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Opening Amiga Source Proposed
Count Fragula writes "Just wanted to pass this along to the OSS community. It looks like Eric S Raymond, among others, has assisted in working up a proposal to Open Source the AmigaOS. In light of the fact that the Amiga, as a platform, is (at least commercially) under some kind of curse, this may be a Good Thing. Heck, there's a lot of really good substructure there waiting to be brought up to to the present decade."
This thread reveals the saddest thing about some people view of the amiga. They remember the A500 and what it could do and don`t realise that the hardware and software has moved on since then. It may come a suprise to those people to realise that Amiga OS 3.5 was released this week! Towards the end of november Phase 5 will hopefully release their powerPC G4 cards for the amiga. If you treat the amiga as though it was as powerful as an A500 of course it will seem old. But that is like complaining about the PC cause I once owned a 286.
Not at all. The people behind this movement aren`t in it for linux. We are mostly current amiga users who have stuck with the platform because the OS has advantages over other OS`s. We want an effecient, compact OS to use on our computers. We also want the OS open-sourced so that we can move it from the dead 68k series to the PPC (especially the G4). Before you start saying that it would be impossible to do remember that a full install of AmigaOS 3.1 takes up less than 4M
Still available? In flea markets, maybe.
:)
No-one has made a new amiga for an age, you know. Even the last fiew a1200s from a while back are just gathering dust in back rooms.
Compare the uptime of a psion running a word pro, a browser, a sample editor, or just about anything else to an amiga built from parts scavenged from flea markets, and see where you get.
Amiga user and proud of it.. Just not a foaming advoloon who's scared to let go of the past..
>Nowadays Amiga as a computer is dead.. What? Crap! We will buy G4 accelerators (what 10000%-15000% faster than p*ntium-3 !!) and use AmigaOS 3.5 and Neutrind! it is real FUTURE! etc.. ;-) P.S. AMIGA must to go!!!!!
>Nowadays Amiga as a computer is dead.. What? Crap! We will buy G4 accelerators (what 10000%-15000% faster than p*ntium-3 !!) and use AmigaOS 3.5 and Neutrind! it is real FUTURE! etc.. a micro$oft mustdie! Mustdie! MUSTDIE! P.S. AMIGA must to go!!!!!
>Nowadays Amiga as a computer is dead.. What? Crap! We will buy G4 accelerators (what 10000%-15000% faster than p*ntium-3 !!) and use AmigaOS 3.5 and Neutrind! it is real FUTURE! etc.. ;-) a micro$oft mustdie! Mustdie! MUSTDIE! P.S. AMIGA must to go!!!!!
>Nowadays Amiga as a computer is dead.. What? Crap! We will buy G4 accelerators (what 10000%-15000% faster than p*ntium-3 !!) and use AmigaOS 3.5 and Neutrind! it is real FUTURE! etc.. ;-) and micro$oft mustdie! Mustdie! MUSTDIE! P.S. AMIGA must to go!!!!!
OF COURSE!................
The Amiga has problems, but Open Source is not the cure. The open source community thought it could save Mozilla as well, and that didn't work out, so why should a complete OS succeed? Every pro open-source programmer even remotely capable of working on an OS is already working on Linux, so the mediocre ones that are left will get to work on AmigaOS. Just let it die in peace will ya?
If AmigaOS becomes open source, one of two things will happen:
1 - all of its interesting features will be absorbed into linux, after which its empty shell will be abandoned
2 - it will receive a lot of linux code and become just another linux distribution
Yep.
The Amiga was a bunch of chips all named after girls.
Why do people insist it had a superior OS?
Air-Sick Raymond is "on a quest."
He's one of the last remnants of the "New Left" movement of early 70's. Part of the branch that ran off and became neo-Pagans (shake that rattle, dude!).
He'll NEVER give up until the Jargon File is in every school library, and every schoolchild knows the meaning of the non-word "grok."
Zealotry has it's place.
And it's not everyplace.
The original Amiga had a CPU running at 4 or 8 Mhz. It was kicking the butt of 386's and even 486's. Why not shrink it down to a .18 micron process, crank up to 500 or so Mhz and start kicking some more Intel butt?
AFAIK, during the whole Commodore/Escom disaster a backup of the development machines was smuggled out the door and a full backup of the whole OS exists. Not sure what this would be useful for though these days. Well I guess it hase some historic value.
The source would probably be picked up by AROS - Amiga Research OS :)
They have from scratch written several of the key amiga libraries, just by looking at the API. They have a working Exec kernel + some of the libraries that can run under Linux or i386 native, several amiga programs just have to be recompiled using GCC and they can run in an X window. Personally im waiting for the native i386 version to become more complete. And no.. with todays CPU power you dont need custom chips
(why comments like that even get a score of 1 is beyond me)
The critical parts of Exec are mostly 68k ASM. The rest of the OS is mostly C, with the notable exception of DOS. The first implementation was written in BCPL, which lead to some inconsistencies with the rest of the OS. (DOS was contracted out to another company.)
But I believe it was rewritten in AmigaOS 2.0, and it must be completely C right now. Any one knows for sure?
Throw away that account and let your hair down once in awhile.
I personally have thrown away over a half dozen accounts by now.
Besides, I want the account with the name "Stephen Williams" now. You've had it long enough. Give it up! Give it up!
If Amiga is *not* GPLed and some of the code ends up in Linux, it opens Linux up to legal challenges which could severely damage the reputation of the hacker community. This is the same trap offered by opening of Solaris code. Coders beware.
(That was perhaps the most sensible comment on Slashdot I've seen for a
while. What a lot of people seem to forget is that there is more to the
computer industry than just dollars and units shipped, it's about a fun.)
In my opinion, the AmigaOS has some very sound underlying principles which
can be built upon to provide a "modern" operating system (whatever that
means.) The priority though is to remove the dependency on the custom
chips, a proper compilation for the PowerPC chips and integration of things
like CyberGFX and AHI into the system APIs.
What, obtain the source so we can br cursed as well? No thanks! Thye should bury the source and encloses the entire Amiga headquarters in a pyramid of 100x100 reinforced concrete blocks. And then to be sure, fill the whole thing with epoxy.
Yes, if the chips in your computer are a bunch of girls, I guess...
Rob, can you implement a "yes, but it isn't open source" macro here when people are on Slashdot? maybe a big button that appears whenever the Post Comment window is open? It would save a lot of keystrokes.
It seems like to "Open Source" something is now becoming a verb.
I'll say what I visualize when I hear the phrase these days. To me it seems similar to the way, after a hunter kills a deer or a gamebird, and splits the animal "open" to gut it.
I find it annoying that the "Open Source" movement seems more intent on cracking open old codebases, and less intent on original work. Even successful "originally Open Source" projects like the GIMP started out and were actually created as closed products developed (then abandoned, actually) by a few individual developers.
Is "Open Source" what happens after the drawbridge has been broken down and the hordes have invaded?
Oh, pshaw, don't start reciting that Cathedral and Bizzarre catechism. I've heard it before.
For some reason I see a lot of negative reactions from people when they see any mention of the Amiga going open source.
I would chalk it up to the "Amiga Legacy," which is a bunch of people who are even more strident an annoying that Mac Zealots.
What I saw immediately when I read your first sentence was one of those cartoon scenes where an annoying toy robot is marching around making lots of noise. The character in the cartoon smashed it with a big hammer. It continues making noise. The character smashes it even more. A few seconds later it makes a few more annoying noises. Smashed again, and it's out.
People all over the world are sick of Amiga zealots. There's a kneejerk reaction to anything Amiga as a result of the legacy of annoyance that anything Amiga represents.
And no, it's not envy.
When you reach adulthood, you might realise just how nice girls actually are...
This is good news assuming that the AmigaOS is released under a truely open source licence and not under some shitty Sun-like "community" (as in prison community) licence. It doesn't mean that the Amiga is going to rise from the dead because it won't, but it will be a boon for emulator writers and those on the ARP to have access to the source code.
Well for one thing the amiga desktop was a well organized and consistent GUI, something that can't be said for Linux. This would give it strong appeal home users.
You can stab it, shoot it, poison it, drown it, and let the platform wither with neglect, but IT JUST WON'T DIE!!!! ... until it shoots itself by walking in the winning run.
I agree. My first computer was an Atari 1040, the siblig of the Amiga. It had a very easy to use GUI desktop, was very compact overall in size and was DOS compatible. The hardware sucked -- it was frozen at 1985 technology. Programmers (I'm not one) said it was easy to program. It did seem to get a lot of out of it's one Mb of RAM. Sure you can argue that we don't need another OS (true -- there's always DOS) but the more I look into Linux the more I'm put off by its myriad files, folders and partitions. This may be good for some applications but it's one of the things that keeps a lot of people away from computers -- it makes computers look hopelessly complex. I certainly think there's room for a simple, easy to use, small GUI based computer like the Amiga.
I see so many negative posts here saying "why bother?".
.. etc etc.
Well, how many OSs do you know that can multitask in under 1MB of memory - complete with a GUI? No virtual memory? Perhaps because it doesn't need it. It's efficient. Fine, if bloatware and an inefficient OS need 32MB to run - but that's not AmigaOS. Besides, it could easily be implemented - take a look at AROS, there are dozens of programmers willing to do the work right there.
AmigaOS tied to hardware? Give me a break. The hardware is old. The OS still offers something valuable. Upgrade the OS, fix the bugs, give it new features, keep it's memory requirements down -and since it would be open source/GPL it'd be free - and I'm sure it would find it's way into a LOT of people's hard disks. Especially if it could be running on 68K, PPC, Intel X86, (Strong)ARM,
Yes, you can use emulators. Have you used UAE? Ever consider that it's only emulating the equivalent of a 25MHz Amiga yet runs BLAZINGLY fast? Well, times that by TWENTY and you have an idea of how quickly Amiga apps would run if AmigaOS was native to the CPU/hardware it was compiled for.
Just a FEW suggestions to get you thinking...
Guys, give it a chance. What harm is there? A little competition is not a bad thing...
I agree that at this point any revival of Amiga is purely for hack value, but:
> 1. memory protection (which cannot be implemented without breaking existing Amiga APIs,
> rendering the existing software base obsolete)
Sure it can be done. The API's don't assume a lack of memory protection. However, it will break programs that try to modify the OS, of which there are many.
> 2. virtual memory (see above problems)
It's already been done. (see above post)
> 3. halfway current graphics drivers (which I assume would be done under the CyberGraphX or
> Picasso API...
This is the worst problem
> 4. new scsi.device that supports very large partitions.
Not a particularly big deal in my opinion.
> 5. rewriting Exec for a new processor, which should be especially amusing since it's all
> ASM/BCPL, as is much of the kernel.
Who says you'd want to keep that around anyway?
> 6. multithreading
This is something the Amiga has always implicitly had. (due to lack of memory protection)
> 7. umm, apps. these are rather helpful, and will have to be generated anew since updating the OS
> will break all the older stuff.
Actually this would be the best part. There are many, many existing Amiga apps that I would love to be able to run todayon newer machines. Either emulation or a WINE style library for programmers would be a good thing.
> While it's too late to change things, tossing the linux core for the AmigaOS would be a bigger
> win than tossing the AmigaOS for linux...
Ummm... except that you'd lose networking support, SMP support, platform independence, multi-user security, virtual memory, and get a GUI built into the kernel... maybe this isn't such a good idea.
Every day some Open Source advocate is telling some company it would be best for them to open-source their products. Amiga, Sun, Sgi, you name them. Hey folks, everyone has gotten your message. If they're not following your advice, they'll have their reasons. I'm getting sick of reading this again and again.
But I believe it was rewritten in AmigaOS 2.0, and it must be completely C right now. Any one knows for sure?
Yes, the dos.library in 2.x was completely rewritten in C. I know because it broke a bunch of my asm programs that made dos.library calls with the library pointer in A4 or A5, which was legal under 1.3. (2.0 required that the library pointer be held in A6, just like all the other libs.)
These 3 tool makes, all of which will fully support Linux, are all that Linux needs to take over the corporate desktop.
I would look for at least 2 to 3 major corporations switching to Linux on the desktop in the next year.
I want to know what's in Jack in the Box's Jacksauce.
OK, I admit this is very offtopic, but I have to ask..
:o) (You remember that joke don't you? What do you call a dog with no legs? Doesn't matter - he won't come when you call him anyway...)
:o)
What exactly IS a dragonball? The tender parts of a male Dragon?
Or perhaps it's what happens when you take your legless dog for a walk
Kinda like Dragon milk - it comes from a cow with no legs
open the code anyway. There is probably nothing worth using.. However the simpleness, clarity and style may teach a new generation lessons in O/S writing. Come up with something good, and the other parts drop into place. Whoever owns the code may get a benefit, like the official amiga palm release/ nee redhat story, whereas if they sit on it, they will get fond memories and letters of goodwill, but no bucks. If they GPL it, then Palm may improve, but they will also have competition. I dont see a niche for amiga, unless the playstations price themselves out of the market. The hardware is un important, and the dollars with the software. Therefore amiga needs to target PDA software. Hanging off the coattails of GPL'ed source is the way to go.
This was the main reason the Amigas were so cheap and so useful, however it was also why it crashed so much. Failure either on the part of the coders writing the operating system code (remember how kickstart 1.0 Amiga's crashed more than 1.3)? Anyhow it forced coders to have to write cleaner code (code that avoids writing beyond array bounds, or code that would keep track of its own resources.. If you placed a language such as LISP or Java on an Amiga, I'd admit it would be slow but you wouldn't need an MMU and your code would have less bugs in it.. The bad coders believed that having not a MMU was a bad thing, but in retrospect, where has bad coding styles and the forcing of the OS to deal with our own lack of good coding skills lead us?? If you look at any Amiga assembly source you will find it looks more object oriented and clean than most C level source code written for operating systems like Windows or even Linux.. The best coders began on Amigas.. I have no proof for my belief, test me on this.. Better yet why not read the source code for the operating system, it could really blow your mind.. PS- Unix and Windows are quite up to date but don't assume they are the best just because they survived by previous assumptions.
But there are lots of features of the Amiga that I loved that I miss:
Sigh, maybe it's time to dig my A3000 out of the closet again :-)
You're right it is. The Amiga is dead and buried.
The Amiga was a great computer but it is no more. It was strangled by years of neglect from owners who did nothing but issue one bullshit press release after another.
Why then was anyone surprised by the outcome of the recent Gateway saga? I expect no one was except for the most deluded, reason-challenged Amiga fanatic.
Frankly I find it funny that there are still sad inviduals in the world believing against all common sense that the Amiga is going to rise again. Whether the OS is open sourced or not makes no difference, the physical Amiga is a thing of the past.
People should accept that and move on.
Strange, you didn't seem to to want to discuss any technical issues of the Amiga going Open Source, you, like so many others want to just keep insisting that the Amiga is dead without actually knowing anything about it. In my oponion, you're just suffering from a case of Platform Envy. I'm happy with my Amiga, I get new software for it every day, why can't I just continue to use it without being harassed by people trying to insist that it's dead. The Amiga will never go away as long as people continue to use it.
Exactly! Just look under the Great Pyramids in Egypt. Under each pyramid lies the complete sources to Win95, Win NT and MacOS. I guess They'll just have to put another pile of rocks together for Win98 soon.
I dont believe that a psion could be more efficient than any desktop computer.
Gee, Unix was cool 20 years ago..I guess it's useless today. Linux and BeOS don't do anything no other OS does, who needs it? What's wrong with opening up the source, so perhaps it can be updated & used in places its creators never imagined, kinda like what's happening with that other alternative OS with rabid followers...
The Doom modification was a cleaver hack, but it was possible before the Doom source release and would even have been possible had the Doom source never been released. What is the real utility of that kill process code?
It's fine and good if Amiga/Gateway wants to do this, but it really does not matter one bit to anyone but ESR and the Ami emulation community.
No, I didn't read the article -- is everyone that interested in Amiga just because they're basing their OS on Linux? Commodore Amiga was one thing, but I'm not so sure about the new one.
What's really going on at Amiga? While they haven't been especially clear about what their plans are, they have said with a fair amount of certainty that they are doing software only.
I don't think the world is concerned or ready for the new AmigaOS, anyway. For me at least, the things dead before arrival, and a lot of it has to do with the conflicting news they were giving. Obviously, the company has no focus, and since there has yet to be a revenue stream, nobody's expecting them to make a profit. They probably never will. When the money runs dry, *then* they'll release some half-assed code to the public and fold, just like Lucid Emacs.
It's fine for your parents to drop thousands of dollars into a college education for yourself, then after graduation, give up all your worldly possessions and become a monk. This is capitalism, though, and *some* kind of a return is important. If Gateway (a major investor in Amiga) was particularly interested in open source, I'm sure they'd prefer to make a donation directly to the community.
I'd still like to see the 'source' opened to these products, since I don't think anyone is really interested in stealing them:
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Remember that "open source" does not mean "free". The software is still copyrighted and any of that "really good substructure" that finds its way into Linux is a big legal problem waiting to happen. Now if Amiga were GPLed.......
Amiga and its OS were pretty impressive at the time and they raised the expectations from PCs quite a lot. Nowadays Amiga as a computer is dead, and its OS is definitely outdated (might I recall that up to 3.0 parts of the OS were written in BCPL and not in C... as far as I know gcc has no BCPL frontend yet, but there should be one somewere). Still opensourcing it (even better: re-releasing it under a BSD-like or GPL-like licence) would be a great thing, both for the old users of the machine (I still have a working A2000) and for the `emulation scene' as well (UAE)... I don't know how much has to be gained from being able to peek into that code, but I am pretty sure quite a lot is lost in not releasing it
- Palm announces color Palms & is licensing like crazy.
- Now, AmigaOS source is open
Seriously..the new Palms will be several times faster than most Amigas, have more memory than most, and like a LOT of 'em, have no HD (for now). I have a hard time believing nobody else is thinking this.
Now, Gateway..wanna do something worthwhile??? Yeah, baby. Bubble Bobble, ATerm, and DeluxePaint, in my pocket, running simultaneously. :->
Now, about those 'pocket' custom chips...without which the Amiga's just an Atari ST.
Okay, time for my medication.
I am all for this, but I have to be honest, if I were sitting on the other side of the table I would not find this proposal interesting at all.
The proposal provides very few ideas on how the company is actually going to benefit, all it says is "publicity and company awareness", and then is vague from there.
I also noticed that the publicity argument is a good 80% of the text. I just doesn't sound very solid if you ask me.
If anything, I like the idea, but I wish that Eric would go through and add a little more meat to the proposal... Not any promises but at least some hypothetical money-making solutions that would give the people over at Amiga something to mull over. Right now it sounds like a lot of theoretical hot air and empty promises if you ask me. (even though we know it's not)
-Erik-
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but am I the only one who sees this as just an attempt to get some "cool" technology for Linux without having to spend the time to create it from scratch?
Wkat Linux needs is API and UI standards, not yet ANOTHER cast-off technology rolled into it.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The AmigaOS was/is brilliant. I still use it every day at home. My Amiga is setup with Miami running IP-NAT. My PC has my Amiga setup as it's default gateway. Although my favourite web browser is Opera, I still prefer the Amiga for other things (Mail, IRC). I run Samba on my Amiga too, and can share files that way. And I don't have a graphics card - plain old AGA does me fine.
And there are still new technologies coming out for the Amiga all the time - Voodoo 2 is available for it (Thank you phase 5 (http://www.phase5.de)), for example. It uses standard IDE Hard Drives (Although the new version of Workbench - 3.5 - is the only one that can access greater than 4Gb without any problems). Or SCSI Hard Drives. Most printer drivers are available for it - 3rd party, of course.
Someone earlier said that a Psion is faster than an A4000/060 - most 68060 processor on the Amiga are 50MHz, some are faster. And the 68060 has more efficient instructions that the equivelent Pentium (80586), making is roughly equivalent to a 75MHz Pentium. I know - by todays standards its not all that fast, but when you consider just how low overhead the AmigaOS has, being only 512K. I don't think a Psion runs quite that fast yet.
Yes, I know, I can get UAE. But isn't not the same as having and using a real Amiga. The Amiga is like having a really old car that still works. You can buy a Ferrari, but there is still something special about cruising around in a 1960s Chevey (sp?).
Don't get me wrong - I love Linux, and I have it installed on my A4000 (Debian 2.1).
The Amiga is far from dead. It's may not be up with the times thanks to it's owner companies, but the guys who worked with it really did work with it, and thought it through, and did an excellent job. It is a prime example of how an OS can tie in very carefully with the hardware - where the OS and the hardware were designed together, and integrated well.
I do have another 2 Amiga, but unfortunately don't have monitors to use them on. And if I could get my hands on them, I would get more.
As for what use the source would be, I personally would fine it very interesting to have a read through. I'd love to know more about the underlying structure. It's not all the big, so it would be perfect for students to study. The OS is based on Unix (believe it or not!), and would be perfect to study in College to see how things operate. 512K isn't all that big, and that includes IDE Drivers, Graphics drivers, Pre-emptive Multitasking, GUI, mouse drivers, interrupts, AutoConfig (the precurser to Plug&Play - except AutoConfig always works!). Such a wealth of info in such a small package.
T.
You mean you haven't heard - Amiga are not producing any hardware, so the Transmete rumour, even if it was true, is not false. Amiga will be producing on the AmigaOS, and will be lisencing it out to other companies to use.
Also, considering that they are about to release WorkBench 3.5 (which will only run on top of AmigaOS 3.1), I don't think they will be releasing the code just yet. I don't think it would make much sense from a business point of view. However, I hope they do. I'd love to get my hands on it.
T.
Oops, had a typo there...
...so the Transmeta rumour, even if it is true, is now false.
Sorry about that.
T.
I have both as well and am devoted to the Psion Series 5 (and new Revo) as a PDA, but the fact of the matter is:
Can a Psion read a CD-Rom? Not unless you hook it up to an Amiga with AmigaNCP. Have you tried browsing the web with a Psion? It's really a joke at this stage...maybe Opera will make it workable.Okay, the Psion is a great little PDA with an outstanding OS (for a PDA), but please don't make it out to be something it isn't.
Finally, if AmigaOS were updated and open-sourced, there's no reason it couldn't continue to support a committed user base. Most major applications are represented on the platform still, and hardware is still available.
(Oh, and my nick has nothing to do with the company or its products.)
Yep, there's Cloanto's Amiga Forever. It works fine on my PII 266, but it feels a bit slow. It's definitely not as responsive as my A4000T and a dog compared to PPC. It's a neat thing to see, but there are some applications that don't work. Imagine for example does a wonderful job of raytracing black screens. Photorealistic black screens.
But then again.. what good would it do to reproduce these chips? It would be like PC people going out and brewing up a batch of EGA chips
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
and neither is AmigaOS. You could make the same arguments for opening BeOS source too
---
I swear there was a story on /. just a moment ago about Linux vs/NT..
HERE
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
And you call the Mozilla Effect a Bad Thing? You probably see it as, "Hey lookit that fish of a project flopping around out of water." But I'm running Mozilla right now, and I see it as, "Hey look, they pulled that project out of the dark closet, figured out it really was junk, and rewrote it!"
The Mozilla team is FIXING the Netscape browser. They're doing the Right Thing(tm) this time. It's not out yet, but it will be. And it will be good. And that was the goal. Sure, the have secondary goals such as meeting arbitrary deadlines, making a product, etc... but the main thing was to see if an Open Source development community (and that includes coders, debuggers, testers, thinkers, and well wishers) could do one better than Netscape, and they are.
So it would be sweet if a group could do that with the Amiga. Hell, it'd be sweeter if they could make the Linux-Amiga hybrid Amiga, Inc was talking about. (Tho somehow, I don't think that was going to use any original code from Amiga CLassic.)
ANyway...
Come on, I loved the Amiga...four years ago. Hell, I still have my 3000T with Vlab Motion, GVP Spectrum, etc etc. But I DO NOT expect the Amiga to suddenly rise from the grave and suddenly become viable.
Yes, it rocked. Yes, the gui and cli were integrated at a level that still hasn't been replicated. Yes, it was inventive, creative, and downright sexy. Then again, so was Marilyn Monroe,but she's DEAD...and I don't expect anyone to be lusting after her corpse anytime soon.
The nearly tens of diehard Amiga users left in the world need to realize that we all had our chance to make the platform worth something, and in the end we lost. Let's take a quick look at what would be needed to make the AmigaOS even remotely competitive now....
1. memory protection (which cannot be implemented without breaking existing Amiga APIs, rendering the existing software base obsolete)
2. virtual memory (see above problems)
3. halfway current graphics drivers (which I assume would be done under the CyberGraphX or Picasso API...hope those get opensourced as well if you want to have something compatible)
4. new scsi.device that supports very large partitions. Yes, I'm aware of td64 and the AI version, neither of which are remotely reasonable IMO.
5. rewriting Exec for a new processor, which should be especially amusing since it's all ASM/BCPL, as is much of the kernel.
6. multithreading
7. umm, apps. these are rather helpful, and will have to be generated anew since updating the OS will break all the older stuff.
Starting to see just how difficult it would be to bring the OS to current standards? By the time you get kernel hackers to actually bring things into spec for 1999, we'll be sitting at 2001 and the rules will have changed yet again.
Look, I sympathize (well, used to anyway) with those that bemoan the loss of the Amiga, but there ARE options out there that don't require you to run Microsoft software. Turn your energy to QNX, *BSD, Linux, BeOS, whatever... and mold those into what the spirit of the Amiga represented to you.
Unfortunately, platform loyalty has all the trimmings of religion, and asking the zealots to change gods will generate an amusing number of emails in my box I imagine.
Your proctologist called...they found your head. Remove "no-spam" from email address to contact me
Everyone seems to be confusing the AmigaOS with the Amiga hardware, and that's a big mistake. The underlying OS was a joy to program--it did shared libraries better than anything else I've seen (and I've see a lot), had a very sweet message-passing system deeply integrated, and was generally very nice. To be very blunt, the core AmigaOS is significantly better in quite a few ways than the Linux kernel. While it's too late to change things, tossing the linux core for the AmigaOS would be a bigger win than tossing the AmigaOS for linux...
Yea.. all that nostalgia kinda brings a tear to the eye :~) ..
:)
I got an A500, about 10 years ago (exactly 10 years in a couple of weeks time, as I think about it) and it was great. As was the A1200 I got in 1993 (eventually a 50MHz '030/882 with 16MB RAM).
Since then though in 1995/6 I moved onto Linux on the PC, and of course games under Windows95.
I felt then that the Amiga hardware was left for dead (It was Red Alert that made me feel that the most), even though AmigaOS was as fast as Linux/X on my 486/133 at the time.
I don't know, maybe it might be interesting to get it working again, not least to have an Amiga in a window or something cute like that, but I doubt it's got much to offer now, considering how much further on technology has marched since the latest incarnation of AmigaOS (1992 wasn't it? when the A1200 came out?)
Nice to think about it again though. I still have my Amiga, although being a Brit and living in the USA now I've left my Amiga1200 at home in England, as the PSU I have doesn't work over here.
Ah, nostaglia indeed
Delphis
The multitasking abilities of the Amiga were ahead of their time, certainly, but other OS's can do that today. What I see as the lasting advantage of the Amiga is the multimedia capability: multiple simultaneous screen resolutions, etc. For that to work, you need the custom Amiga chipset (and rumor -- and this is only rumor -- has it that at least one of the schematics was lost during the Commodore - Escom - Gateway transition). Without the chips, the OS is largely been-there-done-that if you want to port it to new hardware.
Does anyone have any knowledgeable opinion as to whether incorporating the Amiga chipset into a PC video card is technologicaly feasible (assuming the chips can be reproduced)?
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Ahhh, memories. I just gave away my A2000HD this year to a friend of mine that still uses multiple Amigas. I grew up on C= equipment. Vic-20, C=64, A500, A2000. I was very much into the Amiga scene even doing some consulting work for a local copy shop and technical college.
It's for that very reason that I would love to see the AmigaOS Open Sourced. To finally see the insides of the computer platform that fueled my interest in computers which still burns today.
Why let an old dog wither away and die locked behind a closed source door. Let'em out to run free while he's still got alittle breath left in him.
Holistic system design. The OS was built during a time when good small powerful code was necessary for the operation of the machine. The display portion of the OS was pretty well dictated by the display capabilities of the computer, not the other way around. This is why the Amiga was revolutionary during its time. Everybody else was looking at building general solutions that pretty much limited what was possible with respect to multimedia solutions. (Can't resist saying that it also ran on a Motorola chip which at the time made Intel chips look pale in comaprison...) Also I guess you can't forget Jay Miner. He was the one who developed the initial chip designs. He also developed the early chip designs for the Atari 8 bit machines. On a low level all of his chip sets are similar. They were designed to give the programmer both a high level, and low level of control over what is being done with the display. It is these features that makes the Amiga distinctive even to this day. A developer could choose to make a general OS call for a bitmap, and overlay a few sprites to get the job done, or maybe tie the display to low-level interrupt driven CPU code to generate new and interesting displays, pretty much anything was possible even at the low clock speeds of the time. These types of graphics engines are very hackable. The smarter you are, the more the display will do for you. Contrast that to todays current crop of display systems. They are fairly rigid structures with general intent. Given todays general purpose computing enviroment, it is pretty hard to build something that is Amiga like using the current crop of off the shelf stuff.
Todays general purpose PC is just that. General purpose. The Amigas, SGI IRIX machines, and some others that I don't know about really excel at certain things because one entity was able to design the system, and tweak the OS to achieve pretty high goals.
I do not have an Amiga today (wish I still did!), but I still have a number of IRIX machines to work with, and they run circles around PC's in the areas where the system was designed as a whole to perform. (Just try to compose a letter, or edit a spread sheet though!) I do not believe that general purpose machines will ever reach this level of excellence just because of their design. Their focus is just too broad. Even if the OS was perfect, the machine would not be.
Making the Amiga OS open source will no doubt expose some great tools, and Linux will benefit, but none of it will really shine the way that machine, or others like it do because it will be for the most part be running on an X86 Intel driven PC.
We need a machine that runs linux that is not necessarily a PC. Another chicken and egg problem, but an interesting one. Lets say we take a couple of cases where a machine like this could complement the current PC. Most users don't need all these features in one box, so why not build them in smaller ones that they can use with the box that they have? Maybe use that box as a sort of traffic cop to control the other smaller ones that they might have. Linux is GREAT at this. It has evolved on the net, and thus is very net-centric.
1. Modeling engines. I think of the Sony engine that will be released in a short while. It is capable of realtime visualization tasks that would really boost productivity for engineers, animators, simulators and the like. They need a "real machine" with lots of disk, network, and CPU to hold the data and deal with their computing enviroment. Lets say that this "engine" connects with a network wire to the box that they already have. Maybe even utilizes a pass through cable to take advantage of their display. Make it big enough to be able to do the job it is supposed to do, (crunch on geometry) yet small and cheap enough that it is not a big deal to own one. Lets face it people will spend $3000 or more on just Graphics cards. Why not a modeling rendering Linux running engine with a chipset to die for?
2. Media stations. Having a large boxy computer to perform many different multimedia tasks is expensive and wasteful. Have a series of networked appliances that do various things. Compositing, editing, audio mixing, and processing. The interested party just gets them in the quantity needed, networks them, and a larger "server" type Linux machine could administer and direct them. They would be very portable, kind of like SCSI devices are today only you should not have to shut everything them down to swap them in and out. The users of this type of computing enviroment would also be capable of many parallel workflows that would require lots of expensive general purpose machines to duplicate.
My whole point here is that each item could be very flexible and powerful but well focused. Having the operating system and tools open sourced would allow the vendors of these sort of tools to compete on system design and function. They could use anyone's CPU, graphics, IO, whatever, or they could roll their own. Each unit could be very Amiga like in its design yielding the best performance for the least dollars.
Blogging because I can...
At least they knew how to name chips ... ...
It is so much more interesting to talk about Paula,Denise etc. Certainly beats "G200 SuperTerminator" or crap like that
Obviously you don't know that much about BeOS, or you would understand that it was basically designed to be MacOS with the power of AmigaOS and UNIX... read what JLG has to say about Amiga, and you'll realize that it inspired him to create a modern, efficient, high-powered operating system. From the dawning of the BeBox, a large percentage of Be developers and users have been ex-Amiga fanatics. Half the websites of Be developers house Be software _and_ Amiga software. It's a natural progression. Sounds like you need to appreciate your heritage more, boy, or pappy's gonna whoop ya.
Psion already has a perfectly good multitasking OS which is a damned sight more stable than AmigaDOS.
As someone with three (count 'em) Amigas on my home LAN, I really think it's a dead end technology, and of historical insterest only.
Without memory protection, and indeed support for modern devices (ie, things which aren't made of wood and flint!), it's really just a cumbersome beige white elephant.
Oh, and the other thing to remember is that the current psions are more powerful than the average Amiga, anyway :-)
A Psion netbook could leave my A4000/060 for dead...
AC (because I don't need annoying flames!)
What, like the annoying flame you just posted?
Stop being an AC, get an account and filter the news you don't find interesting. It saves your time in more ways than one - you don't have to read it, and thus you save the time that you would have otherwise spent writing pointless flames in response to it.
-Stephen
I think it's a good idea.
What I don't get is why people still want to revive the amiga. Sure it was a good system (I still fond memories of my A500), but due to commodore's problems it failed to keep up with computer evolution.
Why don't people just get the good elements of the os and incorporate them in an open source solution, and leave it at that? Why does it have to be called 'Amiga'?
the pun is mightier than the sword
Proper "screens"
With different resolutions/bpp per screen. I miss that one. I'm not sure if it can be added cleanly to XFree. Would love it, though.
Assigns
I use to call them "named $PATHs" when I try to explain them to the Unixphiles. I don't ever expect to see it retrofitted in Linux, though.
Catalog files
I'm sure the GNOME and KDE guys will come up with a proper internationalization standard if they haven't already.
Datatypes
Both KDE and GNOME is adding this in some way.
Oh. And how could you forget to mention AREXX?! An easy to use scripting language with IPC support, and most "modern" Amiga applications supported it. You'll probably get a somewhat equivalent in Linux when applications start to expose their functions through CORBA.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Amiga was recently spun-off from Gateway, if I remember correctly. Gateway is a big customer of Microsoft. If Gateway does anything to make MS upset, their software costs could go up.
Microsoft realizes what a threat Open Source is becoming. I think they'd either buy Amiga to stop them from releasing the OS as open source, or if Gateway still owns a majority stake in Amiga, they would put pressure on Gateway to stop it from happening.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
As if anyone cares...
That was the entire point of the article!
I use BeOS myself, it's a great OS. The article, however, was arguing that AmigaOS should be Open Source, so the comparison was valid.
Yes, But BeOS isn't Open Source
Silly question, I know, still.
What parts of the AmigaOS are usefully salvageable for other OSs? File system, graphics, GUI?
I just can't see Amiga becoming anything more than a reminiscing toy (although that's quite a nice place to be in, really)
I had an Amiga. All I did all day was play Turrican2, maybe Swiv, and some games by Bullfrog. Also, I read Amiga Power but I rant about that in other places.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
The truth about the Nova.
My opinion exactly... Amiga was cool (I had one) but it is completely dead technology today. Now that chips like the GeForce 256 are coming, stories about Paula, Denise and Agnus are deads. If they had to design an up-to-date Amiga it would only be an Amiga by name, and probably look kind of like a G4 Mac (PowerPC chip with PC hardware around it).
Think, for a moment, what BeOS would be like, if it had its great architecture, mixed in with the advantages of open source. It would have already taken over Windows.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
If you don't need custom chips, then how the hell can't I get UAE to fully emulate a simple A500 on a P233? The fact is that the old PC architecture is bulky and cumbersome. Too bad that next-generation Amiga didn't come out.
Oh well, I'll have to wait until I get older and rich enough to resurrect the Amiga, the right way.
Things that good are not easily forgotten. Just nobody seems to be smart enough to pull it off.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Yep, you have. Stupid Amiga Inc. (Commodore), changed it to "Task:" and "Address:" or something on OS 3.x.
They also got rid of that cool disk-in-hand logo, and changed their official logo from that cool checkmark to that stupid ball.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Those strings could be decoded with a handy program called Guru2u (?). Their actual definitions were in a header anyways (alert.h?) which you'd get with your C compiler or could find in the RKM. When they were truly useful, they'd tell you which library & what the specific problem was.
Hey Josh - I've still got that Amiga 1000 stashed
away at my parent's attic. $10 and a cup of
coffee and it's yours. (maybe you can teach Rich
a thing or two about programming on it....)
;)
My first computer was an Amiga 500, 500 bytes upgraded to 1 whole megabyte of RAM( I think), the cheapest one they had. I dont remember what the heck the harddrive was. I forgot what programs I used, but I used it to edit video...
It was the prelude to the video toaster they priced outta my league.
I always hated that name, same reason why they never sold new chevy NOVAs in spanish speaking countries (correct me if I am wrong).
OK, this helps us how? Without the Amiga chipset, much of what made the Amiga interesting is not possible. So, to what end can I spend my free time on this code?
Now, don't get me wrong. I love the idea of open sourcing the Amiga OS, just as I loved the idea of Caldera open sourcing GEM and Atari open sourcing TOS. However, how much activity has the latter generated?
All I am saying is that this is interesting, but not earth shattering. Perhaps, if the rumors are true, and Amiga and Transmeta release an ubercomputer, this will be a seminal moment in personal computer history, but unless that happens, I fear that this won't even be a footnote. The hacker community won't take up the code and make it wonderful, it will just sit around taking up FTP server space.
Unfortunately.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The Amiga was light years ahead of it's time.
And it was due to the combination of amazing hardware, and an amazing OS for it's time. While opening the source will definitely prove useful, (provided that there is a focal point to submit changes etc to ie. not chaos) the fact remains that the hardware isn't around to support the software this time. As a previous post has mentioned, what we really need is a add in PCI/AGP card that will enhance today's systems the way the Amiga back then was more than the sum of it's parts. This isn't that unfeasible: with T & L video cards already available, who knows what a solid piece of hardware coupled with an Open Sourced revitalised Amiga OS will result in. One can only wait and see.
Every Jedi needs a lightsaber. Use the Force. Need a lightsaber. =)
(just my 2 cents. IMHO. )
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
The Amiga was light years ahead of it's time.
And it was due to the combination of amazing hardware, and an amazing OS for it's time. While opening the source will definitely prove useful, (provided that there is a focal point to submit changes etc to ie. not chaos) the fact remains that the hardware isn't around to support the software this time. As a previous post has mentioned, what we really need is a add in PCI/AGP card that will enhance today's systems the way the Amiga back then was more than the sum of it's parts. This isn't that unfeasible: with T & L video cards already available, who knows what a solid piece of hardware coupled with an Open Sourced revitalised Amiga OS will result in. One can only wait and see.
Every Jedi needs a lightsaber. Use the Force. Need a lightsaber. =)
(just my 2 cents. IMHO. )
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
I agree. The main reason for making the Amiga OS open-source is not to sink energy updating it (which would be silly) but to take those rare (but priceless nuggets) and implement them in Linux, *BSD, or any other OS du jour. Surely the Amiga OS has things Linux's developers can simply lift (guilt-free since it's OSS) rather than wasting time reinventing the wheel.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Psion already has a perfectly good multitasking OS which is a damned sight more stable than AmigaDOS.
Yes, but it isn't open source. There is probably more software available for the Amiga, too.
The amiga was cool in its day. That day is now long past. Any proposed new machine will bear little relation to the original, so why bother?
I'm all for new computers if they do something no exising one does, but the Amiga (in any of its guises) seem to do nothing a PC running Linux or BeOS can't do.
Linux can't run multitasking GUI apps in 512K. AmigaOS can.
AmigaOS was designed for computers with (by today's standards), small screens, small amounts of RAM and secondary storage, and slow processors. So it would make an ideal open source operating system for Psions and other portable/pocket computers.
The subject line says it all...
Isnt it about time that Linux is released under an open source license such as the GPL ???
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Ugh, I feel stupid for having to defend this. I thought several relevant points were brought up --but some moderators don't read the entire comment before making a judgment.
/dev/null ...
Who knows? Maybe the Amiga OE will actually ship. I don't see it appealing to geeks, newbies, or anyone inbetween. Even if it does, there's no money to be made on support alone -- Amiga's market is Joe Sixpack, not the PHB's who buy Red Hat and get those $$$$ support contracts. Businesses can justify those costs, so there's no problem with free software (beer or thought). The home user (Amiga's market) isn't really interested and won't pay for it. Amiga can't make hardware, thanks to the whole Transmeta fiasco (they can afford free thought software, because they own the hardware), OSS advocates want the software to be free, and there's no money in support -- bye bye VC money, and Amiga (once again).
They have to make money somehow. Amiga is a company, not a community. If they do fold, they'll have the great legacy of Netscape, which is another company that gave up on a shoddy incomplete product, gave it away for free (as in thought) and then the world realized that it *was* a gift horse worth looking in the mouth.
That's my two cents -- it's all the money I have left after dropping VC into Amiga. I wonder if I can get some of it back by extracting it out of
--
E2 IN2 IE?
This does seem to be a Good Thing. We have recently seen what free source can do for software, specificly the Doom modifications to kill processes (don't have the link right now...) that was on /. yesterday. Freeing up the code for people to work with will almost invaribly produce new and interesting products.
I have never worked with the amiga OS, but I know a lot of geeks who insist that it was the best OS on the market in it's day. It will be interesting to see if it can be made into a competitive product now that it's strangely ineffective business model has been dismissed.
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
Just when I thought I'd seen my last Guru Meditation!
Hey! Now I can look thought the source and find out what those hyper long strings of alphanums where in the GM error. This is a good thing.
-no broken link
SabrinaOL.
Eric W. Schwartz is a REAL talent,
you can visit his home page here.
"Last words are for fools who haven't said enough." - Karl Marx
why careing then about it ? i love this approach, since there _is_ an AMIGA community which cares about its baby and develop it further (up to now by supplying the great AMINET with superb tools) -- so why not makeing/applying these improvments into the core OS ?
I've seen and worked with several OS's (MacOs, BeOs, OS/2, Windows, Linux, etc.). AmigaOS might be old and outdated on some aspects but it still has a vast array of nifty features built in which i could not find in other OS's. There are loads of great other OS's but there is only one AmigaOS. If AmigaOS didn't have something special we wouldn't have this discussion.
Remember, Commodore never had the thousands of engineers munging the code that Netscape had, and the OS was modular in the first place (with the exception of the graphics system, which would need to be totally re-written a'la' Mozilla), which made it much easier to keep things clean.
Of course, it got crufted a bit at the end, as Commodore died, but so it goes. There wasn't enough engineers left at Commodore by that time to do TOO much damage to it...
Actually, the hardest problem with AmigaOS nowdays would be compiling it. It was written in pre-ANSI-C days, and I suspect that modern compilers would choke on it :-(.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Open sourcing the OS would be nice, but I don't think much would come out of it other than someone might go out and add memory protection or (ooh!) integrate ShapeShifter into the OS? It'd be like gutting a vintage stereo with modern equipment because the asthetics please you. I would vote for someone to made draggable windows and virtual memory for starters.
I recently dug my old A2500/30 out of the dark to revive a bit. Granted I am just working on backing up my 1.2GB of hard disk storage for use on an emulator, but I get such a kick out of using it again.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I'll take it! But I won't share it with Rich... It can join Kramer, Bushwood, and my iBook in the Geek Room instead where I'll give it the respect it so richly deserves.
Rich is a pretty good programmer for a business dweeb - he does 4GL stuff well and he was a whiz on the Newton when it came out (he wrote a Sybase front end for it - it was cool). But I think that an Amiga might be beyond him a tad.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Seriously, if you want a fully buzzword enabled OS with some raw power behind it (not to mention something that is up to date, clean, an quite free of cruft) I don't think you can do much better than BeOS.
Try it! It really is Bliss expressed in 1's and 0's!
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I'm sorry, but I think you (and a bunch of other people here) have missed the point. One of the advantages of Open Sourcing the Amiga OS would undoubtably be to decouple it from the hardware dongle, which even the owner doesn't want to sell anymore. Trust me: almost nobody cares about the hardware anymore. Those who do, are viewed as fanatics even among the ranks of us Amiga fanatics. :-)
Amiga hardware was very cool up until through the early 90s, but as mass-market commodity chipsets caught up, a lot of Amiga users tried to adopt them. My Amiga has a graphics card and a sound card based on PeeCee chipsets. I don't use the Amiga chipsets for those things anymore. Hell, I don't even use the built-in serial port anymore. She's a Frankenstein machine (and it's only going to get worse once I put a G4 PPC in it).
But the hardware isn't the only Frankenstein part -- it's the software too. The OS is tied to obsolete things like the Amiga chipset and even the 68k processor itself, and over the years, all sorts of competing hacks have been used to extend it and make it more device independent. They sorta work, but there's a lot of reinvention and infighting. (The Phase 5 vs H&P approaches to PPCs, for example, and the earlier CyberGraphX vs P96 wars.)
Open Sourcing AmigaOS would permanently fix this problem. Imagine being able to run AmigaOS on a fully modern computer, instead of an AmigaDongle that has a bunch of cyber implants to modernize it! Oh, and some people say, 'What can the Amiga do that OS ___ can't?' Well, turn the question around: What can OS ____ do that AmigaOS can't? There are in fact a few things, but not many. If anyone advocates against Open Source AmigaOS, I have to wonder: What are you afraid of?
Would I use an Open Source Amiga OS? No, probably not. If it had been done a few years ago, maybe. But a few months ago I finally decided to commit to Neutrino. Yet there are still a few people who don't want to go to Neutrino (for whatever reason) and I think an Open Source AmigaOS would be a great way to give them a fighting chance. Why would anyone be against that?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The Amiga, as I recall, was a hardware *and* software combo.
To GPL the Amiga, you would have to GPL the whole she-bang.
A lot of talk about making the PLEB project's boards GPL has been going around (we got feedback from RMS about it).
The bottom line is that the GPL is not made for hardware. Period.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
Disclaimer that probably won't be believed
This is a question. I'd like to know the answer. Flame if you must, but this isn't flamebait.
The amiga was cool in its day. That day is now long past. Any proposed new machine will bear little relation to the original, so why bother?
I'm all for new computers if they do something no exising one does, but the Amiga (in any of its guises) seem to do nothing a PC running Linux or BeOS can't do.
cleaver hack
LOL...was this intentional, or a typo?
What is the real utility of that kill process code?
Umm...what is the real utility of Doom? What is the real utility of a GUI for that matter? you can do the same thing with a CLI.
It's an interesting thing about pure research. It can produce a long chain of useless (but neato-cool) stuff. Then somebody comes along and says "I can take these six useless research projects and create something AMAZING out of them!" What many people forget is that the amazing thing is merely the final link in a long chain of useless things.
So what good is the "cleaver hack"? Don't know, but I saw a lot of creative thinking in the discussion that resulted from it...some of it might be useful some day.
If anyone wants to try making Linux (or whateer - I've jsut picked that as the only completely open-source option listed) as easy to use and configure and as fast as my old A1200 then they've got my support. But I don't see it.
:( I loved my Amiga (still do!), I loved the ease with which I could tinker with it and the near-impossibility of breaking it. I loved its compact efficiency. I loved the user community, so friendly and with such a strong freely distributable market. I loved the way that almost anyone could pick it up - I mean, my mum was fine on the old Amiga! When we moved to Windows 95 and Word, though, she got confused, she got agitated. She also got a Brother Word Processor.
I've no idea what the technical state of relative operating systems is today so I can't say whether the Amiga's got a wonderful deterministic scheduler with sensible multithreading (to pull terms out of the air) that hasn't been equalled elsewhere. It wouldn't surprise me though and, even if we're not unique, look at the footprint! This thing will run on little more than fresh air in modern terms, for goodness' sakes. I'd love to see an Amiga PDA...
Anyway, getting back to my original point, I've no idea about the technical side of things, but anything as nice to use as my old A1200 gets my vote. That wonderful, easy to use and understand shell and startup-sequence. Commodities. That icon system, especially with NewIcons or MagicWB. That lovely clean, clear, simple GUI. MUI. Directory Opus. OK, so I've just listed two add-ons, but I haven't found them elsewhere and I miss them
OK, I'm going on, but they were lovely. And anything even halfway that nice gets my vote and my money.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Perhaps I did misspeak myself, at least in the use of a catchy title. :-) My concern is that making it open source might not be enough to resuscitate it. If it's in a decrepit state, it might need a large team of paid engineers to bring it to the point where it can be used, praised, and worked on by all kinds of people -- just like Mozilla is today.
Let me try again with a definition of what I call the "Mozilla Effect": open source in an of itself is not the magic bullet by which excessively large chunks of previously proprietary code can achieve greatness; it's just a building block. You need to infuse a project with a large team of knowledgeable people with oodles of time on their hands to achieve the next step.
HTH, and I'm sorry if I misspoke.
I'm beginning to wonder about ESR. His quest to get any and all software on the face of the planet open sourced is noble, indeed. (I would love to see it.) But I think his credibility is beginning to be damaged every time he tells someone that ejecting an aging codebase into the 'net is going to magically resuscitate it.
To be fair, I haven't read the proposal yet, and I certainly don't have any idea what state the code is in. But I'd wager that it's in a similar state to the Communicator code when Mozilla was first launched: lots and lots of interesting code, but you can't really compile it into much.
Mozilla required almost complete rewriting with extensive corporate support to start shaping up as the awesome browser it will be. (One or two more Milestones, and I'll be happy to retire my well-worn copy of Communicator.) I wonder what AmigaOS will need, and if there is sufficient support to bring AmigaOS into the next millenium.
Adopt Amiga's message passing and asynchronous
I/O archicture for Linux, or some variant.
(also similar to NT completion ports)
Amiga's thread-based (Amiga called them processes,
but they were really threads) MessagePort
based I/O is lightyears easier to program
and more scalable than Linux select/poll(),
and POSIX AIO sucks, and SIGIO doesn't look
much better.
Basically, Amiga OS is deficient in every area (device independent graphics, memory protection, virtual memory, resource tracking, etc) except the one area where a real-time OS kicks ass, which is I/O.
Under AmigaOS, you could send off requests for thousands of different I/O requests and have buffers filled in by device drivers, and then
notify the threads that new data is available.
Almost zero-context switch overhead, no "copying" between kernel/user (device drivers would actually DMA data directly into your memory buffer if possible), which would lead to highly scalable servers.
Okay, I'll start by admitting a slight bias here. I started with an Amiga 1000, moved on to a 3000, used my brother's 500 while the 3000 was in the shop (CIA chip, of course), my brother bought a 1200, and a few months ago I traded some stereo equipment for a 2000.
I learned how to work with a CLI on an Amiga, and loved the integration with the GUI. The multitasking was great, and I still think it did many things better than any other OS out there.
But let us say that the OS is open sourced. What do we do with it? Am I wrong in thinking that it is so outdated that it would have to be completely rewritten? Is there something else we can get out of an open sourcing? Intellectual property rights maybe?
Maybe somebody could hack this thing into a window manager? Nico Francois, are you still out there? I want Powersnap under X.
In essence, I agree. People want this for fun. I still use a number of Canon and Leica rangefinder cameras, even in this day of digitals and SLRs smarter than any human. Because they're fun, because there's a degree of excellence there not available in today's "wonderbricks". AmigaOS is very much the same way.
Your details are wrong, though. AmigaOS was NOT "based on Tripos". The AmigaOS was largely original work. In order to get to market in time, Amiga had the DOS subsystem (a tiny piece of the greater whole) from Tripos ported to the existing AmigaOS. That's the only Tripos connection.
-Dave Haynie
I found a fast warez site: http://warez.it.kth.se
We have now seen company after company go down the drain, after promising us one wonder amiga after another. But the question that I am asking myself is, will the Amiga curse spead to Open Source if AOS is open sourced? And what would happen if Micro$oft bought Amiga?
For some reason I see a lot of negative reactions from people when they see any mention of the Amiga going open source.
To start with, I have friends who have been saying for the past 6 years that the Amiga is dead, the fact that they are still have to say it to me is an indication that it is not dead. If the Amiga really were dead then we wouldn't be talking about it now.
Secondly, a lot of people are saying that it would be impossible to bring the Amiga up-to-date, because it's lacking this, or that. From what I know about it, the only thing it's lacking is memory protection and the AROS (www.aros.org) project is working on that already.
The AROS project has already built an Amiga compatible cross-platform Exec (the Amigas multitasking kernel to those who don't know). The AROS Exec can already boot on both PCs and Amigas, what AROS is missing is all of the Amigas extras and utilities. If the AmigaDos code were open-sourced, it may become possible to merge the AROS code and the AmigaDos code giving everybody in a small amount of time a new alternative open-source operating system.
I know a lot of people here are die-hard Linux fans, who are afraid of having more than one open-source operating system, they seem to think that all deviation from the path of Linux is some kind of heresy. I think differently, I think that in order for open-source operating systems to truly flourish there must be competition between very different operating systems.
There are still many good things about the Amiga.
Efficiency, multitasking with very little memory.
System of datatypes.
System wide macro language, a single interpreted language can be used to get all of the Amigas applications to talk to one another
Extendibility, if something's not already in the operating system, it can be added on, like TCP/IP, graphics/sound card drivers, virtual memory, PC/UNIX/Mac filesystems etc., there's none of that recompiling your kernel rubbish whenever you add some new hardware.
I really love my Amiga and I would really love to see the Amiga go open-source, because I, and many thousands of people like me, would work on making AmigaDos the best operating system once again.
You can stab it, shoot it, poison it, drown it, and let the platform wither with neglect, but IT JUST WON'T DIE!!!!
This isn't intended to be a troll (I really don't know the answer), but how much cool stuff was in Amiga anyways that we can't get out of today's operating systems? I know that Amiga was way ahead of it's time for 1985 (I, with my lowly Apple IIc, drooled with envy at my friend Ken's Amiga 1000), but wouldn't it be simpler at this point, technically speaking, to try and duplicate the Amiga's best features in Linux, BeOS, or MacOS X?
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Why bother?
Why does anyone ever bother? Because they find it fun.
Why do some people renovate old cars? Do they believe that it'll really outperform a modern car?
No. They are having fun, damn the usefullness of it.
I would find it fun to poke around in the guts of the OS that I 'grew-up' on.
And to all those people saying "it's so old and unless, we have all this new stuff now, and the Amiga is sooo old."
Duh! That's _why_ we'd want it Open Sourced, then it can be altered to run on XYZ super hardware.
"Ohhh, but Linux is already there", yeah, and a few years back you could have said "why bother with Linux, Amiga is already there".
Do these people who ask such questions use anything old at all? Do they refuse to read old books because "they're so out of date, and they don't use modern book printing technology, and the paper is a bit yellow - so it must be useless".
The Amiga was based on Tripos, a unix-alike, which is why familier things like crypt() crop up in the kernel, which is why it had proper multitasking. It _was_ unix with a GUI. Yes - it does have some major holes compared to current OS's - big gaping holes ----- so what's the best way to fix them? Yes, finally, are you seeing the light, are you catching on -- the best way to fix it is to Open Source it. If it were perfect then what would be the point?
Yes, it's out of date, yes some people will find it fun to update it, and yes, some won't.
Err, rant, rave, etc.
The complete 'C' source code for the Amiga's Intuition code was released to the public domain back in the late 1980's. It was released on the Copperstate PD disk series. I think it was either disk #14 or Disk #24. I have it on one of my DAT tapes. I still own two amiga 2000's. But you just can't get replacement hardware anymore. I hope they release the Source so the emulator writers can improve the amiga emulators. They just aren't good enough yet. I have tons of cool amiga software that I would love to run under an emulator under Linux.
Open the Source!
Maybe Microsoft can learn how a real operating system is written! (no offense to Linux).
The Truth is a Virus!!!
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS BOTH A GEEK WALK THROUGH MEMORY LANE AND ACTUAL TECH ANALYSIS. IT'S MY POST, AND I CAN WRITE WHAT I PLEASE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.
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I'm as surprised as...well, I guess none of you have any reason to be surprised. But I've never owned an Amiga; hell, I've barely even seen one.
OK, so I grew up drooling over the concept of having a pimped out Amiga system, and can completely identify with the rabidly loyal Amiga community(I had an Apple IIgs and lived in the city Applefest used to be held in. 'Nuff said.)
And, now that I think about it, a very large proportion of the music I grew up listening to was downloaded to my IIgs via a 2400 baud modem, straight from Aminet sites. Ah, yes, the good old days of blasting data through *FSP*(does anyone else remember this beautiful little hack of a UDP protocol?) so I could get around FTP user limits...not to mention, downloading to my system that didn't even possess a hard drive! 800K floppiez, K-RAD 3133+...;-)
No, but I think the real reason I've been loving Amiga's lately is this comic strip I found off of Memepool--it's called Sabrina; the archives are here, and this is undoubtedly one of the most dementedly weird strips I've ever seen.
It's joined User Friendly and After Y2K(mmm..TTB...mmm...NTZC...) for "gotta read it" value. Imagine this strip about a bunch of Amiga-addict Anthropormophized Kitten/Skunk/Squirrels-Cum-Hot Chicks who have lives that traverse the range of Web Site Designer for Porno Director to pregnancy.
I really can't describe how strange of a geek strip this is. It's definitely geek. It's obsessively geek. In someone else's hands, it'd be Geek Sold Out. In this guy's hands...just go. Go now.
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Oh, yeah. The Amiga. The point that the Amiga was an insanely efficient OS with 512K ram should be muted by the fact that there was significant amounts of extremely useful custom hardware embedded within that system. I think one of the slowest realizations the industry is going to eventually come to grips with is that general purpose processors are really f*cking slow at many tasks, at least compared to hardwired solutions.
Just consider how many Pentium III's you'd need to match a Voodoo 3 at bilinearly filtering the texture coatings for large amounts of polygons.
One of the major things I'm looking forward to seeing out of Transmeta is the degree to which they've bridged the specialty opcode vs. general purpose architecture divide that's somewhat divided the industry over the last few years. I'm tremendously interested, for example, in if we're going to see things like Routing and Firewall Opcodes dynamically programmable into the Transmeta CPU.
If Transmeta doesn't do it, those guys with that mass FPGA programming language will. Sooner or later, we're going to have hardware morph itself into the configurations various applications and utilities require. Should be interesting to watch.
What do you guys think?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
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