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AmigaOS 4
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jan 22, 2007 11:30 PM
Second five-eighth writes "The Amiga is alive and sort of well (you can get the OS, but not the hardware), and Ars Technica has a review of the final version of AmigaOS 4. New features include limited memory protection, 3D display drivers, an improved suite of applications (the bounty for porting Mozilla to AmigaOS has yet to be claimed), and much better 680x0 emulation. Perhaps most telling, the reviewer was able to move his daily writing workflow from Windows XP to AmigaOS 4.0: 'Not only was it possible to do this, but having done so I feel no urge to switch back. It is nice to not have any distractions when working — there is no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications, no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions and even if the worst happens and the system locks up, it takes only seven seconds to reboot and get back to a functional desktop.'"
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Spaceballs? (Score:5, Funny)
Prepare for the jump to ludicrous speed!
Re:Spaceballs? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think I read this article last night (thanks Firehose
Seriously, as a lot of people point out, Amigas were way ahead of the competition, but Commodore's management were a bunch of morons and squandered what they had. I stuck with Amigas for ages, and I still wish they'd make a comeback, but it doesn't seem likely does it? Though I had the same hope with Linux and it's doing okay now
Parent
Short memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Amiga was one of the worst in the old days for viruses. Most of them at the time came from floppies because it had this habit of auto booting the disk the moment they were placed in the drive
Did the Amiga hardware include a motorized floppy drive similar to the Apple Macintosh floppy drive? I don't think that standard "x86" drives would automatically access a disk - the OS usually has to be told to do so, unless it is constantly probing. But I think that would cause the OS to constantly be hanging. I think Tandy also used automatic drives.
Re:Short memory (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Short memory (Score:4, Informative)
This type of virus was made obsolete by later versions of AmigaDOS (Version 2 and higher) and there were good antivirus programs in shareware and freeware.
(I was an amiga owner from 1986 til 2002)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It was possible to turn off the clunk and have it still detect inserted disks correctly.
It wasn't autobooting. (Score:3, Informative)
Amiga disk drives had a mechanical switch which acted to inform the OS whenever a disk was inserted into the drive. The OS would read the bootblock when a disk was inserted, but it didn't actually "boot" it.
Virus writers then used that short-sighted habit of the OS to get their code into memory. These "Bootblock Viruses" were widespread and generally tended to be pretty innocuous, one of the most common being the "ByteBandit" virus, which did nothing but spread itself.
The switch wasn't actually necessary
I suppose in the year 2038.... (Score:5, Funny)
Thank Goodness! (Score:5, Funny)
This will completely let me replace my Coco3.
Tradewars door, here I come!
So how much computer is the amiga? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.archive.org/details/Amigaand1985/ [archive.org]
The only question left (Score:5, Funny)
What is it used for? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is it used for? (Score:5, Interesting)
That was the main reason I switched from Amiga to Sun. Browsers were limited to like 4 bit video even if you had a 8 or 24 bit bitplane board, unless you were update the roms "again" to version 3 if I remember correctly. I was a dumb ass and updated to version 2.x roms and couldn't kickstart version 3.x from version 2.x. Not that I was offended by the idea of pirating the roms as amiga folded.
Also 24bit graphics boards were not really standarized, well I think Picasso II was the defacto standard, something that cost a pretty penny. The board I had could emulate AGA graphics, amiga 8bit ham support, but not without newer roms.
But I started to price what it would cost to update my hardware on my amiga 2000. The cost was horrible. By the time I added in a faster cpu, more memory via a special cpu board upgrade, a defacto standard graphics board, oh and an extra serial board to handle a standard mouse, not to speak of the fact that you needed a 23pin to something else cable to sport either the stock monitor, an EGA monitor, or one of those rare vga monitors that would sync down to TV levels in the unlikely event the config on my graphics card failed, well... the cost was equal to a high end penium with 16 megs of memory.
There are still many features I miss.
Parent
The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers (Score:5, Insightful)
1) preemptive multitasking.
2) special hardware for graphics.
3) a unified memory architecture.
4) stereo sound with hardware-assisted mixer
5) a UNIX-like O/S with many goodies, including
6) a nice GUI that looked good on low resolutions with datatype aware drag-n-drop for every app.
7) a good DMA architecture that allowed for easy parallelization of many tasks (for example graphics not blocked by I/O)
What would it take for the Amiga to be a quantum leap today, given that the average 500$ Intel PC has much better capabilities than the Amiga of yesteryear? there are certain possibilities:
1) provide sound and graphics of 5000$ worth at the price of 500$. This is highly unlikely, because all the billion dollar pioneering research in graphics takes place in the labs of NVidia and ATI, two companies that will not be willing to sell their top technology for a mere 500$. The Amiga was the result of hardware gurus like RJ Mical that worked on their own designs...so unless a similar group of talented individuals gather up and make something unique, this possibility is less likely to happen.
2) provide a computer with a fixed hardware, like a console, but with an O/S that the users can write applications and games that hit the hardware directly. It might sell but for small numbers...back bedroom programming will certainly thrive on such a machine,
but I do not think the numbers it sells will be sufficient to sustain it.
3) do something really wild like a computer with 3d stereoscopic graphics projected either in mid air or in a special display. Now that would be a quantum leap, but only if the price is right, and it would certainly be hard to make and sell.
Overall, I do not think Amiga has a place in today's computing environment...especially when the O/S works on special hardware platforms.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers (Score:4, Insightful)
2) special hardware for graphics.
3) a unified memory architecture.
4) stereo sound with hardware-assisted mixer
5) a UNIX-like O/S with many goodies, including
6) a nice GUI that looked good on low resolutions with datatype aware drag-n-drop for every app.
7) a good DMA architecture that allowed for easy parallelization of many tasks (for example graphics not blocked by I/O)
There were other machines around at the same time with many of these features, at the same price
provide sound and graphics of 5000$ worth at the price of 500$. This is highly unlikely, because all the billion dollar pioneering research in graphics takes place in the labs of NVidia and ATI, two companies that will not be willing to sell their top technology for a mere 500$.
Don't they already sell their top designs for $500? Isn't that what a top-end video card costs these days? You just don't get the rest of the computer with it
Overall, I do not think Amiga has a place in today's computing environment...especially when the O/S works on special hardware platforms.
Agreed, and even more so given that, as far as I can tell, this new AmigaOS has very little to do with the original other than name. It's just another niche OS which is platform specific, non-free (in any sense) and very, very limited in functionality. Pointless.
Parent
emulator or vmware? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's wrong with this summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
Something not up to Slashdot standards...
Ah... there's no "dept." caption/commentary!
From the nothing-to-see-here department (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:What's wrong with this summary? (Score:5, Funny)
Let me be the first to suggest this be assigned to the "He's dead, Jim." dept.
Parent
Not to point out the obvious but... (Score:5, Funny)
I hear not having any will do that for you.
Why Amiga? Why not Zeta? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.zeta-os.com/ [zeta-os.com]
I really liked BeOS. In fact I've installed and used it in the past year. Though it was short lived
I'm sure these operating systems are excellent for older hardware that has already been downgraded to web browsing, emailing, and simple word processing. All they need to do is boot and run Firefox. Google takes care of the rest. Has anyone made an uber-lite Linux distro that just includes X and Firefox? Perhaps even launches straight to a Firefox full screen window with tabs. I guess maybe a Linux web kiosk
Nice Nostalgia (Score:5, Interesting)
If I could find an affordable Ethernet card, my Amiga 3000 would still be in active use today, mostly as an archive server for all my old stuff. Sadly, the only Ethernet cards I can find are $150 or so, and the TCP/IP stack is (usually) not included.
The way things are now, though, the only way Amiga will have a future is if A) a dedicated investor with very deep pockets and a lot of patience funds a company to look after it; or B) they Open Source the entire OS and support utilities. The latter is likely very easy from a contractual aspect, since the only "borrowed" code was from TRIPOS, and much of that was re-written in C for the OS 2.04 release years ago.
I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy." I'd like to see more Amiga philosophy in modern software design, but even I have to admit that light of Amiga may be irretrievably fading. Really, you people have no idea what you missed...
Schwab
That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when "Amiga" meant innovation and usability at an affordable price. One of the amazing things about the Amiga was that most of the cheesy slogans that were used to sell it (e.g. "Only Amiga makes it possible" and "The computer for the creative mind") were true. It felt good to own an Amiga, because it was orders of magnitude better than anything else out there.
Today, "Amiga" is just a trademark. Will this new Amiga-branded system compete with Mac OS X? With GNU/Linux? With Windows? If not, why should I, as an nostalgic Amiga zealot, care?
I have no need for yet more proprietary hardware running yet another proprietary OS in a time when commodity hardware and free software are where most of the interesting things are happening.
The new Amiga we dream of won't be called "Amiga". It will be something completely different---built by a small group of brilliant people that nobody has ever heard of---not the underwhelming output of some company whose only real purpose is to figure out how to extract revenue from the copyrights and trademarks for a 20-year-old technology.
If I were Amiga OS' chief designer ... (Score:5, Funny)
The Amiga Could Run THREE OS's at Once! (Score:5, Interesting)
My (admittedly high-end, for its day) Amiga 3000UX could run Windows 3.1, Unix, and AmigaOS SIMULTANEOUSLY on three pull-down screens. People would freak out when they saw me pull down and flip between three different screens running three different operating systems. And it wasn't just some cheap parlor trick - all three were running various applications in real-time.
Oh, and you could even run a Mac emulator on the Amiga screen at the same time.
This was in 1990. Can your machine do anything even remotely like that today? AmigaOS had a very different way of looking at how computers should work. There is still a lot that OS programmers can learn from the Amiga.
Yeah (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Yeah (Score:5, Funny)
So that would include 6 interested people + at least 2 guys who keep posting "Amiga is Dead" over and over?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who cares... (Score:5, Funny)
You know, that's just what they said about cuneiform. But I'm continuing to develop new kinds of clay for the tablets and to experiment with new ways of making a reed stylus- I'm working with a new kind of reed from South America which is vastly superior to the ones the Sumerians used. And cuneiform on clay tablets works fine for all my word-processing and accounting needs, plus it never gets viruses. Well, I did once have a problem with mold growing on my styluses. But I solved that by keeping them in a dry place.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Someone needs to read more Neal Stephenson.
Re:please.. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is your problem?
I don't get all upset when somebody drives by in a 1950's Studebaker all tricked out. Yeah, it has some limitations, such as: a single-speaker AM radio, no air conditioning, cruise control, electric windows, it requires fuel additives to not die on unleaded gas, and it's hard to find parts for. Oh, and it's a death trap in an accident.
And despite all that, it's still mighty cool. I honk when I see somebody driving one.
Can you imagine what a dorkass you'd look like if you stuck your head out the window and screamed: "Dude, die already! The Studebaker's time has come and gone already!".
Oh, wait. Nevermind. You're posting O/S elitism on Slashdot. My guess is that you probably already know all about what a dorkass you look like. Never mind.
Parent
Re:Let it rest in peace! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, just like Macintosh. And we all know that IBM machines survived because of Microsoft's open operating systems.
The reason Amiga died was because Commodore was completely inept on just about everything non-technical in nature - advertising, business decisions, corporate alliances, you name it.
Dan East
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Almost. It went like this:
If Commodore owned the KFC franchise, they'd advertise it as lukewarm dead bird.
Having said that, I'd certainly pay a few hundred bucks to run a 680x0 emulated AmigaDOS v2 or v3 in a window on my Macbook. I wrote a lot of Amiga code. Wrote the first Amiga CAD system, in fact, a PCB layout engine; sat in the CBM booth at the spring COMDEX in Atlanta in 1986, demoing the shipping product to interested parties. Interesting times. Still have all manner of code archived here and
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's open source and MacOS X is supported, so I presume it should build fine on an Intel Macbook...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Amiga died for many many reasons. This likely isn't one of them. The Amiga was pretty open compared to it's competitors at the time. Commodore killed it with mis-guided management and bone-headed marketing. Microsoft and Columbia Business Machines killed it and many others when they said, let us have MS-DOS on whatever hardware we want, IBM. I don't think an open standard w
Re:Let it rest in peace! (Score:5, Insightful)
The proprietary nature of the platform had little if anything to do with the Amiga's death
Parent
Re:Open Open Open? AROS! (Score:4, Interesting)
...because you've never used it. In AmigaOS, the idea of assigning names to directories (not just drives) was pervasive. You'd say that "FONTS:" would comprise a list of directories where you stored your fonts files. When a program tried to open "FONTS:Helvetica.font", it'd search each of those directories in order and return the first match it found. All system libraries went in LIBS:, your command-line utilities went in C:, and so on. It was exceedingly rare to use hardcoded paths instead of named search lists for anything general.
Probably, but maybe .5% of people actually use that ability. Again, the difference with AmigaOS was not that you could do it, but that everyone universally did it. I was just something you used without making a big deal of it.
No way. You might have been able to perform those exact (poorly chosen) examples, but neither Linux nor Windows were anywhere near as good at multi-tasking in '95, let alone '85. It's like hearing someone talk about a car with great handling and not understanding; your Oldsmobile can turn corners, too, right? It was just something you had to see to really understand.
I have no illusions that AmigaOS will make a comeback, and by now I wouldn't want it if it did. Still, it did a lot of things right, even by today's standards, and you can't just dismiss it by saying that other systems can do some of the same things.
Parent
Re:It's a shame... (Score:4, Funny)
Only Amiga is worth using. If you disagree, you deserve worse than death.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?
Schwab
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that you really shouldn't be swapping to/from disk just to switch between applications. There is being efficient with memory... and then there is being a total cheapass who refuses to upgrade beyond 64MB of RAM.
-matthew
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:4, Interesting)
From your eulogy:
Actually, OS-9 was running on 6809 based GIMIX and SWTPC systems well before the Coco ever saw the light of day. I still have working SS-50 systems that run it (and FLEX.) They also ran OS9 a lot better than the Coco could, because the Coco's hardware was uber-cheap compared to the (literally) gold-plated machines from GIMIX, not to mention that the GIMIX machines could support a lot more RAM, which, as we know, is definitely an issue in a non-VM multitasking system. :)
The Altair/S100 and SWTPC/SS50 machines started everything, pretty much.
Parent
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't help with Windows. Its *#$@! VM system is still tuned to machines with far less memory than we have today. Run anything memory intensive and I guarantee that you'll start seeing swapping and thrashing. On the bright side, at least it doesn't swap everything out to disk when you minimize the application. It used to be tons of fun working on local J2EE instances after accidently minimzing the console.
Parent
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:4, Insightful)
At the early 90's Amiga was an amazing platform, with even more amazing software. A desktop publishing software was crammed into 1.4MB, two 720KB floppies! And you had an almost perfect alternative to Word 6.0 on less than 720KB, and spell checking was only another floppy away from you.
I had an Amiga 600, with 4MB RAM and 40MB HD, and I never managed to use half of the space. Why software is so bloated nowdays? I understand that now we have multi GHz cpus, with loads of RAM... but yet, we waste too much resources using poorly optimized software. For an example: OpenOffice.
I understand that now software do a lot more, we have higher resolutions and color depths... But does it justifies the lack of performance, the bloat? I mean, OpenOffice will crawl on a machine with less than 256MB, and a average Amiga had no more than 4MB of RAM!
Parent
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:5, Insightful)
I write this on a laptop with 2GB of memory - sum total of applications running:
Outlook (yes I'm at work, we do what we have to)
Several gVim sessions
Firefox with 6 Slashdot tabs and 1 gmail tab
Acrobat Reader
VNC session
Winamp
as I alt tab to winamp, watch the hdd light flash and the delay in re-draw.
I kid you not, that with the exception of tabbed browsing, I used to do all of this on my Amiga 4000 with 16MB of ram without swapping. my old A1200 only had 4M of ram and i used that as a desktop for a couple of years and that didn't even have the concept of virtual ram!
Now maybe this is the price of progress, but seriously, how much ram do you suggest I need to buy in order to stop this swapping?
As an collery, my desktop at home at 4GB runs Ubuntu and that swaps in similar situations too. Maybe this is the price of progress, but if this article only reminds us that there is another way then I'm all for it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)