Slashdot Mirror
Amiga Comeback?
An anonymous reader sent us linkage to a fairly lengthy
ZD Net story on Amiga
and its "Comeback" (if you're keeping count, this is approximately
the 293 thousanth time someone has suggested an Amiga comeback).
They talk about Amiga 'net appliances and low cost Amiga PCs.
I have a suspicion that the Amiga is the Elvis
of the computing world, everyone loved it when
it was around, and now that its dead, the faithful
keep seeing it appear in fridges and cars and
stereos etc
But seriously, it's nice to read an article where they have actually done some research.
Don't you all think Rob should start complaining about all the posts about M$ downfall or the rise of Linux too, since the are so damn common, and not to forget: boring.
So after everyone discovers Linux isn't ready for the desktop and the Linux balloon bursts this year, do you think Linux has a chance of making a comeback? Maybe in server appliances?
Yeah, the oldies sure were great, weren't they? The Amiga and the NeXT did things a decade ago that PCs are just discovering today. Lets bring the Apple ][ back and maybe I can figure out where I stashed all my w4r3z3d Apple software and my good ol' copy of Copy II Plus...
When this is posted, I for one assume that the story will be a ZD Net story! How about that! Now, to ignore the story all you have to do is not take any of the links. Thats right, don't click on the colored text. No! Don't do it! Damn..did it again. Now you will just have to whine for Rob to make a filter since you lack self control and intelligence. Idiots
Can anyone recommend a URL for a good webpage which might explain the origins of the Amiga kernel and it's relation to *nix?
Aren't there other sources of new besides ZDNet? Has slashdot
.....
just become a bulletin board for these jokers, Rob?
This is not news. It's old hat. The Amiga may or may not make
a comeback, but ZDNet is not the place to get reliable, timely
information about that or much else. For Amiga news, how about
stories and links to Amiga news sites. I know of several...
Slashdotting ZDNet just gives the mofus more advetising revenue
based on hits. From the looks of things here lately, Rob must be
getting a cut.
Slashdot sucks, Rob is an idiot
ALL of that in a low-cost, extensible, modular little box. You need mucho dinero to get ALL of those features/cards on a PC or a Mac. Plus, you'd likely run out of expansion slots. A revived Amiga will allow people (nerds/geeks and Carl Consumer) to have a decent computer on the level of high-end PC's, at the price point of a low-end Crappard Bell. And don't tell me about the convergence cards (ex: ATI's All-In-Wonder line) because they fit the old adage exactly: a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I'd like to have a new Amiga that can be easily and inexpensively tailored to suit all your needs. If had to do video editing in a pinch and started with nothing, I'd rather import an A5000 and Video Toaster than buy a PC or Mac. That's just me, but now I will be able to get a spiffy AmigaNG running an extremely stable RTOS with a (hopefully) Video Toaster 2 card, or some equivalent. Perfect for an amateur hobbist who can't afford all that expensive video hardware and software for PC's and Macs, and doesn't want to suffer getting it to work (more a PC problem). So, dear sir, for all those reasons and more, Amiga Inc./Gateway should bother. Of course, this puts them squarely in competition with Be and somewhat with Apple, so I wish them luck.
68000 series cpu, failure, bankruptcy, attempts to
be reborn, failure again.
Can anyone say
Atari
Mac
Amiga
point me to the common(non-nerd) computer that preemptively handles thread management,...??? that was my first real computer(second if you can count the C64) and still one of my favorite to use and manage. good strong !!no-bloat!!
power to the pupil
~3ghan
For those of you who think the Amiga is dead, check out this article.
http://www.amigaatlanta.org/AEcastro.html
If Amiga is still the computer of choice for NASA, then they are far from dead!
(It's too bad the Amiga marketing division probably will never figure out how to exploit this fact to their advantage!)
Although I am not an amiga fan, I have
read off the QNX ( a very good real-time OS )
that future versions of the Amiga OS will be based on QNX. With QNX, even the drivers are
considered seperate programs which implies an
extremely stable operating system.
See www.qnx.com for more info.
I think this could be a nice boost for
this system.
fuck you
Same Eponymous Cowled Her, here.
I meant A4000 with the Video Toaster/Flyer.
stoopid me...
Try this. (Not really any info.)
You should really get the Amiga RKRM but dunno where you can find them on the web, I bought them.
Any1 can point him to some RKRM place?
A3000/16 with 6Mb RAM and Linux 2.0.33 on it.
A4000/40 with 16Mb RAM, a Cybervision 64, a SCSI board, CD-ROM, and an IDEK 17" monitor (that syncs down to NTSC)
Plus lots of other Amiga goodies.
I haven't touched them since I got my Linux Pentium box.
Make a reasonable offer.
DG
trog@wincom.net
I'll give you a hundred bucks for everything.
Get these guys:
Soft-Logik
to port Pagestream to Linux!
Best DTP program ever written - and an Amiga program to boot!
It is dead.Forget it. There is an end to everything.
JUST LET IT REST IN PEACE !!!
Wow, I'd pay 10 times that.
:(
If I had any money
The only reason you had "threads" on the amiga is that there was no memory protection, hence no real thread/process distinction.
...while ZD can and has published trustworthy articles, the years of not getting it right on a regular basis don't make me want to automatically trust them for any information at all.
If there were a ZD filter, it would be enough for me to start using the filter system ASAP.
The system that is most trusted by NASA can't be "dead". (http://www.amigaatlanta.org/AEcastro.html)
How do you know that you can actually get all of that ? Right now, the NG Amiga is total smoke and mirrors. No one (outside of the Amiga Inc/QNX guys) knows anything about it. Arent you putting a lot of faith into a company (Amiga Inc) that has a pretty poor track record ?
Wassup dude?
Can't you manage to not click on links for ZD articles which don't interest you?
Does your OS force you to follow every link in here?
Can't you actually decide for yourself not to read an article?
Maybe you need to seriously consider getting away from computers - you obviously can't operate them!
Yeah, but the NASA Space Shuttle's computers still use ferrite core memory nad programs must be loaded on reel-to-reel tape. Each astronaut carries an HP calculator that's more powerful than the on-board computer.
most trusted
?
I owned an Amiga back in 89 and it was one damn fine machine. Incredible graphics, 4096 colors, stereo sound with 4 voices. It was incredible. For the time. 10 years ago.
Even though I grew to hate the guru meditation error, I enjoyed the machine. Speedball II was awesome, and in fact I might write a clone of it some day. I liked Word Perfect, and it was very nice to be able to download a program while doing my homework at the same time. Drip was an awesome game too. What a great machine, for 10 years ago.
But it's DEAD 0xDEADBEAF 0xCACAFECE. Get over it. If the "Amiga" makes a comeback, it will hardly have any relation to the original OS and hardware that I used 10 years ago. Commodore is bankrupt. They made a wonderful machine, but frankly, Windows 95 is as stable as an Amiga was back in the early 90's (barely) and multitasks just about as well, plus it runs on a 400 Mhz Intel (although the architecture of the chip sucks, the speed makes up for it). They are marketing a NAME not a machine.
Of course Linux is better (for me). It may not have all the useless frills Windows does, but hey, I don't play video games for a living, I code for a living.
You'd pay a GRAND? What are you NUTS?? Go to Ebay.
At the time of design the 68000 processor series was highly superior to intel's offerings and MOT was a more reliable company, at this point intel was a baby with inovations and didn't really have mainstream support. Most systems designed at this time used the MOT processors. Intel gained dominance through luck. If microsoft had choosen a different OS to buy and IBM hadn't just invested in intel, the IBM PC would be based of a MOT chip or IBM proprietary microprocesser and Microsoft would not be in a place of dominance, Apple would be using MOT's risc chip, Intel would be scraping by if not out of business, their would be no pc's just IBM branded and no cheap systems would exist. If this had happened part of the industry mainly the products IBM made would have been very fast but other segments such as video would not be as good. Overall the computer industry would have been better and more segment not allowing one company or platform to have over 30% of marketshare.
I would debate the issue but if you seriously think that "Windows 95 is as stable as an Amiga was back in the early 90's (barely) and multitasks just about as well" then you are obviously clueless and have no idea what you're talking about.
Now we have sound cards, 3D cards, and the idea is to offload everything from the CPU to some other processor
Umm actually, if you've been paying attention to Intel in the past few years, this is the exact opposite of what's going on (MMX, instead of a separate DSP chip; onboard random number generator, etc...)
newtek hasn't been making toasters for pc-based systems for serveral years. they just recently started selling the frame factory for pc's, wich is the toaster equivalent and will soon start selling a flyer equivalent. about a year ago they started selling aura, which is a toasterpaint for pc, and for several years have been selling lightwave for pc's, which was also part of the toaster software.
Actually there WAS a version of it for the PC (never made it into production tho...) just like there was one for the Mac...
It plugged into the SCSI port, and involved a rather large box sitting under your desk that looked suspiciously like an A2000 with the name plate removed...
They abandoned the PC version because windoze kept crashing.
it can not, wake up moron
Pull out your SAS/C compiler, compile dhrystone and run it, run it in linux on a 133mhz AMD 486 and you get???
4000 for amiga and 56000 for the amd box
came from '83 cambridge etc...
I think they wanted a company to write it, it turned out shit, so they looked at the local uni , and they had a prototype taht was way cooler, so they took that, hired them, and remade it better in 4weeks and had it running. Those guys were truly the geeks of time, i mean , locking your self in a room for 4 weeks straight, wearing purple gowns and slippers and coding nonstop and not talking to a single soul, and then opening the door after that, and presto, you have a finished kernel, WOW man! Do we see that dedication today? no, netscape takes 12 months
The reason it outperformed your 120Mhz intel is because of the OS it was running... it's a perception thing... (In reality, it takes a 50Mhz 68060 to comete with a pentium - and even then they were passed a long time ago..)
:o)
The Amiga OS is a thing of beauty - small, fast, efficient... and for graphics, not even Linux (X is pretty bloated) can touch it... (although I still love Linux - no flames please
The schedule has slipped a bit. Note, though, that GNU has been on the Amiga for years - check out www.ninemoons.com
Windows 95 is as stable as an Amiga was back in the early 90's (barely) and multitasks just about as well
:P), and they have thousands of programmers working for them. To say that Windows 95 is as stable as WorkBench was in 1990 is no testament to their ability to produce anything decent. Microsoft, quite simply, sucks. And I say this without any bias whatsoever. NT is crap too, but it wouldn't be if the programers that built it weren't so fucking incompetent. It's a half way decent (and half way bad) design for an OS.
Oh bullshit!
The Amiga was a fucking AWESOME machine, but it was NOT stable. I could easily get it to crash once a day buy running multiple programs. The 68000 processor (one of which I'm working on right now as we speak - or should be..) doesn't have protected mode, which means that one program can trash another if a pointer is pointing off to lala land which isn't too uncommon to do as a mistake.
To call the Amiga vastly superior in terms of stability in comparison to Windows 95 is quite an overstatement. Windows 95, just like the Amiga, is fairly stable. It's moderately stable. Windows 3.1 was not stable at all. It's ludicrous to think that the Amiga was perfect, because it wasn't, it was merely vastly superior to anything else in its market (i.e. consumer) than anything else at its time.
I'm no fan of MS, but I'm not going to misrepresent them. Their current offering of an OS is very poor considering this is 1999, they run (finally) in protected mode using an MMU (at least most of the time they run with an MMU - not all drivers do
then you are obviously clueless and have no idea what you're talking about.
Oh golly, gee whiz! Your intellectual wit just mauled me there! I certainly can't hold my own in a discussion here! What the fuck, I only work for Motorola, what the Hell could I possibly know about it?? Gee, I suppose you're right, the Amiga is still the best of the best, and MS will never out do it no matter how many decades pass!
Hey, welcome to cold hard objective reality. What should be isn't necessarily what is.
Wasn't Elvis worth more dead than alive?
Quick! Run out and get a velvet painting then!
The only value that an old Amiga has is antique and novelty value. Invest in an index fund instead, you'll probably get more return on your investment. Of course, the market is (probably) going to crash in 5 years, but antiques are just as worthless as stock during economic troubles.
I still dump money in, whatever happens, the market better recover in 30 years or I'll be pissed.
multitasking OSes, NTSC output, digitizers, paint, draw & 3D apps, and stereo sound for $300! you got tricked into putting $2600.00 worth of technology on your desk, the Amiga did it great for very little money!
hm...
68000 series cpu
You think it's the CPU'S fault?
the reason the x86 is a success is big old gorilla IBM chose it, because it was CHEAPER than the 68000, and then gorilla IBM got in trouble with the DOJ and farmed out work to their front^H^H^H^H^H partner MICROSOFT which IBM made, not Bill Gates. When IBM lost control of the PC market (PS2) it was Intel and Microsoft calling the shots because people wanted "compatibility". Try running a 4 year old program on Windows 98 now, me thinks this may be a long term mistake, but.. Anyhow.
The x86 is garbage. Don't believe me? Program in ASSEMBLY on it. I'd rather shave my balls with a straight edge while on an Amtrack train travelling 80 MPH than work with an x86 again. To call it painful is a gross understatement.
Intel has 1 (count them) ONE product that keeps them afloat and making tons of money, the x86 family of processors. The i960 (they called *that* a DSP) sucked, the i860 sucked, and everyting else they made sucked or died on its own. Name some other products they make. Motorola is HUGE compared to Intel. Want to make bets as to who will survive longer? Motorola is huge in pagers, huge in cell phones, and huge in Cable Modems. Intel can't even define the USB standard well enough to put IP over it, I know, I've been waiting for the fucking spec for over 18 months now. If AMD overtakes them, they are doomed.
Don't blame Motorola for this mess, blame IBM. I do.
That was an eye-opening article. Sooner or later they will be replaced and thrown in the trash though. Maybe they belong on the Smithsonian!
No, actually, the industry is moving more and more to offloading work from the CPU to peripheral devices. Intel doesn't like that. Intel wants to sell more CPU's, which is hard to do when people can upgrade their video card and suddenly have no use for a more powerful processor (well, this is a simplification, but that's the gist of it). So Intel is pushing hard to get people to pull workload back from the peripherals and onto the central processor again. It's not a good technical solution, it's entirely a marketing decision. Thusfar it's been ineffective; the industry has continued moving processing away from the central processor. Fortunately for Intel and AMD there are still some processing requirements which are best done on the CPU. Also, doing everything on the CPU makes the software easier to develop, which is a major consideration for some development companies.
Frankly, you cannot buy a computer today (PC or otherwise) with the knowledge that it will still be around ten years down the line. The PC of today is a very different beast from the PC of 1989. Just about the only thing that hasn't changed is x86 binary backwards compatability. The IO system has been been patchily replaced over time, the memory and IO busses have been completely reworked, and the software is completely different (and largely the newer OS's aren't even backwards compatible with 1989 software)!
The wise thing to do is to look for the best system for your needs (hardware and software) and your budget, and buy that whether it's a PC, a Mac, a SPARC, an Alpha, an Amiga, or whatever. Three years later you will not be able to upgrade it to use newer processors, memory, or peripherals without also replacing most of the system, and you may not even be able to run the newer OS's on it. So worrying about whether or not the company that made it will still be around ten years hence is kind of pointless.
-- Guges --
This is a different person with a serious question, and since you mentioned MMU's and memory protection, could you explain how it works? I understand a little about OS-level memory protection, but where does a hardware MMU come in? Why is it necessary?
Thanks.
Hey ! Don't knock on x86 assembler. Only real programmers can code it, it require a lot of memory and concentration to remember what each register is holding and which ones can be used to store another variable. Programming in x86 is for REAL men !!! Not this girlie C++ stuff ! Everybody forgot that assembler is still way faster than the bloated code any C compiler does...
hehehe, point well made..
Umm excuse me? Low cost? Doesn't an A4000 still
sell at about $4000? You can get one hell of a lot more PC for $4000.
Go download Junkbuster (www.junkbuster.com) and stop bitching already.
And it is the 295th time. ;)
C compilers do not produce bloated code. They compile exactly what you tell them to. Furthermore, C has no runtime presence whatsoever (unlike Basic, Pascal, C++, Java, COBOL, Lisp...)
That's ok. You can keep your x86 asm. ;-)
I haven't touched anything other than Z80 asm. And I liked it because it was simple, neat. x86 is ooooogly.
Writing in read-only memory (or outside your process's memory space) causes a hardware interrupt. The OS complains (core dump, GPF, etc). That's protected mode in a nutshell, and it has to be implemented in hardware.
Windows 95/NT uses this model (though not effectively; drivers are given too much freedom), as does Linux, and any other modern OS.
MacOS does _not_ employ hardware-level memory protection (some say it's not necessary, see MacKido's bullshit rants). In that respect, MacOS is like DOS, Windows 3 or Minix (all of which were designed for bullshit processors like the 8088).
Ok, schmuck!
Using a computer isn't about being smart you stupid geek! I'm happy to do a simple click instead of writing a lengthy command. But sometimes you can't accomplish everything with a click and then you have to write that command. But to remember a few commands has *nothing* to do with being smart. Do some advanced algebra or something to determine your real mental capabilities.
Stop posting those articles sponsored by the M$ legal department.
/dev/null
And BTW, let's stop wasting time talking about M$.
ZDNet, Katz, MEEPT, Microsoft >
IMFO, if it was IBM that markets the AMIGA, not Commie, we all be using AMIGA today, not PC's. The part of AMIGA that rules is the OS, how many OS out there that is about 200K in size (with the kickrom about 800k) and it's full GUI capable of 24 bit graphics and it boots up in less than 20 seconds (on a stock A1200 with 2 Megs of RAM, including Video, Sound RAM) and Hard Drive is optional, so is a monitor and it all fits into the size of a IBM keyboard?
Until there is a machine/OS can do that AMIGA still rulz!
yes I do admit that Linux comes in a close second.
AN ANONYMOUS AMIGA FAN.
The point is that the Amiga could do all those things back in 1985 on a 4 (count them) Mhz processor in 512Kb of ram, off a floppy disk, windoze needs (last time I looked) about 36 Mb ram, 200Mhz chip and It still feels slow. The shear economy of the amiag operating system is what apeals to most users
First of all, that tape drive does _not_ take standard analog cassettes. It takes an old form of digital cassette which stores approx. 65MB per tape, which used to be a lot. The digital tapes are physically _almost_ the same as the analog ones, the most obvious difference being a big extra notch in the middle of the top of the cassette. I`m not sure, but I think that a different formulation was used for the digital tapes, and that putting in an analog cassette could therefore damage the drive`s heads.
Second, why did you post this in this area?
I don`t think this has anything to do with Amiga.
Why was the iMac so successful? People are fed up with the plain-looking, noisy, bulky boxes that are PCs today. I want a nice little box with enough CPU power for a GUI and games, which is also pleasing to the eye. The iMac is too expensive for my taste and I don't like the monitors. Yes, I could also buy such an x86 box, but it's hard to find and I don't *need* it to be x86... (emulation will be good enough in 2-3 years for me not to have to worry about the CPU)
Only this 'Elvis' has 9 lives...
ELAL from an Internet KIOSK
I'd love to see Be and Amiga hook up. It seems like a natural combination. Anybody here think Be would make a better choice of OS for the new Amiga than QNX?
Bzzzzz.... only thing worse than mac advocate is amiga advocate.
Ok I give you that it had a pretty good GUI, almost as good as Mac GUI, and multitasking was pretty neat. But what you all like to forget is that the OS was buggy guru meditating piece of shit, FAR WORSE THAN WINDOWS95!!! Thats why you Win/Amiga/Mac advocates like to tout with quick boot times, because that is what you spend your time doing. Who gives a damn how long it takes to boot, it's not like you have to do it even once a mounth.
And lest you think that I speak out of ignorance, at one time I did own Amiga, several actually. I still have my A500 and the only thing it is good for is ascii terminal to my linux box. It's just amazing what kind of crappy hardware and software we put up with back then.
You say "with QNX, even the drivers are considered seperate programs..." Er... the amiga as it exists today (ie. 10 year old tech.) has drivers that are considered seperate programs. And yes, you're right, it does "imply a very stable operating system"
Desktop PPCAmigas? Like the ones you can buy now you mean? Put your money where your typing fingers are Troll.
The Amiga's been "coming back" since 1992. I had an A500 and an A1200. I loved them both. At the time, they did way-cool stuff that Pee Cee's and Mac's couldn't touch. But let's face it, this is more of the same old crap that's been floating around on the net since '94 when Commodore went under. And even if the Amiga did come back (snowballs in hell have a better chance), it wouldn't be anything like the Amigas that were around before. From the things I've read--Intel chip, new OS--it sounds like it won't even have binary compatibility with the old machines. For all intents and purposes, you might as well run BeOS on the PC you have now, print off a little "Amiga" logo and paste it on your case, and forget it.
no - the amiga actually had a beam-synchronised display CO-PRocessor called the COPPER that could perfrom changes to the custom chip registers on the fly, using no CPU time ( It had a whopping 3 instructions - MOVE, WAIT and SKIP, and two "jump registers" - now that's RISCy...) The equivalent hacks on the Amstrad PC tended to trigger interrupts to split the screen, like the raster interrupt trick on the C64.
The copper had much finer-grain timing resolution than such interrupt tricks - GLOOM ( a wolfenstein clone) on the Amiga used it to change the palette repeatedly to give a 160x128 12-bit chunky screen on the native AGA chipset.
Actually, programming the amiga was great fun - the copper could trigger a cpu interrupt and vice-versa, the cpu could program the copper, and the copper and cpu could both program the blitter, the blitter could then operate on areas of memory containing 68000 and copper code. Weird. That's why so many amiga demos could look so trippy. ( blitter == a versatile block-image manipulator with line and fill modes and 256 logic functions - this was why the amiga was so fast at gfx despite only a 7MHz CPU ( of course a 7MHz Motorola 680x0 series cpu is a lot faster than a cruddy x86 arch cpu,and the amiga assembly language was pleasant to program in ( the macro assembly was almost as readable as C code. It's also been adapted to PPC programming - Amiga PPC programmers are writing PPC assembler programs these days, since Amiga people tend to be obsessed with getting every last bit of performance)))
Err... Crappy hardware and software? In comparison to what exactly? You say you had a A500. I think dicklicks like you forget what the state of PC hardware was like in '86 (when the A500 first surfaced).
Try http://www.phase5.de twink.
CyberStorm 060/PPC.
are you being sarcastic or wot? I can't tell.
Pascal doesn't have runtime ! Neither Delphi. Pascal is just a kind of clean C without all the syntaxe weirdness. Put { } instead of begin end and your Pascal prog is a C prog. Only Pascal is checking types so you get a lot less bugs (and you don't have to use those low level pointers, which keep bugs away too)
Most of the Amiga people I used to hang with are now Linux people. If an Amiga with some new hardware and an improved OS was offered to me today, I wouldn't be running around screaming "Amiga sucks Linux rocks!".
So stop bashing the machine, because when you do that, you underestimate the power of former Amiga fanatics that are now pro Linux.
I liked the Amiga better than I like Linux now.
However, at the moment I sacrifice alot of my free time supporting Linux in any way I can.
Mostly because I want the freedom of choice, and because I want Linux to succeed where the Amiga could have succeeded.
Don't make me switch to QNX/BEOS.
This is the day I've finally realised how biggoted slashdotters can be. It's been obvious for some time, but as a Linux user, I was prepared to give my countrymen benefit of the doubt. But reading the replies to this story has actually made me feel ashamed to be associated with /.
/.ers to give respect where it's due. I'm not going to harp on about the Amiga as I've been out of the loop for far too long.
/. and freshmeat. I don't think this is through choice incidentally, more a case of being forced to.
As Linux users, we are beginning to display the same, ugly personality traits of evanglism we so often accuse Mac and Amiga people of. Why are we doing this? It doesn't help our cause one iota.
What saddens me most though is the childish inability of some
In my opinion, the Amiga people who are still left, show far more maturity in the face of adversity than most of us gathered here. Why do I think this is? Because they actually bother to look around at the computer industry as a whole and not confine their perception of the world to
CmdrTaco's leader to the story alluded to this being the "293 thousanth time that someone has suggested an Amiga comeback." This is typical of slashdot ignorance. By my reckoning (and it seems I've been keeping a closer eye on this CmdrTaco) this is simply the continuation of the whole Gateway/AmigaInc development saga. Nothing to get exicted over.
"Over population: Just enough of me. Way too much of you." -- P.J. O'Rourke
Although plenty have ridiculed the original poster, there is truth to what he says about linux not being ready for the desktop.
After upgrading to kernel 2.2.3 (which I needed to run several recent programs), I was once again reminded how no "normal" (ie "desktop") user would be able to handle linux administration. The main thing here was the old version of dhcp not working with the new version of linux. I was able to find this out eventually, but it took a lot of poking around. And I only really knew what to look for because I know a lot about computers. To the desktop user, DHCP is just YAA.
I think the desktop use could happily user a properly setup linux box, but god help them if they want to install anything new or upgrade it.
I'm not knocking linux, though. I still like it best of anything I've tried. It's still a solid, well-supported OS. It has both the sanity of a unix environment, plus lots of apps and commitment to get more. That second part is the main reason I haven't even tried the BSDs. Please, don't follow up with how you can run linux apps under BSD, cause there will always be quirks and troubles because they weren't designed and tested with that in mind (would just swap one set of annoyances out for another).
--
Jason Eric Pierce
I think he's laughing at the statement that implies the only way to get a PC to function with a toaster is to link it to an Amiga. Which, if true, is very funny!
It's really sad to see such a negative comment (...293 thousanth time...) about such a great computer system on a site which is known for supporting "alternative" OS's. I visit this site everyday and filter through tons of Linux articles just to find a few tidbits of nerdisms to make my day better. And the ONE time in the past few months that I see an article on the computer that I use (my wonderful Amiga), I get slapped by someone who I was beginning to look up to as a revolutionary. Was it really neccessary to stand on the back of one good OS (Amiga) to support another (linux)? I had a hard drive go down a week ago and had to reinstall my Amiga OS. It took me about 5-10 minutes. Now, how long does it take to install Linux? I use a 50 mhtz 060 and it runs circles around most everything I've seen... not because it's a fast processor, but because the OS and applications are well-programmed. Amiga never died... it just got a more exclusive audience...one that REALLY knows what the word "alternative" means.
yep- that's exactly what it was, I remember it... ...
What I want to know though, is how it's functionality compared to the siamese system that some people use to retarget their amiga display to a windows desktop these days
clickeee clickeee www.siamese.co.uk
strange - my Cyberstorm 604e PPC 233MHz with 68060 50MHz amiga seems pretty real. Think before you write something. Dolt. Look where team amiga are in the RC5-64 decryption tables. Yep. Hovering about sixth or seventh. Not bad, for such a minority eh? PPCs kick x86 butt.
Incidentally, I dual boot AmigaOS 3.1 and LinuxPPC (APUS is the name of the Amiga ppc linux port - it's on sunsite.auc.dk). I have an 8MByte Permedia 2 gfx card, 128Mbyte ram, and ultra-wide scsi 3 4.3 gig HD.
No, it's not a top of the range spec, but I'd say it's not bad.
Makers of the amiga PPC hardware ->
www.phase5.de
Makers of the PPC-side kernel favoured by the majority of PPC amiga users, and the Warp3D Amiga OpenGL API->
www.haage-partner.de
Claim to be developing an amiga G3 card ->
www.escena.de
amiga ppc news->
come.to/amigappc
Amiga ->
www.amiga.com
QNX ->
www.qnx.com
Yes, most decent amiga stuff comes out of the UK and germany, and this is a US site, so some ignorance among the readership of this site is to be expected, I guess.
PS. I suppose my machine isn't a "desktop" - It's in a tower case...
That's what I figured...an A500, and it probably never got past version 1.3 of the OS. Which sounds like the version you used. I use 3.1 on my A3000 '040(with 3D graphics card/16MB Ram/4GB HD/Ethernet/56k modem)and it is very stable. Did you also run your machine off of floppies instead of buying a hard disk??
I'm not attacking you, just making observations based on the general attitude of "A500 Owners" during the period. The earlier versions of the OS were buggy. But after the 2.xx it got _alot_ better I think. And 3.1 is very good. I get FAR more "application has caused a fault error" messages in Win95 than I get gurus under Amiga OS 3.1. I _rarely_ ever see guru anymore.
I've been using Amigas for years and now that I have a PC (keep the hammers away from me)
I have spent my time trying to make my PC act like an Amiga. (filetiger,powerbar,swshell...)
My WB3.1 is way more stable than windows....
Windows does have the Ctrl-Alt-Del menu that works.
Windoze isn't even smart enough to recognize a floppy for no-boot or autoload.
The drag bars on PCs SUCK bad!!!!!!!!
I'm curious how in your mind a Windoze advocate would somehow be preferable to a Mac advocate or Amiga advocate?
The Motorola 68040 was one wicked chip. But if they really have to abandon MC680X0, I hardly see x86 as any kind of improvement.
They should come out with an Amiga that is also an Alpha clone, taking advantage of the 128-bit 1Ghz AXP chips that should be coming out in the moderately near future. Those chips will be hot!!
A 128-bit AXP powered Amiga would get some major headlines.. Imagine that chip running an efficient OS. Ooh Baby!! Can you say, Lightwave 3D? Imagine if the new kernel supported some form of clustering.
But be sure it can also run Linux and do Beowulf clustering to absolutely ensure its place in render farms.
Perhaps also write the new Amiga OS so that it could run on existing AXP systems or Pentiums (cough!), thus marketing the OS and the hardware separately, so that the success of one no longer depends on the other.
I do think there is a lot of room for Amigas in the high-end arena.
You have your figures completely wrong.
A 68020 is a nice processor, yes. But at 14MHz,
it's slower than a 33MHz 80386, let alone a
Pentium-class processor.
What made the Amiga fast were two things: a good
quality, low-overhead operating system (yes, the
Os *IS* the primary factor in software sluggishness), and the co-processor hardware.
Yes, the Intel architecture is NOT an ideal CPU
architecture -- in fact, it sucks eggs in my
opinion. But it has excellent instruction timings
now-a-days, especially compared to that of a
68020.
I personally feel that they should have gone to a
MIPS or Sparc-based architecture -- they've got
better timings yet. PowerPC is good, but probably
would have been more expensive. DEC Alphas DEFINATELY would have been more expensive.
68000 a failure? Shit...I better return my
Palm Pilot then...
This is correct and the Mac Version of the Toaster was done the same way. It always amused me that Mac users would buy a dedicated Mac to hook to their Mac Toaster when it would have been cheaper to just use a straight Amiga with the toaster card than a Mac as a dumb terminal connected to an Amiga with a Newtek name plate on it. Oh, welll...
I have to agree with you, the Amiga was and is not stable. Things have
improved a lot overtime, and I'm tiping this on my A3000T, with a
colourful background in 16 bit, textures in the window borders, a
browser and a mailer. I've constructed my OS by hand by adding various
utilities, extensions, apps and tools over the last three years, never
needed to "reinstall", never had a harddrive crash, make regulary
backups via a CD-writer, and am very satisfied. Crashes? Comparable
with W95.
But sorry, I have a P200 standing next to my Ami, and multitasking is
done MUCH better on my 68030 at those measily 25 Megahertz. Even Linux
has problems with doing the things I usually do on my Amiga. I have 22
megs of Fast Ram, and I usually have 70+ tasks running. Debian on my
PC gets almost unusable when I try that. With 64 megs...
The Amiga OS wasn't designed as a realtime OS. But it usually behaves
that way. Quite paradoxal.
AFAIK the thing is loaded with 6502's.
Which Amiga lets you play Quake II?
Mine for exemple runs Quake II as smooth as my AMD K6-2 400.
Just get Fastquake or the QuakePPC-Port for Amiga, use a WAD-File from the PC or Mac-Version and there you are....
We want a ZD filter!
2^5
I went to an amiga convention in St. Louis a couple of days ago. I love the old machines, but it seems like the wind has been let out of everyone's sails.
:(
One of the big things that seems to keep the Amiga alive is the video toaster/flyer. It's great for budget editing, and even more, still. Of course, Newtek told us that they're open-sourcing the flyer software (cool!). The thing is, they've got a new PC capture card/software combo. It isn't a toaster yet, but the guy we talked to (the east coast sales rep) called Amiga a "dead, well... comatose" platform, and then all but said their new hardware is going to be the toaster for PC. He pretty much hinted that the hardware does stuff the software doesn't yet, and with a software upgrade you've got a full uncompressed film quality flyer on your hands.
Bye-bye Amiga.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Actually, I have (at home) a SCSI tape unit that takes standard audio cassettes! The only reson I don't use is the only scsi card I have is VLB and the VLB slot in my computer is taken by my video card (et4k). When I get some more memory (RSN) I'll be able to get my second 486 going and hopefully use that tape drive. Hmmm, wonder what its capacity is....
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Obv. this proves that MS can't have a monopoly.
Seriously, I never owned an Amiga, but was impressed with the way it had separate processors for everything that went on. Back then, the CPU on an x86 machine did all the work. Now we have sound cards, 3D cards, and the idea is to offload everything from the CPU to some other processor. The Amiga did have an influence on today's technology.
Posted by The Incredible Mr. Limpett:
Yeah! I can play a mean game of Karateka...I think I still have that 5 1/4 floppy here somewhere.
What about the TI99/4A in all it's brushed stainless steel glory. That was actually the first one I owned. I know it wasn't the best, but I must've had a hundred cassette tapes with my little basic programs on there. hahaha
Let's bring back cassette tape storage!
----
"Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a
villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify."
Posted by KenM:
The value of anything is a subjective thing...
To *you* an Amiga has only antique & novelty value; to those who kept their Amigas updated & capable and use them to do their daily computing tasks, they have as much value, maybe more than your personal workstation has for you.
If you only invest for financial gain,and your only measure of value is monetary, you must be one dimensional indeed...
Posted by KenM:
:)
It was based on Tripos (ever hear of that?) and written in BCPL. It did take a *little* longer than 4 weeks though, but was still done in an amazingly short time. But the first release was pretty rough and used to crash left right & center unfortunately giving the Amiga a reputation of being a crash-box. The 1.1 release a few weeks later was quite stable...
But full preemptive multitasking in 512K, wow. And I remember being blown away when I saw my first digitized photo in 4096 colors on an Amiga... remember, this was the days of XTclones with 16 color CGA. The AT and 64 color EGA were still on the horizon.
The Amiga would handle 8MB of RAM at a time when Bill Gates was saying "no one will ever need more than 640K"
Posted by GimmeZeroZero:
I don't think there is much point in comparing
assembly to C or any other HLL.
x86 does really suck when compared to 680x0.
Posted by JerTheNerd:
:-)
and the reson it is alive, is that we keep it alive. There isn't any big marketing infrastructure, no profit margin, it's just the love people have for their GOOD operating system. (man that sounded cheezy)
The only forseeable way (in my humble opinion) Linux is ever going to die, is if all the hackers suddenly say "Eh... this sucks." and go work on something else.
That seems fairly ridiculous at this point. At least that's my humble (linux user for 2 weeks now WOO HOO!!) opinion.
"My brain suffers from chronic IRQ conflicts."
Jer
There was once a long article in Byte on Exec, however their web archive doesn't go back far enough. Exec is a simple message passing kernel that internally uses exec lists as a common data structure. Unfortunately it relies a lot on a globally shared memory system (i.e. no memory protection) - hence the need for a completely new kernel.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Yes. It's true - the A600 is a dead machine. Not upgradable. However other Amiga's are very much alive and well, some of them are even running Linux.
You don't seem to understand. Noone is talking about reviving the A600, or even OS3.1. This is something modern and new.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
My .sig isn't about using computers. It's about programming. Duh!
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Well, what's the point in Apple? What's the point in Linux? It's another option. Once upon a time you could create innovative computers, now the best we can do is Apple's new colors. The good thing about the net (and Linux) is our tasks don't require a Wintel box. If hardware engineers could get back to playing with some interesting architectures it would be good for computing in general. I think they should just run BeOS or Linux on it this time instead of doing another OS.
Just my $0.02.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Without ZD Net, Slashdot wouldn't have any news. ;)
Because it gives us another choice, which is a good thing. Whether or not they'll succeed is the real question. And why would they use Intel chips is another...
Hell no. An x86 based Amiga would surely put the last nail in the coffin. Even if it's not going to have Motorola inside (god bless them 680x0's!) it sure as hell better not have Intel. Hell, my 14mhz 68020 easily outperformed my 120mhz Intel...
Bah.
Newtek has been making the Video Toaster for PC-based systems for several years now. They started doing so as soon as they realized that their Amiga-based product lines were not going to succeed if the Amiga was going to die.
Or in the immortal words of the original Amiga developers, "We made Amiga. They(commodore) fucked it up." (found in 1.2 ROMs with some funky keystroke combo upon startup)
Put the original disk if you have it (heh, yeah right) in the drive upside down, then boot. The entire game will play upside down. Of course, the copy of the game I once had, many moons ago, was distributed as a two-sided game, complete with the upside down version cracked with the upside down version of the cracked message from the first side. 'twas cool. br0derbund used to be cool. whatever happened to them?
The day before Commodore went out of business, you could get an A1200 for $349 and an A4000 for $1899.
The day after they went out of business, those prices (I witnessed this personally) went up to $549 and $2499 respectively.
Wasn't Elvis worth more dead than alive?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
A couple things the Amiga has always offered and will probably continue to offer:
- Nowhere is it written that every OS wants to be UNIX when it grows up - the Amiga is not UNIX and thus brings a fresh perspective to OS design, while remaining robust enough that UNIX apps can be ported to it.
- The GUI is integrated the way a GUI should be - preferences are basically systemwide, not merely toolkit-wide or API-wide. GUI and Shell are given equal billing and don't operate in separate universes. ARexx provides a platform-wide scripting mechanism that lets applications talk to each other. And on and on.
- The Amiga speaks NTSC and PAL, and the proposed next-generation Amigas will speak HDTV. There is a real need in the home computer AND the video pro market for machines that consider television as a native language - allowing software to manipulate video whether the software was designed to or not (like using Workbench to genlock!).
The Amiga has less than 0.1% market share right now, and I don't really see the classic Amiga line making a noticeable comeback - nor do I have convincing reason to believe the current batch of promises any more than the last 173 we've been given - but there really is a place for the Amiga, or some descendant of its spirit (and I don't mean Be, which seems to become more like a closed-source UNIX with each successive release).
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
According to my sources, Amiga Inc. thought so too. But they had a terrible time getting Be to cooperate - they wanted too much for licensing, taking too long to sign paperwork, etc. Finally they mutually said "f*** you" this time last year (a week before the Amiga convention where the partnership was supposed to be announced!) - and Amiga Inc. started talking to QNX after that.
(I've heard that Sun was also on the list of "potential partners".)
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
amiga will use QNX Neutrino kernel, according to NTO it works on arm/strong arm/x86/ppc, just check http://www.qnx.com there's an "old" press release about amiga and QSSL
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
What's so big about this? The current plan has been running smoothly and on track for about a year now (actually, I think it's exactly one year to-the-day the plan was originally announced to the public). The Amiga IS coming, and this time for real.
I remember software that did this on the Amstrad as well. I'm not very familiar with the Amiga, but I'm guessing this is the same thing, in which case you can can't change the resolution in the middle of a scanline. The trick is to just change the video mode at precisely the right time as the screen is being redrawn.
If you find that interesting, you might want to dig up an old demo called "copper" (should be on the Hornet archive), run it, and read the docs that come with it. Guided by those docs, I once wrote a TSR for MS-DOS that, with practically no CPU overhead, scrambled the display (making it look like cable tv). I pondered making a virus out of it, but I was too damn responsible. It would have been the coolest virus ever, though. Just imagine the tech support calls! :-)
Anyway, to get back on the topic, the same technique can possibly be used to achieve multiple simultaneous resolutions on a PC. I think the copper docs may even have covered that.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
It was a great computer for its time (in the Commodore 64 era). The Amstrad 6128 had 128K RAM, a screen, and a floppy drive. The disks took a whopping 196K. You could even run CP/M on it.
Most people had a 646, though. That one had 64K RAM and a tape deck.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
If BeOS is being compared to a closed source UNIX then I guess Irix is the only candidate I can think of. Good enough for me-I hope SGI would consider BeOS instead of NT on their new visual workstations since they're not porting Irix to Intel.
---
They're right here :)
http://www.broderbund.com/
They sell stuff I'm sure some linux users will appreciate
---
SGI
SUN
HP
all started on this same cpu for thier workstations.
Last night I saw a QNX demonstration on a P133 notebook with 48 megs of ram.....283 jobs running at the same time and the guy pulls the hard drive out. It kept running! Most amazing thing I've EVER seen. I've never had an Amiga but if the QNX/Amiga OS is even half as fast and stable as QNX 4.25, I'm going to be first in line to buy one. I just hope they're cheaper than QNX :^)
I have it on good authority that QNX (http://www.qnx.com) is being used as the underlying OS for the "new" Amiga workbench. Not sure if this is old news for this audience.
It was supposed to be coming soon (1st Q) as a beta but I guess that has slipped. I thought their schedule was way too aggressive when I heard about it.
This would be a double win - get all the kewel Amiga stuff ported to Intel and port more of the OSS/GNU stuff to Amiga.
I like it! (if it happens)
r@m
yep, stable, strong, and fast.
It uses a real microkernel. It's small too: 4kb
Everything else loads as a daemon-like module. The OS itself is message passing based.
Kewel stuff.
r@m
Wasn't Pagestream for the Atari first (not the Amiga)? Or am I confusing it with something else?
Actually, it was a whopping 7.14MHz :)
Did you ever see an a5oo webserver?
amiga.nvg.org
It's cute, it's got a o3o+883 combo and 32MB of RAM and a pcmcia ethernet card and runs a samba server on the local LAN, when it is not busy showing off animations for dept. of psychology here at the univ where I work.
Our collection
This is good news indeed. It seemed as though the only person in the Old Regime (how many Old Regimes have there been so far?) who really gave a shit was Petro T. At last he is in good company. All the Amiga has ever really needed to succeed is dedicated and visionary leadership. It sounds like now we have a chance.
LOL
Oh that's got to be the funniest thing I've heard all week (OK, so it is only Tuesday). "...Looked suspiciously like an A2000 with the name plate removed"
"Hear hear" as they say in Parliament.
If people want to know what ZD thinks they can go there and find out for themselves. As much as I love discussing Amigas, I don't think this article needed to be posted. Slashdot readers already know the score, Amiga users certainly do, and I don't care what ZDNet thinks about any of it.
As far as general news stories go, they are usually reported in 20-30 different sites on the web and you can often get good info straight from the source or other involved party. WE DON'T NEED ZD NEWS ON SLASHDOT.
Your mother must be so proud.
Don't know, but what couldn't the Amiga offer today?
Maybe the Amiga could offer a good standard for all those device (not like MS did with software)
I remember reading in a french linux magazine, that new Amiga-OS or something will be made by QNX... That's a good point, maybe he will be POSIX?
Anyway, Amiga was great and i can't be bad for us if it comeback
Mongolito404, King Of The Mongolian People
The Amiga is _not_ the computer of choice for NASA. Somebody at Hanger AE likes Amigas and uses them for local processing and displays, that's fine.
Most NASA desktop systems are IBM PC clones running some variety of Windows. There are some Macintoshs, though they seem to be slowly fading away. Some people have UNIX workstations.
For data acquisition, processing and display, many different types of systems are in use. But the trend in new systems seems to be towards IBM PC compatible systems, unless the requirements justify a more capable and expensive system. Many projects don't have the budget to buy expensive VME systems or UNIX workstations.
NASA's current approach is "faster, cheaper, better" with the emphasis on cheaper. COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) is the magic word.
Taka a look at http://www.sewp.nasa.gov if you are interested in what NASA is buying these days. Not a single mention of the Amiga.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The only correct statement is that the computers are loaded from mag tape. The current computers don't use ferrite core memory. They may be slow by modern standards, but they are certainly much faster than any HP calculator. They don't blue screen or generate guru meditation errors (obligatory amiga content).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You act as if Intel was unheard of until IBM came around. Acutally, the very first personal computers (Altair, etc.) were Intel 8080-based.
The IBM PC was just a "16-bit" version of your average CP/M machine in it's day. Just substitute the 8088 for the 8080, and substitute a clone OS (MS-DOS) for CP/M.
The reason the IBM succeeded was that it solved the lack-of-standardization mess for floppy drives, video devices, tapes, etc that existed in the CP/M world. Plus, with up to 640K RAM, it could take 10 times the amount of memory as an 8080-based system.
Early Sun machines used the 68K, as did some IBM machines, but those were big $$$.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If you've ever seen the "Revenge of the Nerds" PBS documentary, there's an interesting part:
When IBM broached Microsoft to write PC-DOS, they actually thought MS owned CP/M, because they'd only seen CP/M running on an Apple II with a Microsoft 8080 board inside. (But that's actually another story...)
Anyway, the real CP/M guy was too drunk or something, so MS ended up with the DOS contract. They took one look at the specs for the IBM PC and realized that it could be cloned by other manufactures. (IBMs only property was the 4K BIOS, which had open specifications.) They even called up Intel to conspire in this plan.
So, Microsoft brokered a deal where they got paid only $50,000 for MS-DOS 1.0, but they could re-sell it anywhere they wanted. So, the clone market was born even before the first PC was manufactured.
I guess we can draw the conculsion that IBM was either stupid, didn't care if their computer was cloned, or didn't think PCs were going to amount to anything. If anything, the PS2/OS2 initiatives were an attempt to capture market control from Intel and Microsoft that IBM never had anyways.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I used to wonder at this too. Then I realised its the whole geek/hacker/nerd thing, characterised by "If its possible, it must be right"
So, if a link is clickable, it SHOULD be clicked.
If a ZDNET filter is possible, it should be made.
There Is No Other Way (tm).
These guys just can't help themselves, there's no point in trying to retrain them. Guess that means I'm Not A Geek (Damn!). Then again, wihout this mentality we wouldn't have Linux, so I'm not going to complain any more about this failing....
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
Nowadays, though, multitasking OSes, NTSC output, digitizing cards, paint, draw & 3D apps, and stereo sound are standard or easily available on any PC.
Excuse me, but expanding an arch with design flaws as deeply based as x86 (irq and port conflicts etc) just can't compare. Amigas are done right from the ground up, and manage to be extremely elegant and low-footprint in the process.
--
Paranoid
Paranoid
Bwaahahahahaa.
So after you discover that evolution sort of has left you behind, do you think you have a chance of making a comeback? Maybe marketing?
Linux, coming to a desktop near you!
Being a real programmer is not about doing hard things - it's about getting something real done. It's about being lazy and still getting the job done. And while it is true that small amounts of handcoded assembly will be faster, writing whole programs in assembly is impossible and would be slower overall than well optimised high-level code anyway (as well as buggier). Furthermore, the time spent in rewriting in assembly would usually be better left to tuning algorithms.
It's very true. The PC and the "Toaster Box" were linked to one another. The software on the PC was basically just a user-interface for the Amiga2000/Toaster product sitting next to the PC box. The "PC Toaster" hardware was just a link between the devices. The PC didn't really do much real work, short of perhaps some fun with Lightwave here and there. All the muscle was next door!
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Yes, I WILL believe it when I see it, but until then I think it's more pipe dreams and vapourware. Amiga Inc. is heading in the right direction, they just desperately need to pick up speed and start getting somewhere. The market ... or what shreds are left of it ... have seen too much shit to keep sucking back on empty promises.
Amiga News is a handy place to get the latest scoop on what's going down in the Amiga market... though Slashdot these days is starting to become a close second or third! :^)
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
For the umpteenth time... they're only using Intel chips for their development system. The final "next-generation" (for lack of a better term) Amigas will be out there with a yet-to-be-announced processor. It ain't gonna be no Intel, that's fersure.
(Make all the grammatical comments you want. I wrote that last sentence like that on purpose. If you want to dock marks for it, take it up with my high school English teacher.)
Intel platforms are cheap to come by, and work well with off the shelf parts. Nice for development. Hell... the original Amiga architechture (hard & soft) was developed on Sun Workstations way back when...
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
The AmigaOS going to be built in layers around the QNX neutrino. That's QNX's contribution. The rest of the OS is probably going to be handled by Amiga Inc. and coders like Haage & Partner.
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Then again, realize that Amiga prices are primarily inflated because of a lack of market share. Take the tech in an Amiga box and apply the same mass-marketing economics to it as you would to standard PC components, and it would cost a bungload less. That's the way it was back when there was still a company pumping out boxes.
As for low cost, nobody said you needed an Amiga4000 to do all that stuff. Ever heard of an Amiga1200? Low cost, low profile, damned powerful.
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Of course it was cheap. That was a big factor in its favour...
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
I wouldn ever have tripped across the article if it wasn't for my incessant monitoring of Slashdot goodies...
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Really, what's the point? When the Amiga was introduced, it did a lot of things PC's and Mac's couldn't. Nowadays, though, multitasking OSes, NTSC output, digitizing cards, paint, draw & 3D apps, and stereo sound are standard or easily available on any PC. What could the Amiga possibly offer today that can't be duplicated on the computers already on our desks?
We need to have a seperate place for ZD Net's corporate asskissing articles... that way we can ignore them :0
Be should at least port to Amiga. As long as Amiga will give them specs, I don't see any problems with it. It would be nice to see the Amiga replace the BeBox if they do go with a PPC chip.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.
Why are there more posts from ZDNet than normal all of a sudden? We KNOW that they are a crappy news source! So maybe they're funny because they're so bad, but this isn't the type of news I'd like from Slashdot. By the way Rob, love the new site. -n
I saw Jim Collas's speech at the Amiga99 convention, and had the
pleasure of speaking to him at the party on Saturday. He is truly
a man with a vision, and if anyone can turn their new hardware into
something deserving of the Amiga name, it is he. He understands what
the Amiga meant to people when it was introduced, and how it has
managed to stay with so many people til today.
He believes that there is a place in today's market for non-PC, non-
Windows computers. I believe that, too. This man stepped down from his
position as Senior Vice President at Gateway to become President of
Amiga, Inc. That takes balls. That takes vision. I for one know that
he really is going to work at this -- this is no half-hearted attempt
like what the Amiga has seen over the past 5 years. This is genuine.
There will be new Amigas for enthusiasts (read: nerds) and for end-users.
Jim Collas is not making this stuff up. He really feels strongly about
this. I believe it will happen. Now, whether or not these machines will
succeed is a question that cannot be answered. I believe that there is a
place for them in today's computer market. Other people do too. Gateway
does. Ted Waitt, president of Gateway, is excited about this.
Yeah. So. This isn't just hogwash hype. They're really working on this
finally. No more B.S.
Uhmmm... what? Point me to an URL to Video Toaster/Flyer hardware for the PC.
AFAIK, there's no such thing, because PCs suck, and can't do anything
cool and innovative like that. >;)
No. Linux is doomed to obscurity.
One thing I was really happy about was that Petro has a place in the new Amiga, Inc
hierarchy of executives. I'm sure all the information is on Amiga Inc's website.
The Amiga's hardware is nice and its OS is nice. But there's something underlying that really makes
the Amiga what it is. There's a Spirit. What Gateway/Amiga is doing now is looking at what made the
Amiga so special back in the day, and seeing how they can reproduce that today. I think that's
possible. I think there's a place for that. It's not based on the original OS because it can't be.
It's not based on 68K because it can't be. That would almost be a dead-end right away. The currently
available Amigas are for Amiga-lovers. They're not for a mass-market. The new ones will be.
I, personally, see very little Spirit in a UNIX-based operating system like Linux. Sorry.
And, FYI, there will be Classic-Amiga boards that will plug into the new machines. These will essentially
be 68040/68060-based Amigas on PCI cards.
For those who do want to revive the Amiga, the source code for AMOS and STOS have been released. Check out http://www.clickteam.com/web/amos/amos.htm
Well, I'm glad to say that Apple is FAR from failing.
It was based on Tripos (ever hear of that?) and written in BCPL.
:-) As far as I am concerned, Exec and Exec alone makes up the kernel.
That isn't the kernel as such; that's dos.library, the high(ish)-level file I/O subsystem. The kernel proper, Exec, is written in C, and (as Matt Sergeant said) is a simple message-passing microkernel-style system.
When such a large part of the OS is in ROM, I guess it gets hard to decide what's the kernel and what isn't
I'd certainly hesitate to call it an Amiga if it's just some black box on top of a TV. Those can still be found. Try looking on ebay.
The beauty of the Amiga was how simple and stable it was to go in and fuss with the guts. The user had a high degree of control over the OS, and the hardware had handy features that still aren't available today (like splitting the screen between multiple resolutions).
RTG and RTS were excellent architectures that still aren't well matched in the mainstream world.
The OS had hooks all over the place, it was incredibly straightforward to alter aspects of behavior with legal, sanctioned hooks. This kind of flexibility is only paralleled (badly) by the X model.
A set-top box, without the AmigaOS, isn't exactly something I'd be interested in calling an Amiga, or paying money for.
Bring out one of them PPC based desktops, though, and I'll plunk down cold hard cash.
Wot's an Amstrad?
Funny, that Phase5 sure looks an awful lot like an accelerator card, not a nice crispy box.
The money's there, just waiting for me to not have to send it to 4 or 5 different shady-looking places in some dreadful second-world country to get a usable box out of it.
Sounds like a neat box. Was it rouhly equivalent to the C64 in gee-whiz special effects capabilities like graphics and sound?
That it ran CP/M makes it sound as though the target market was somewhat different.
I can fondly remember my old A500 with 1meg RAM, no HD, 2 floppies. I even remember painstakingly drawing and animating that little red and white ball in DPaint III. I had this nicely redone desktop with this custom-drawn pointer, and some really good games.
The game I remember most was a D&D flight sim, where you flew these dragons around and killed things. Anyone else ever play that?
--FroBugg
Most likely the Amiga will never come close to the number of sold PCs. But how big marketshare does a computer company really need in order to survive today? Is 5% enough, or does it take more?
The PC is not really my dream computer. I would gladly buy a niche computer, if only I know that it will survive for at least some years ahead. (oh, I don't know if the Amiga is intented to be a niche computer or not...)
I will not believe it until I see it.
The 1.3 Workbench *WAS* crappy (according to modern standards), went to Guru meditations all the time, and all that shit. 2.04 was *MUCH* more stable (it was really rare to see a Guru with it), and 3.1 was... Simply great. Well, and given that so many people (like me) zKicked their 1.3 A500s into thinking they had a 3.1 ROM (isn't that great?), we had zero problems with it.
Now, for old machines you still had the incredible GOMF (Get Outta My Face), that took care of most guru meditations...
Debian already runs on amigas, so apparently getting a good OS wouldn't be a problem if Amigas came back.
-S
Just the facts:
;)
Linux is an OS.
Windows 9x/2000/NT is an OS.
Mac OS 8.5 is an OS.
Mac OS X is an OS.
Irix is an OS.
QNX is an OS.
The Mac 680x0's and G3's are computers.
The Amiga is a computer.
The SGI machines are computers.
The x86 machines are computers.
The Imac is a silly-ass toy
There seems to be some confusion over these points. It's possible to tweak, overclock, throw memory at, throw video cards at, and throw OS's at these machines in just about any combination. Doing these things costs $X for some components and $1.5X for others and $.75X for yet others. You can strip down or upgrade your machine to the point that it's an essential part of your home-heating system. However, it's assinine to say that one setup is "better" than any other. Whatever you use is up to you.
If the Amiga comes back in a big way, that'd be cool. It had a lot of genuinely new things to offer. Something else to mess with. [That's my on-topic comment so they don't have to send search planes for me]
My Mac-lovin' roommate and I will be building a Linux server sometime in the near future. It will more than likely be some flavor of AMD machine with a ridiculously large hard drive, but don't make the mistake of calling it a Wintel machine. Bill Gates has a very bad predilection for shiny things. Steve Jobs has repressed anger toward anyone who is not Steve Jobs. Linux developers need to take a walk once in a while.
The point is that whatever you choose is just fine. If you present me a machine/OS or a brand of machine/OS and call it better, I can throw a few dollars at another system/OS and show you up.
The best thing is that you can have Linux on nearly any of these machines. After all, that's the whole point of This Old Slashdot, neh?
The party's over
What are these people waiting around for? If all gateway is going to do is put a x86 type computer together for easy surfing and use amigas name
you guys are getting ripped off. I can identify with the underdog and wanting a different solution to MS domination. But at least get with a
architecture that is in the marketplace. Besides which amiga lets you play quake II?
So you have used an Amiga 500. It's like saying PC's are crap, because you used a 25Mhz 486 with Win 3.11 and it didn't multitask. Come back when you've tried an Amiga 4000 with a PPC and gfx card...
Vidar
Bravo!
I used to be one of those "church of Amiga" kind of guys, now I own a peecee and I'm even M$ certified, but I still love my Amiga and use it every day, and was disgusted with all the trash the users here piled onto a technically superior machine and OS (despite its age)
I don't preach Amiga anymore, I guess I'm tired of being laughed at or asked who makes it and will it run windoze? but if you folks here are so shortsighted as to think that Linux will fare any better than Amiga has, despite its technical superiority, then you're sadly mistaken.
Thanks 'anonymous Coward' for calling a spade a spade and telling these losers where to get off.
Paul
pak@erols.com
Wrong! The only thing worse than an Amiga advocate is a Team OS/2 advocate. My nightmare is being trapped in an elevator with a guy wearing a "Ross for Boss" T-shirt and a "Team OS/2" hat just as his medication wears off.
Cheers
multiplexo
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
My Amiga can autoload Mac PC Atari Amiga MSDOS disks can your PC.
How about autoplay any OS software.....
ONLY AMIGA MAKES IT POSSIBLE !!!!!!!