to reach.
Ridiculous.
What's next?
(Or better... What's NeXT?)
What surprises me is how many Amiga ideas died with the Amiga.
Again you too missed the point that Amiga is alive and kicking... better... It is alive and KICKSTARTING.
You can buy modern AmigaOS and Amiga Hardware in online stores.
And perhaps take a look at modern amiga software:
http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/efika-morphos.html
Keep in mind this Amiga Alive fact next time.
1)
To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
Except if you use Amiga PFS filesystem that is Journaled Filesystem and so be sure that there is no pending hard Disk Activity.
2)
Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
Modern Amigas can do that again even with modern GFX cards. You missed nothing.
And it still better than stupid Unix-Linux-macOSX (and now also Windoze) multiple desktop thingie.
3)
Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
And you can also consider whole internet as an Amiga device...
Try to prompt your Amiga Shell (Command line interface) with something like this:
COPY TCP:http://www.mysite.org/myimage.jpeg" TO amigadevice:
And it will work flawlessly.
4)
Bidirectional linked list filesystem. If you lose a sector or sector link, most of the file could be rebuilt by following links from both ends towards the bad sector.
Obsolete... Amiga Now deals with USB 2.0 Memory keys too..
5)
The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
Obsolete... Even Amiga can use wireless keyboards and you put your keyboard just where you want.
And you missed more:
I) Datatype system that is now being replaced with STREAMING muxer/demuxer data system
II) An efficient device and directory system. Any system file in Amiga is put in its own place into a hyerarcical directory sytem where ANY DIRECTORY has names intelligible for the common user..
AOS:Utiltiies
AOS:Devs/Monitors
AOS:Prefs
AOS:Prefs/Tools
Etcetera
(Windows still puts all into giant C:\Windows enormous garbage. Unix/Linux is a geeky system for geeky persons where normal people must face dislexia named directories such as "usr", "bin", "etc", etcetera... :-D )
III) RAM: RAM Disk Device that stays on desktop and twhere you can put temprary files, use it as virtual device in which inflate/deflate compressed data archives, and so on....
Also it occupies zero "0" RAM memory when unused.
(Still unsurpasssed feature in any OS)
IV) OS running with a few system tasks... (almost 40 more or less) even unexperienced Amiga users learn with ease what is running in the system.
V) Amiga Desktop responsive to user input even if Amiga is busy with other number crunching.
(Try to get any response from Windows XP while is busy with memory swapping even on modern dual core CPUs... It could pass lots of minutes before get any response or lots of minutes before programs will open after clicked upon by user)
VI) No hardware resource consuming...
Typical AmigaOS installations occupies from 40 MEGAbytes to 100 MEGAbytes with AmigaOS 4.0... LEaving all your disk space for programs and mainly your data files.
Typical Amiga programs occupy just some dozens of MEGAbytes, and not entire gigabytes of disk space as in Windows.
(Windows programs are often full of unwanted multiple and redundant features. have you even pressed F11 function keys in Windows Office? it pulls out an entire Visual Basic For Applications environment)
VII) Thanks to AReXX Amiga can even build new applications by merging existing funcions of actual software.
Look for example
Win95 didn't kill the Amiga, the new owners did, coupled with the first viable alternative that was available at the time...Linux.
Win95 didn't kill the Amiga, neither the new owners.
You can still buy new AmigaOS 4.1 and new Amiga Hardware SAM440EP and FLEX motherboards on internet computer stores.
So keep in mind that Amiga is still here.
..Year of the Amiga Desktop
Amiga Desktop is called Workbench!
Keep it in mind!
And Amiga it is here to stay! :-D
Even Intel thinks they can do better now, but their RISC and later VLIW efforts failed in the face of x86-entrenchedness
So why don't they just make a processor that can handle two instruction sets, and phase the old instruction set out?
I have never been convinced that Intel wanted the Itanium to replace the x86 architecture, because it was too exotic and cost too much. More like an attempt to capture part of the high end server market away from POWER, SPARC, and Alpha. It certainly did a pretty good job of cannibalizing the latter, in some sort of mutual suicide pact.
The Itanium was so inappropriate as an x86 upgrade path that Intel deserves half of the credit for establishing x86 dominance for another generation. AMD the other half of course.
The PCI bus is a *very* nice bus, perhaps the most modern bus design on the planet, at with with PCIe. It is used on a number of non-x86 architectures, most notably Sun SPARC boxes. I would be more than a bit surprised if Apple didn't eventually adopt it regardless of their decision to go to x86.
I can't speak to the merits of ATI's chips, but isn't having any decent GPU better than having none at all? Certainly GPUs were a relatively new thing in the Macintosh world, and you have to get your GPUs from *somebody*.
It is too bad that Firewire is on the way out, though.
Wikipedia, for example, lists MS-DOS as an operating system
I would hesitate to consider Wikipedia an authority on anything. That aside, where do you draw the line? Is a BIOS an operating system? A device driver? A boot ROM? What about a CPU? Is a CPU an operating system? I can run programs on it, can't I?
Take the Apple II for example. When the Apple II first came out, floppy drives were expensive and rare. So you could load and save from audio tape instead, a function that took up a couple hundred bytes of the 2K monitor ROM.
Assuming I don't need BASIC, I turn the computer on, enter a monitor command to load a program from cassette tape, press play on the tape recorder, wait a few minutes, and then enter a command to start the program at the load address. The program, once loaded, makes absolutely no use of any of the code in ROM, until it terminates and back comes the monitor prompt.
So the question is: Was the Apple II monitor an operating system? It could save, load, and run files from tape, right?
(By the way, the only thing that makes notepad.exe on Windows an application and the Notepad desk accessory on the Mac a "desk accessory" is a distinction that the Mac itself makes. If desk accessories could do everything that applications could do, and in the same way they did it, no one would care. "Mac desk accessory" and "Mac application" would be a distinction without a difference, sort of like "BIOS" and "Boot ROM".)
(By the way, the only thing that makes notepad.exe on Windows an application and the Notepad desk accessory on the Mac a "desk accessory" is a distinction that the Mac itself makes. If desk accessories could do everything that applications could do, and in the same way they did it, no one would care. "Mac desk accessory" and "Mac application" would be a distinction without a difference, sort of like "BIOS" and "Boot ROM".)
Lotus Notes calls an email a "memo." Does that mean Notes isn't an email client?
Comment of the year
Amiga will always still be here.
We're resigned to that. It will resurface in Slashdot threads at least once a year forever.
I can only imagine what the 2020 threads will look like. Gramps N waving his cane in fury at Old Man Jones who switched to Windows 95 in 1997. Old Harvey maintaining that Amiga is STILL viable because the embedded controller in his prosthetic leg runs it under emulation.
Rinse. Repeat. Forever.
I'm sorry, I think you care a lot more about this subject than I do. Is there any truth to the question of whether (fill in the blank) is an operating system? It is just a matter of convention. Hardly more than a matter of idle curiosity.
In my opinion, the world would be infinitesimally better off if we adopted the convention that operating systems actually operate more than one non-trivial program at once, and multitask between them on an equal basis. No doubt you disagree.
We still get occasional articles of other popular old platforms, such as MacOS. And we still get occasional articles of current but obscure platforms. The Amiga falls into both of these categories, so why should it be any different?
Certainly more interesting than the daily Iphone advertisements, anyway...
I'm sorry, I think you care a lot more about this subject than I do.
That's a great way to dodge a difficult question. "Well I don't have an answer but I don't care neither! Naaah."
In my opinion, the world would be infinitesimally better off if we adopted the convention that operating systems actually operate more than one non-trivial program at once, and multitask between them on an equal basis. No doubt you disagree.
Yes, because the *convention* is already established and it's not that.
What you're wanting to do is change an existing convention, and frankly you don't have the cultural influence to pull that one off, buddy.
Comment of the year
Yes, because the *convention* is already established and it's not that.
Only among the historically uninformed. No UNIX or VMS guy from the 1980s would consider MS-DOS an operating system. A system for operating disks, sure, but not a general purpose "operating system". As I said, that is why it was called a "Disk Operating System", not an "operating system". The serious system guys would laugh if you called it that.
MS-DOS is barely more sophisticated than Apple DOS, and believe me, *no one* called Apple DOS an "operating system". Apple itself didn't call the Mac system software an operating system up through and including System 7. Not "OS 7" but "System 7". Apple didn't start referring to their system software as an "OS" until 1996 or so, with the later versions of what was System 7, renamed "Mac OS 7.6" or thereabouts.
If Apple users needed a real (preemptive, multi-user, etc) operating system what they sold them was "A/UX", Apple's version of Unix. You simply couldn't make a general purpose server out of Mac anything until Mac OS X. Of course you wouldn't want to use an Amiga back then for a general purpose server either, even though it was capable of it.
Whatever, none of that changes (or even addresses) my point: the term is already established.
That's true regardless of how "historically informed" I am. You're spouting complete bullshit, and it's starting to piss me off.
Comment of the year
You're such a liar. Take a look at "Inside Macintosh" from the System 6 era - Apple calls it "system software" which comprises the "Macintosh Toolbox" and the "Macintosh Operating System."
And to clear this up for you, "disk operating systems" were called that because they were operating systems that supported disk functionality.
This is an idle pastime for me. No doubt you have better things to do.
I agree the "convention" changed among a large number of PC users who couldn't tell the difference between a glorified disk driver and an operating system, and the unfortunate name clash between "DOS" and "OS".
I will grant that the Mac system software was ten to twenty times as sophisticated as MS DOS ever was. Microsoft didn't come close to catching up (in their own products) until the release of Windows 95.
I have for some time wondered why more projects don't take the approach Anubis is; getting rid of the parts of the Linux kernel they don't like or need and keeping the rest to get the hardware support. We've got Linux, the BSDs, and interesting L4-based kernels like Genode. Why not put something together that allows for a common driver framework? It's a shame that projects like Haiku have to limp along such a tiny list of hardware options when they're doing such interesting things with the user space.
Yeah, absolutely. GEM was DRI's graphical environment, which they wrote to live over MS-DOS. When Atari wanted this on the 68K, they could have run it over CP/M-68K, which was actually a better "DOS" than MS-DOS. Unfortunately, there was so much MS-DOS specific crap in GEM, it was easier just to hack together a compatible MS-DOS replacement. That was GEMDOS, which Atari called "TOS".
Anyone confusing GEM/TOS with AmigaOS needs some serious counseling. That's kind of like preferring Windows 3.1 to Ubuntu... maybe someone does, but if so, they're probably very, very misguided individuals.
-Dave Haynie
He probably means OS-9/68000, which was kind of the "default" 68K OS to run, if you didn't need a GUI or anything else in those days, but wanted a more or less UNIXy environment. The Philips CD-i project also used OS-9 as its basis.
There is/was a version, called OS-9000, which ran on x86 and a few other CPUs. And back at least when I was attending ATSC conferences, there was another spin of this called "DAVID", intended for smart TV and STBs. That's the last I heard of it, back in the mid 1990s.
-Dave Haynie
Intelligent Window Manager.
When you're running an application in AmigaOS, let's say it's so busy, it's not reading window messages (Windows would report this app as "not responding"). For most applications, you could still move the window around, shrink it, grow it back, etc. At worst, the contents of just that window don't refresh. You don't have the window "stuck" not responding, you don't have parts of other windows getting into each other, as you often see in other OSs. You can even resize the window (again, you MAY not see it refresh properly, or you may, depending on the nature of the window itself).
Datatypes
System level objects used everywhere. You don't care about the kind of graphic file or video you're opening, you just open an IMAGE or a VIDEO or a DOCUMENT or whatever in your program, and you can open any of these known to the system. BeOS implemented a similar idea, but I haven't seen it anywhere else. Sure, there are programs that do this for you, and different systems within the same OS to deal with SOME media types. But nothing as complete, not at least that I've seen.
AREXX
Every program of consequence had an AREXX port. Basically, any command the program could understand was available in AREXX (standard scripting language, originally invented at IBM). So you could build very interesting interactions between running programs. Linux users get a taste of this, between a million command lines and pipes, but this was so much more powerful. And very well supported, pretty much in every commercial application.
ASYNCHRONOUS I/O
Every I/O operation to every device driver could be done synchronously or asynchronously. So what becomes a pain in the butt in an OS like Linux was a couple of extra lines of code in AmigaOS. Of course, in those days, there was no point of asynchronous I/O for Windows or MacOS, since they didn't multitask and pretty much had to dedicate the CPU to loading or unloading your I/O, anyway. But it was a beautiful thing in AmigaOS, in the day.
Probably some other stuff, but I gotta go. It's not that I plan on firing up my A3000 when I get home, rather than that home-integrated Q9550 PC with nVidia 8800GT graphics, 8GB RAM, twin 1920x1200 monitors in 24-bit, and 11TB of total attached storage. My old Amiga was weak at electronics CAD, and I'd still be waiting for that first AVC render for Blu-Ray creation to finish... not to mention the lack of support for huge drives and all. But it's a shame when you have to leave behind better ideas just to move forward a bit.
And don't even get me started on word processing... all the power I had with Scribe at CMU in the 80s, to be stuck with things like Word or OpenOffice, it's crime. I do like the WYSIWYG editing, just wish they didn't have to remove 100 IQ points from the formatting engine to get that....
-Dave Haynie
This is a bit on the nitpicking side, but as someone with very fond memories of Amiga, I can't resist a couple of corrections/comments:
VGA hardware let you have 16 colors at 640x480 and Amiga only had 4
Do you mean the Productivity mode (i.e. 640x480 without use of interlace) that was first present on ECS chipset (which was a minor disappointment as an update over OCS, and in hindsight a bit of an early omen about Commodore's inability to keep the competitive edge)? I'm wondering about this, because even the original chipset did allow use of 16 colors at that resolution (but with interlacing). For still images there was also the so-called Dynamic HiRes that was not a 'real' screen mode, but instead a software trick to use the Copper to switch the 16-color palette for each individual horizontal line with little CPU overhead.
Concerning non-bitmapped scalable fonts, AmigaOS 2.04 (introduced with A3000) did introduce the so-called outline fonts. I don't really remember whether they could also be rotated via OS itself, though.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
I was a proud owner of various Amigas 500,1200, 4000 although you did get guru mediation crashes (even crashes were cool on the amiga) it never occurred by just running desktop apps, it was always a game/graphics app that crashed the system never just using your desktop.
For me my computer dark ages occurred during 1996-2001 - the years I used Windows.
Going from an Amiga 1200 to Windows 95 was the worst downgrade of my life, although my brand new PC had a infinitely faster CPU and more RAM it was so slow, any sound and graphics would constantly skip, software which used to be free now cost a lot and didn't work as well, and windows just crashed all the time..
My Dark age finished when I started using Linux, I tried XP but that was even slower than Windows 95/98, it also crashed.