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Amiga Operating Systems Software

AmigaOS 4.0 released 225

Posted by timothy from the users-thrilled-plan-to-show-entire-retirement-home dept.
tmk writes "After five years Hyperion announces the availability of AmigaOS 4.0: 'Amiga OS 4.0 is the most stable, modern and feature-rich incarnation to date of the multi-media centric operating system launched by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) in 1985 with which it still retains a high degree of compatibility.' But there is a snag: the new OS supports only the AmigaOne, which is not available anymore. According to Hyperion, the new hardware platform will be announced by third parties early 2007."
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AmigaOS 4.0 released More

AmigaOS 4.0 released

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  • Ooh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:22PM (#17369112) Homepage Journal
    A new release of AmigaOS! A new release of OS/2 can't be far behind!

  • He's dead, Jim. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:33PM (#17369204) Homepage Journal

    I loved AmigaOS. I used it for probably a decade after it had completely stagnated at the top levels, while its huge crowd of shareware developers kept shovelling great software out to Aminet. But come on, folks: Amiga is dead. Not dying; dead. All of the technical elegance I appreciated for so long has now moved into other systems (KDE and its KIOslaves are far cooler than Amiga's "datatypes" ever hoped to be), and other than keeping an emulator available for the occasional retro-gaming jones, I just can't see a single reason for its continued existence.

    I'm the last one to criticize people for spending their days working on projects that look insane to everyone else, but this brings me pretty close. Rest in peace, Amiga. You were beautiful at a time when no other computer was, but your era has long passed. Leave us with our wonderful memories, and sleep well.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @03:05PM (#17369524)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Just going from memory I think Sid was a C64 chip and Paula actually handled the sound on the Amiga. Recovering Amiga addict with an A1200/060 in the closet to prove it. Anyone know where I can find a clean 3000 to put my Phase V Cybervision64 card into?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tim C ( 15259 )
          I don't remember Gary being in the Amiga either; of course, it's been a good few years (more than I care to remember, to be honest) since my Amiga500 was put out to pasture, so I could be wrong.

      • I miss getting video toasted! Waaah!

        That's why I modified my bread toaster with an extra-wide slot. Unfortunately, it's not compatible with my genlock.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gewalker ( 57809 )
      So, the real important question is whether or when will I be able to run version 4 on my favorite Amiga emulator? (Other than the even more obvious, what's the point?)

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by YttriumOxide ( 837412 )
        You currently can't... nor will you be able to unless someone adds PPC support to "your favourite Amiga Emulator" (I assume you mean UAE here...) as well as hacking it to make it look like it has the hardware license key (AKA "annoying dongle chip on the motherboard that everyone hates since it forces you to use that proprietary hardware where otherwise you could run the OS on pretty much any appropriately specced PPC system, but is actually a good thing because it prevents piracy, which is what damn near k

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by corpsmoderne ( 1007311 )
      If Amiga is dead, it can only mean one thing... P0WN3D BY ATARI!!!!!! W000000000000000T!!!!! errr, forget it...

    • Re:He's dead, Jim. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Xugumad ( 39311 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @04:05PM (#17370082)
      Yeah... now anyone looking for an elegant, easy to use but over expensive hardware/software combination with a serious lack of 3rd party software now gets a Mac.

      (Posted from my MacBook Pro)

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by 91degrees ( 207121 )
      Indeed. And the OS was only a small part of it.

      What the Amiga was was an inexpensive machine with fantastic graphics and sound (for the mid 80's), the ability to be plugged into a television, and a pretty good multitasking OS was a neat bonus. The only other company to make such a cool general purpose computer were Silicon Graphics.

      A new OS is quite nice, and there were aspects of the Amiga's UI that I'm still fond of, but unless you have a complete machine, I'm not at all interested.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by YttriumOxide ( 837412 )
        It's quite interesting, because I hear comments like this a lot, but my personal experience is quite different. I hardly ever plugged my Amiga in to the TV (too low quality) and have never been much of a gamer so graphics and sound are only a "bonus" as far as I'm concerned. I always liked my Amigas (from my A500 through to my trusty A4000 that I had for ages through to my current AmigaOne) just because the OS is so damn easy and elegant.
    • Poor Amiga.

  • I wish I was more excited.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GreggBz ( 777373 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:33PM (#17369206) Homepage
    Well, whoopee! Also, in this press release:
    Availability of PowerPC hardware suitable for operation with Amiga OS 4.0 will be announced by third parties early 2007.

    Which, the folks at Amiga.org are guessing, means a system based on the SAM [sam440.com] board. Prototypes of this have been shown. But, knowing everything Amiga, I'll believe that when I see it. It would be nice, as it's a small simple motherboard that runs without the need for active cooling. It would make a unique and interesting web / internet / Amiga applications machine with a snappy OS.

    I, myself have a nice PPC Amiga 1200, which I use occasionally for fun. It's a horrible over extended, upgraded collection of cables and add on cards though. We never got substantive replacement hardware, and we just kept expanding the old stuff. It will probably never see OS4 and I'll have to spend $1200 on a new system with the Eyetech board, or this SAM thing... maybe..

    And lastly, yes we know it's basically orphaned and practically useless and modern replacements do things much much better and more cheaply, so I'll kindly ask all of you to save your breath, I don't care. It's just interesting how it won't die isn't it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xjerky ( 128399 )
      Is there any reason why they can't make it work on PowerPC-based Mac hardware? I'd almost hold onto my Powerbook just for that....

      • AmigaOS on PPC Mac (Score:5, Informative)

        by IL-CSIXTY4 ( 801087 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @03:00PM (#17369472) Homepage
        The main obstacle to getting AmigaOS ported to anything other than the AmigaOne is Amiga, Inc's licensing program. They license out the right for a board to carry the Amiga name and run AmigaOS, by virtue of a ROM "dongle" that gets integrated into the motherboard. This means that anything running AmigaOS has to be specifically designed to run AmigaOS. According to messages on the AmigaWorld.net and Amiga.org forums, the company hasn't been very good at getting back to the few people who have emailed them asking about licenses. I can't see value they see in holding such tight reigns on something with such a small market.

        Then, there's the matter of developer documentation. The folks at Hyperion who are coding the OS want solid documentation for the hardware they're targeting. They don't want to just look at the Linux Mac code and just trust it works the way it should.

        But that second point is largely irrelevant, as they'll never get the chance to do it given the current situation with Amiga, Inc.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Seehund ( 86897 )
          More on the insane licensing scheme here [8bit.co.uk]. As long as Amiga, Inc. refuse to let AmigaOS be sold for hardware that people already own or would actually consider buying, the whole AmigaOS4 project is a complete waste of time, money and enthusiasm.

          (Yeah, yeah, I can hear the "it'd be pointless no matter how it's sold" comments already...)
        • They license out the right for a board to carry the Amiga name and run AmigaOS, by virtue of a ROM "dongle" that gets integrated into the motherboard. This means that anything running AmigaOS has to be specifically designed to run AmigaOS.

          Gah. They should port it to the PS3 and do a USB dongle if they have to. Sell it for $129 or so.

  • In related news... (Score:2, Informative)

    by cmang ( 103268 )
    The next release of MorphOS [powerdeveloper.org] is planned to support hardware that's actually shipping [genesippc.com]. :)

  • Seriously. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by urbanradar ( 1001140 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {gnidleifyhtomit}> on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:36PM (#17369232) Homepage
    If people like working on this, great, let them. But even if it was great in its day, is *anyone* seriously fooling themselves AmigaOS is going to make a comeback of any sort ever again?
    • Your descendants will thank the AmigaOS team, when it is the only OS capable of running patched together computers that run the defenses keeping the mutants from the forbidden zone at bay. They will be glad that the Amiga team retreated to The Caverns where they continued to pass down the secrets of the OS from generation to generation, memorizing the entire sequence of bytes in the event of a hard drive failure.

  • The comedy continues (Score:5, Insightful)

    by realmolo ( 574068 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:37PM (#17369242)
    So, it takes them how long to finally "finish" AmigaOS 4.0? And now that it's finished, the hardware it runs on is unavailable?

    Just when you think the Amiga saga can't get any more absurd...

    I fully expect them to announce that they're starting an x86 port, and it'll be ready in January of 2008. Or January of 2018, whichever comes later.

    I had an Amiga back in the day. Loved it. Have no desire to use on ever again, though.

    • Re:The comedy continues (Score:5, Funny)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:51PM (#17369400) Homepage Journal
      I fully expect them to announce that they're starting an x86 port, and it'll be ready in January of 2008.

      Spoken like someone who abandoned their Amiga before the bitter end and didn't stick around for the true lunacy. A real Amiga announcement would claim that the new DEC Alpha port would be available for sale in Two Weeks (tm).

    • Actually I thought there was an x86 version of AmigaOS 4 floating around. This was the demo/SDK you could boot up in Linux or Windows. Was this a different AmigaOS?

      I have in fact been trying to get hold of the SDK for years but no luck (actually just the documentation would be nice). The whole VP code system seemed interesting even if not all that useful.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LoadWB ( 592248 ) *
        It's called AROS, the Amiga Replacement Operating System, and it's based on compatibility with the AmigaOS 3.1 API. I don't think they call it a "port", though. Check out http://www.aros.org/ [aros.org].

        To disagree with some of the posters above... Amiga isn't dead, but it is dying at the hands of Amiga, Inc., for all I can tell. I like reading ignorant and uninformed people spewing forth about how dead it is, etc., when the reality seems that Amiga is one of the liveliest dead platforms around.

        "Amiga: Dead and Lov
    • Mayhap you are correct. However the programmers involved will have gained enviable experience in systems coding, such as would be useful in VM creation, or console programming.

      If it serves no more purpose then to advance the careers of the team involved, then it's done well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sgtrock ( 191182 )
      Nahh. The /real/ absurdity will be when they announce that the Duke Nukem Forever team has decided to start over on the Amiga platform for the nifty programming benefits. :)

  • I hear RT-11 [wikipedia.org] is about to make a comeback! Damn you, it was one of the most powerful operating systems ever created, and STILL does things that no modern machine can do! It can, it can, IT CAN! Damn ALL YOU HEATHENS TO HELL!!!

  • This sounds familiar ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:38PM (#17369256)
    Let's see ... what other company has recently released an operating system for a hardware platform that doesn't quite exist yet?
    • I believe this situation is slightly different...the Amiga folks are releasing an operating system for a hardware platform that doesn't really exist any more...

      Chris Mattern

  • Hardware is beside the point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:40PM (#17369272) Homepage Journal
    If you're going to create an OS that nobody will use, does it matter whether there's any hardware to run it on?

  • Programming for Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)

    by robvangelder ( 472838 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:44PM (#17369326)
    I'm not certain that it was the Operating System that made Amiga fun, but it's hardware and community.

    I participated in "the scene" where you got to advertise your warez group by posting a miniature presentation before the game loaded.
    These were called "intros" - some of these were a very impressive collection of code, graphics, and sound.
    I used to write the code behind many intros in my early teens for programming exercise and to support my group.

    The scene also released and supported an open source (free source?) soundtracker player that became the de-facto music player format for Amiga. Soundtracker (and forks of) were widely available with a huge library of samples and mods (mods being the completed song). Any non-musician could load some sound samples and start banging qwerty to hear tunes.

    The Amiga's architecture was a very good for the first-time-asm-coder. 680x0 is quite an easy assembler language and Amiga's hardware, particularly the graphics (and copper), was easy to write for. So, the rewards after the first hour of programming were there and learning curve low. It made you want to poke around and look for more effects - with a few Guru Meditations along the way.
    I mean, 1985 and it had 3d graphic capabilities built into the hardware - standard.

    Put together, Amiga produced some of the best eye-candy I've ever seen.

    I really miss the Amiga scene. I believe it's gone for good. The majority of use have grown up - moved on.
    I don't believe a new Operating System is going to revive the community - the community that "made" Amiga what I remember it as.

    • Re:Programming for Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Thumper_SVX ( 239525 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @03:36PM (#17369812) Homepage
      Wow, am I getting nostalgic reading this thread!

      I would tend to agree with you here. I was also part of "The Scene" way back when. The community was built up around people who tended to take what the manufacturers said their hardware could and could not do, and attempt to prove them wrong. Some of the slickest bits of code I ever saw in my life were in 68000 on the Amiga and Atari ST. The former had the advantage of nice hardware, but I saw some awesome code on the latter trying to overcome its limitations and making it more like the Amiga in software. Truly wonderful times.

      That community doesn't have a chance in the modern computing world. The code these days is too obfuscated from the hardware to really push it in the same way that you can with assembly. On the other hand though it's increasingly difficult to code anything impressive because of the wide arrange of hardware that's out there. You just can't write a demo or intro that'll run on everyone's machine without going through an API layer (operating system), and then you just can't push the hardware like you want to.

      This is why when I grew up I got involved a lot with embedded systems. While you don't have the in-built audience that you got with "the scene", embedded shops are screaming out for talented coders who can whip out awesomely efficient code on a known hardware platform. Although the audience is smaller, you will get a bunch of embedded geeks looking at your code and saying "Cool!" when you've done something truly amazing within the limits of the hardware. Then you get to see your code in the marketplace making stuff really work... or in the ultimate example launched into space and doing unexpected but wonderful things on another planet. Now there's a reward that the scene couldn't match :D

      • That community doesn't have a chance in the modern computing world. The code these days is too obfuscated from the hardware to really push it in the same way that you can with assembly. On the other hand though it's increasingly difficult to code anything impressive because of the wide arrange of hardware that's out there. You just can't write a demo or intro that'll run on everyone's machine without going through an API layer (operating system), and then you just can't push the hardware like you want to.

        Ap

    • Which "3d graphic capabilities" were those, exactly...?

      • I believe the 1200 had hardware support for texture mapping. I remember seeing a demo of a colorful picture of a parrot mapped onto a cube - apparently it had more colors than the texture-mapped PC games of the day or something. But that was just before the end...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Explo ( 132216 )
          The Amiga built-in graphics hardware (including the AGA machines) had fairly little support for 3D. While blitter did have support for filling areas and drawing lines, that was 2D operation. Thus, all fancy operations such as rotation, texture mapping, scaling and such had to be done by the CPU and blitter only did the final 2D drawing.

          (Blitter was also actually slower doing those operations than the faster 68k CPUs, although it could be used in parallel with the main CPU.)

  • I'm not dead yet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by edwardpickman ( 965122 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:46PM (#17369340)
    Talk about beating a dead horse. I know there are still devoted fans out there but it would take a herculean effort to get the OS semi modern and even then it's pointless. What made it unique was the combination of OS and chipset. If they want to resurrect the spirit of Amiga they need to develope chips that had a similar approach to graphics intergration. Anything else is feeding off nostalga and is completely pointless. You might as well get excited because some one was bringing back DOS. There actually would be a reason for that. Not to the average user but it was far easier to program devices on DOS. There are motion control machines still running DOS. Although they have largely gone the way of the dinosaur there would be need for an updated DOS but without the hardware to go with Amiga is pointless. If they are simply adapting it to an AMD or P4 chip it'd make as much sense as putting a modern engine in a model T. One day you just have to accept it's dead and move on. I just wish one of the chip makers would team up with some one like a Linux developer and come up with a system that used the same approach. Could you imagine an OS with targeted graphios all on seperate cores? Even parts of the OS embeded into the chip architecture for processing graphics within the chip itself. There's no way a traditional approach to computer design could come close. The laws of physics would prevent it. Transferring data will always cost you speed so localizing functions will always be faster. Quantum computers may change that but I probably won't live to see that.
    • "You might as well get excited because some one was bringing back DOS."

      http://www.freedos.org/ [freedos.org]
    • There are motion control machines still running DOS.


      A friend of mine is into packet radio and much of their software is still on CP/M. It works, the hardware doesn't wear out(except for disk drives) and there's no reason to port it to anything more recent.

    • Talk about beating a dead horse. I know there are still devoted fans out there but it would take a herculean effort to get the OS semi modern and even then it's pointless. What made it unique was the combination of OS and chipset. If they want to resurrect the spirit of Amiga they need to develope chips that had a similar approach to graphics intergration. Anything else is feeding off nostalga and is completely pointless

      It has already been done. It was called BeOS. Even it is pretty much dead at this

  • Its worth it just to see all these guys whine about letting it die, or about how its already dead.

    Long live the Amiga!

  • The whole REASON I stopped using AmigaOS.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:51PM (#17369404) Homepage Journal

    ..is that it was only available on limited hardware and wasn't being maintained. (Having software that is ten times faster than the competition isn't a real advantage if the hardware is twenty times slower.)

    And the reason that happened, was because it wasn't Free.

    AmigaOS 4 is truly following in the steps of its forefather. If the people in that project want to know how much marketshare AmigaOS 4 will have, they just have to look at the marketshare of AmigaOS 3.x.

    As for me, I run software that I know will be maintained and updated. I don't have to take anyone's word for it; it requires no faith at all. And that's good, because I don't have any faith anymore: my Amiga experience killed it.

    • The soul of the Amiga was its chipset. Slow by modern standards, but still "cool" in the same way people still enjoy tinkering with the Atari 2600. Once you drop the chipset, all you are left with is an OS with no software support. You really have to concede that the legacy software is outclassed by modern equivalents. By hitching their wagons on PPC and taking so long they are now an entire processor family behind the times as Apple has thrown in the towel and gone Intel. The fact that Apple had to le

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )
      I did the same... It wasn't just the OS tho:
      Basic networking software on the Amiga cost money, a web browser, an ftp client, an irc client, even a telnet client cost money... Every other platform had these basic clients available for free. When i was first using the internet, i did so from an amiga, and very quickly got frustrated by the ridiculous pricing for the most trivial of programs.
      And the attitude of a significant portion of the Amiga community when you pirated these programs... Many would shun you,

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Squozen ( 301710 )
        I bet the developer community wept for days, losing a good customer like yourself.

        Back when I used an Amiga on the internet, I paid for my software.
  • Releasing a new OS before the hardware is available is one of the most ass-backwards things in the entire ass-backwards history of the Amiga. And I think it's pretty shocking that they don't support the add-on PowerPC cards for classic Amiga hardware, since IIRC that's what they were developing on. I guess they want their new hardware to sell (if and when...), but you'd think an OS with so little to commend it in this day and age would want to pick up every possible scrap of userbase, no?
  • My refrain from 15 years ago:

    "Sell your Agima! Move out of your parent's house!"

    seems even more apropos now.

    Ahem. Of course, the 25+ year old vintage microcomputers that I'm currently mucking around with (restoring digital tape drives, making MP3s of old audio cassettes, cleaning the muck off 1Kx1 RAM chips...) are not a waste of time, because . . . well, because. :-)
  • Hardware vaporware. That's a new concept for an Operating System.

  • Amiga is not (yet) vaporware (Score:5, Interesting)

    by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @03:14PM (#17369604)
    A lot of /.-ers complaining that Amiga is vaporware. Not yet. Amiga is still used in existing installations especially in the music/theater world for DMX/MIDI and other computer-controlled light- and music sets as well as real-time effects on lights, video and music. The fact that most controllers are hardware based and don't need any processing by the CPU is a great thing as compared to the latency even top-end video- and soundcards on PCI produce. It has a great open-source fan base and it is (still) stable as hell in all the applications I've seen and especially in real-time performances not really a task for (Windows) PC computers.
    • Too bad that the software release they've announced won't run on any of that equipment and the hardware is only vapor...

  • Your moment of Zen (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @03:19PM (#17369660) Homepage Journal
    If an operating system is released, and there's no hardware around to run it, does it make a sound?
  • Guru Meditation. Amiga not found.

  • Atari ST (Score:3, Interesting)

    by slapout ( 93640 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @04:22PM (#17370210)
    Not to restart the Amiga/Atari ST wars, but....

    It's not as nice as the Amiga stuff, but the Atari Running On Any Machine (aranym) project is continuing work here: aranym.org

    • "Not to restart the Amiga/Atari ST wars, but...."

      Well, yes, but my Amiga had a blitter, whereas your Atari did not have one until a very late model.

      Amiga also has better sound than the Atari: 4 channels over 2.

      And Shadow of the Beast has more colors and levels of scrolling, and it is smoother.

  • Reading this thread, it seems to me that few people are waiting for this new Amiga OS or the new Amiga hardware, but the old OS and hardware were lots of fun to hack around with, and reasonably easy to get started with. I wonder how well a revival of the old platform would fare. Perhaps an open source re-implementation of the old Amiga-OS? It seems we know how the hardware works, and lots of people have hacked it. I'm not one of them, though, so all this is just my uninformed observations.
  • Can I ask the Slashdotters to stop with the superficial bitter remarks of how Amiga is dead and so they better not try: give them a friggin' chance.

    As people who are more involved in the matter at hand, they probably know better ways to capitalize their efforts than try to cater to Slashdot readers that had Amigas who put their efforts down before they've even seen the thing.

    Competition is nice: there's place for Amiga. Why? Well there's place for a hundred Linux distros some of which are majorly incompatib
    • IMO, the problem today is that there is no unified effort to resurrect the Amiga. Hell, even in the case of the AmigaOne motherboard, you had to have an original Amiga to hook it up to, in order to utilize the existing graphics chipset. It was made by a relatively unknown company (presumably the lowest bidder) for a barely existant company (ditto), and died because they couldn't even find a vendor for a decent northbridge chipset. Frankly, with this amount of discordant practice, it's a miracle they made th
      • Hell, even in the case of the AmigaOne motherboard, you had to have an original Amiga to hook it up to, in order to utilize the existing graphics chipset.

        Actually you *can't* do this with the AmigaOne. It was originally planned to have that capability but when they didn't have the time to engineer something like that they just went with designs from the northbridge vendor (and later commissioned a new design that was smaller with integrated graphics).

        The Amiga custom chipset (only OCS so far, but AGA isn't

  • how much ram to run it now? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blackest_k ( 761565 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @06:00PM (#17371178) Homepage Journal
    The Original Amiga OS managed without a swopfile with 512k of ram shared with the graphics hardware and a rom of 512k

    My A1200 had 2 meg chip and 8 meg fast ram and my original harddrive loaded with applications was 52 Meg and I got on the internet with that.
    just compare those specifications with what you are using right now.

    I have to wonder how much overhead is in version 4. Has it grown as bloated as windows, linux or osx.how would it be if it was ported to x86 hardware (and having the complete source code its not impossible). Probably it's ideally suited for embedded systems such as satellite and cable boxes.

    When you look at what vista does encrypting and decrypting data as it moves it between the subsystems,
    Amiga OS would be giving a much bigger bang for the buck.

    What actually is an OS for and how much of your processor time should be spent running the Os shouldnt it be running your programs?

    Isn't it embarrassing that we need so much more power today to do, what exactly? I read my email went to websites chatted with friends all in 10meg of ram doesnt seem possible does it?

    It makes me wonder if the One laptop per child project shouldnt be using something as compact as Amiga OS the point of the project being to bring information to the children and on the original amiga web pages worked RTF documents worked. even spread sheets were useable in amigaos.

    The Amiga was fantastic for its time the custom chips which made it all work ultimately limited its progression
    I don't quite understand why people feel so smug when current hardware and operating systems are so inefficient,
    but then again I liked beos too.

    • Not to be persnickety, but it required only 256k of RAM. My Amiga 1000 has 256k internal RAM, plus an optional add-on 256k module that attaches inside the front of the unit.

      Dan East

    • My A1200 had 2 meg chip and 8 meg fast ram and my original harddrive loaded with applications was 52 Meg and I got on the internet with that.
      just compare those specifications with what you are using right now.
      Similar to my palm phone, which is great for such a limited platform. For my desktop, I'm gonna want a whole lot more resources--just the frame buffer for my display is gonna take more than 52M.
  • Of course they can't release the hardware now. They can't release it until AmigaOS 5 has been announced, you see.
  • Is it possible without too much effort to get a working VM of the hardware spec going? It would be momentous to release an OS that is targeted at a virtual machine only.... running on the latest commodity hardware around for hobbyists and only on dedicated hardware for those with a real business interest in using it commercially.

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