AmigaOS 4 415
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.'"
What is it used for? (Score:5, Interesting)
emulator or vmware? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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
Re:Let it rest in peace! (Score:3, 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.
Re:Let it rest in peace! (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 there.
But deal with new hardware? My 4000 and several 2000's lying around here all still work fine, so.... nah. :)
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.
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Open Open Open? AROS! (Score:3, Interesting)
is an open source cross platform community driven recreation of AmigaOS and all it's wonders that even modern OS's STILL just don't mangage 20+ years on such as
1. Logical Volume Assignment : Assign "Webs" to your web site dir and point your web server at the Drive called Webs, not a hard path attatched to a hardware controlled drive letter. oh and if you want to move your website or switch to a backup just reassign Webs to point to the new location, only the underlying OS will know that you've moved it. Also works for removable media, ram drives, network mappings. Beautiful and not tied to a mysterious legacy drive structure peppered with acronyms like unix/linux wither
You know you can tell Windows what letter to use for a drive, don't you? OK, so you can't use names, but I don't personally find that too limiting. And the directory naming convention on Linux is just a convention... if you wanted to, you could easily change it. Most programs have a configure script that allows you to specify the names of the directories that their files will be installed in.
2. ability to control window z-index. The window you are currently using isnt forced to be on top, again this may sound odd at first but imagine you are copy-pasting text line-by-line from one window to another, in windows you'd have to resize and move them around so you could always see both whichever was in focus just so you didn't give yourself an epliectic fit by switching back and forth constantly...
I've been able to do this with X11 since I first used it. I believe the feature has existed for as long as the platform has been available. You can achieve it with windows using any of a variety of focus management programs available. I believe there's one in the powertoys collection available from MS.
3. multiple screens, different software can open a new screen in a different resolution with different color depth. yeah you can kind of do this in windows when booting up a game but we all know it's actually re-setting the resolution of the system as a whole, illustrated by the fact that when a game bombs your desktop is f**ked. You can have as many as a like, so you can be tight with your desktop's video ram and run it in 256 colors if you wish, but imagine at the same time being able to host a HD movie on another screen, pause it, and switch back to the desktop instantly without waiting for the OS to have a fit first.
I can achieve this effect on Linux with virtual consoles.
4. actually well implimented multitasking, like being able to zip up a bunch of folders on your hard drive AND format a floppy ready to put them on at the same time. without a) a major slowdown or b) the whole system crashing and burning.
I've been able to do that with both Windows since NT4 was released (97, IIRC) and Linux since the first version I tried back in 95.
and what's with windows totally stopping dead when you stick anything in an optical drive, does Vista still do that?
I don't have this problem. Could be a driver issue with your machine?
Re:Short memory (Score:2, Interesting)
For me, the Amiga isn't about games or demos. I tend to side with the author of TFA really - the Amiga is just a great OS: Small, Fast, Efficient and doesn't bug you every few seconds or cache memory to disk when there's really no need to.
Right now, I'm writing this from my intel iMac, while my Win2k box sits to my left compiling some code for work, my Linux box sits under the desk being my local caching proxy and my AmigaOne has my email client open. So, I'm hardly a fanatic of any OS, but the Amiga will always be my favourite just for "getting stuff done" (assuming that the "stuff" in question has the appropriate software - the one great lacking on AmigaOS right now)
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:1, Interesting)
If an efficient algorithm is found to handle one atom of the text then that benefit only grows as you write more text.
You have to weigh up time versus benefit though, a person won't normally notice something running slowly in a WP because it has to respond at the speed of the typist.
I think
The underlying
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Switching XP - Amiga (Score:3, Interesting)
Welcome to the world of object-oriented programming. What, you thought all that crazy inheritance was free???
Applications are bloated because developers try to (and fail to, as it turns out) "optimize" for lowest development time, and they think they'll be more "productive" if they use a bunch of classes from some class library that kinda sorta does what they need (hey, no big deal, just subclass from it and reimplement the methods that don't do what you want, right?). But if everything I've seen is even halfway true, there is usually no real reduction in development time, and the resulting programs are usually even more opaque (and thus harder to debug) than they would be if they had been badly written in a procedural language. At least with a procedural language, what you see is what you get, and tracking down the flow of control is relatively straightforward. With an object-oriented program, what appear to be straightforward method calls tend to be very difficult to track back to their actual source unless you use some magic tool to do the job for you. End result: the program is harder to understand (is it really using the class method you think it is, or is it using the method of one of its ancestors?), harder to debug, and harder to maintain.
Object oriented programming is a tool, just like procedural programming is. There are certain classes of problems where it's very obviously the right tool for the job, and sometimes it's the right thing to use even in the middle of a procedural program. But it's not a general-purpose programming method.
If you think I'm wrong about all this, try justifying the 30-40 levels or so of inheritance nesting that you get from a typical Java stacktrace. Each of those levels represents an additional level of inefficiency that simply wouldn't be there if the program had been written properly (which may or may not involve writing it in an object-oriented fashion).
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.
Re:Spaceballs? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember using telnet under Windows 3.1; when it was unable to connect to the remote machine, you had to wait for the connection to timeout before you got control of your computer back, because telnet didn't cede control of the multitasking. This was a PITA.
Hate to say it though; this OS release is likely wildly irrelevant from a mainstream perspective- one for the diehards only. The Amiga OS was fantastic in its time, but things have moved on and the serious users and applications migrated- never to return- a *long* time ago.
From that perspective, it'd have to build a reputation from scratch. And given this, great though Amigs OS was in its day, I think it would make more sense to build a new OS from the ground up, rather than remaining compatible with the old Amiga OS and its software. Of course, that's from a mainstream perspective; if this new release gives the hobbyists pleasure, that's fine by me.
Re:Spaceballs? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers (Score:2, Interesting)
Toss the OS. It is just a stupid way to distribute software libraries anyway. Instead, build a "Configuration System" that knows how to build virtual systems, configure them to talk to each other, and deploy them.
This is what we are ultimately going to need anyway. What use is an "OS" when the typical computer system will have many independent Cores (or CPUs or whatever you want to call them) each with plenty of memory and plenty of bandwidth to some sort of persistant storage. Such a system will easily support a number of Linux deployments, a few BSD deployments, a few Amiga deployments (maybe under immulation), XP, Mac, etc. etc.
We do this now for web applications. You deploy a database, a few appliction servers, some web servers, some firewalls, toss in some systems for load balancing and failover. This stuff takes people weeks and sometimes months to configure.
So how are we going to configure and deploy all this crap in the future? The best idea is to build complete descriptions of virtual machines. If the developer wants to develop "on Linux" or "on Windows" go ahead. Then generate the virtual machine and ship it.