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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
. .
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 ----
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
Yeah, but don't forget that AmigaOS doesn't fuck around.
Yeah, it doesn't do anything. It's a corpse.
It beats someone trying to recreate them later using Frogger DNA.
rewriting history since 2109
There's the joke that with Commodore's marketing "savvy", had they tried to do something like KFC they would have called it "Warm Dead Bird" ...
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
The 1960's: "I was at Woodstock!"
The 1980's: "I had an Amiga!"
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.
There are a number of reasons why the Amiga could run so well using a 50MHz processor or slower.
1) The OS used a flat memory model. The entire address space of the 680x0 looked the same to all processes. So there was no slowdown doing page table translations on a per process basis.
2) Every process could read and write to every other process's memory. One process could pass a memory pointer to a second process, which would then have direct read-write access to every data structure the first one had. No having to pass huge amounts of data using semaphores or pipes.
3) The GUI was very primitive. The BOOPSI widget subsystem was about as bare to the metal as you could get. Even extensions such as ClassAct/ReAction were very minimalistic. That made it very fast.
Of course, that all comes with a price.
1) The flat open memory model meant that any sort of malicious software could eavesdrop on any other memory location without bother. Stealing passwords or silently copying data from your word processor? No problem!
2) That same memory model meant that any program could go outside of its bounds and trash any other program in memory, including the kernel. That's why Amigas tended to crash more often than even Windows 95 boxes.
3) Memory fragmentation was horrible because the OS had no form of garbage collection. You couldn't move allocation blocks around in memory because there was no form of abstraction, either using Win32 style handles or virtual memory pages.
4) No memory tracking / garbage collection. If a process closed without freeing memory, it was gone forever. After a while, you'd run out of memory and would have to reboot.
5) Every modern widget toolkit around today, including Qt, GTK+ and Cocoa, generally make BOOPSI look absolutely prehistoric. Try doing any sort of raster or Unicode based apps under AmigaOS. You'd probably have to write your own BOOPSI extensions to get what you want.
6) You would have hit the 4GB limit of the 68020/030/040 much faster had the platform remained around unaltered. That's because every process would share that space. With OSes like OS X, BSD and Windows, each process gets its own 4GB (~3GB after kernel reservations) to play around in.
Yeah. Even your mobile phone has an OS with better memory management and UI functionality than your Amiga 4000.
I heard it as marketing sushi as "cold, dead fish."
Cheers from the (long-defunct) Amiga-centric Ack! Phffft! BBS! (circa 1992)
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
And Mac OS "classic" was not an OS, was a crash-prone, non-multitasking toy.
Yes. Structurally speaking, Mac OS Classic was about as much an operating system as DOS was (aside from a a very nice GUI programming environment). One application running at a time, and special tricks required to switch to anything else. Programs were statically compiled to access critical system state variables at fixed addresses in low memory, there was no locking, no scheduler, etc. There was no real multitasking because of that, not even cooperative multitasking.
By comparison Amiga OS was a modern multiprocess multitasking operating system in every way except originally there was no memory protection, and no virtual memory. More like a modern embedded system than a general purpose operating system, but *very* fast, and ridiculously easy to program for.
Most of that is very true. The amiga's memory management was the biggest problem and they did tend to crash if you had badly programmed apps. In general use however it crashed far less than win95 and even less than 98. It wasn't until win2000 that I saw a microsoft operating system that I actually considered superior to the amiga. Unforunately the hardware couldn't keep up after the death of CBM.
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.
I'm afraid it doesn't allow more than a single resolution on my screen at once, it just offers a resizable window. Besides which, we're talking about hardware here.
From wikipedia:
Uses of the copper
* It can be used to change video hardware mid-frame. This allows the Amiga to change video configuration, including resolution, between scanlines. This allows the Amiga to display different horizontal resolutions, different colour depths, and entirely different frame buffers on the same screen. The AmigaOS graphical user interface allows two programs to operate at different resolutions in different buffers, while both are visible on the screen simultaneously.
So is the Amiga more powerful than both VirtualBox and the Mac? Again, Amiga wins! :P
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.
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