* The Kernel in the bundle of mishmash that seems to be called Amiga OS these days is called Exec. A completely brilliant and very weird piece of software (written by Carl Sassenrath in assembler if I remember correctly?), it is partly responsible for the speed and responsiveness of Amiga OS. It is also responsible for making it so darned hard to add mem protection and virtual mem to the system.
* The file system and CLI shell utilities was bought from Metacomco/TRIPOS when Amiga Inc's own system was not ready in time. In many ways a load of crap even if we were proud of it at the time. It was interesting as an academic paper but it was never adapted to the real-world realities. IMO anyway.
* There was a windowing system called Intuition that managed windows, menus and stuff. It had some limitations compared to X (where I came from) because of memory limits in the system (anyone remember GIMMEZEROZERO windows?), but was decent for it's time.
* The graphical user interface/shell on top of those three was called Workbench - corresponding to the Windows desktop, KDE or similar. Today it is of course very dated, but there is still some good ideas that never showed up anywhere else.
All in all an extremely interesting product and in so many ways lightyears ahead of it's time. One of my favourites is the almost-never-mentioned language libraries where we had a reasonably well separation between code and displayed texts, making it easy to switch an application from let's say English to Swedish with just an O/S call! I hear that MS is putting a similar function in the next OS...
And there were tons of these more or less unique features!
/ Peter Hjalmarsson (ex Amiga Support Manager, Commodore Sweden)
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* The Kernel in the bundle of mishmash that seems to be called Amiga OS these days is called Exec. A completely brilliant and very weird piece of software (written by Carl Sassenrath in assembler if I remember correctly?), it is partly responsible for the speed and responsiveness of Amiga OS. It is also responsible for making it so darned hard to add mem protection and virtual mem to the system.
* The file system and CLI shell utilities was bought from Metacomco/TRIPOS when Amiga Inc's own system was not ready in time. In many ways a load of crap even if we were proud of it at the time. It was interesting as an academic paper but it was never adapted to the real-world realities. IMO anyway.
* There was a windowing system called Intuition that managed windows, menus and stuff. It had some limitations compared to X (where I came from) because of memory limits in the system (anyone remember GIMMEZEROZERO windows?), but was decent for it's time.
* The graphical user interface/shell on top of those three was called Workbench - corresponding to the Windows desktop, KDE or similar. Today it is of course very dated, but there is still some good ideas that never showed up anywhere else.
All in all an extremely interesting product and in so many ways lightyears ahead of it's time. One of my favourites is the almost-never-mentioned language libraries where we had a reasonably well separation between code and displayed texts, making it easy to switch an application from let's say English to Swedish with just an O/S call! I hear that MS is putting a similar function in the next OS...
And there were tons of these more or less unique features!
/ Peter Hjalmarsson (ex Amiga Support Manager, Commodore Sweden)