Quadruple Interview With Amiga 4.0 Developers

Mike Bouma writes: "diff.org has done an interview with some important developers involved in the development of AmigaOS 4.0 PPC. These developers also helped to realize AmigaOS 3.9 which was released at the World of Amiga show last december. AmigaOS 4.0 will be available later this summer together with the release of new PPC based AmigaOne mainboards." I'd like to see a robust OS marketplace -- the more the merrier -- but I wonder if Amiga can ever really succeed, what with the continued promises, delays, rearrangements, direction changes ...

But is it really Amiga anymore?

Sure, Grandma isn't senile anymore, ever since the brain transplant. And so what if 98% of her body has been replaced with prosthetics at one point or another? Why, she now has a IQ of 200 and is an Olympic contender, and lord knows thats all that really matters. ;P

McEwen, you do us all a disservice in presuming to call your company Amiga. You look down at us as if we were just another fringe market to milk for all the cash we're worth, and if you don't even have to go to the trouble to throw us a few bones along the way, why should you care? After all, if we wanted a modern computer, a real computer, we would have switched to the Windows PC long ago. The Amiga is truely dead now, with no hope of yet another buyer who might do that name any honor. And it shouldn't be that way. Is that all you see, a trademark with brand name recognition, an opportunity to foist ill-concieved and irrelevant technologies on us? No Amiga fan that I know has ever said "Hey, if only my toaster ran Workbench 5, I could play Populous and have breakfast at the same time!". AmigaDE is a copout, some sort of lame-brained notion that since most people's exposure to the Amiga is UAE, then it's only fitting to release the entire system as some trumped up emulator. Macintosh owners have Macs, because for some reason they want them. Ditto for PC/windows owners. As a matter of fact, they are probably happy with the variety of games available to them. So what, you're marketing to developers, some sort of crossplatform development tools? Only not calling it such?

Drop AmigaDE. Drop it now. Apologize for it. Quit saying how software is all that matters, you sound like a bum making excuses about why he doesn't work. Give us first-gen neo-amiga hardware with legacy zorro3 slots AND PCI. Kill Zorro after you've had at least a bit of token continuity. Show us a computer that will never, NEVER EVER have only one CPU again. Entry level dual G3/4's, with quad cpu on the high end. Market it to power users, to computer nerds, and those who have to have the most powerful of everything. But make it the first multi-CPU computer marketed to users ever. If there was one thing Be did right, it was the Bebox. But almost as soon as they did, they changed their minds, and decided "software is the only important thing". Look where that got them. License the OS, the hardware specs, but make some yourself. Send a couple hundred freebie systems to Adobe, to Macromedia, to all the hotshot graphics companies. Offer free hawaii vacations to their programmers, if they spend those extra 15 minutes they linger at the donut table actually porting code to AmigaPPC. If it's already written, there is no reason not to sell it. You can make money off licensing development tools after you've got some apps to show for it. Give free "I resurrected Amiga!" T-shirts to shareware developers who can prove they wrote something for it. Bribe Tucows to put up an amiga section. Do whatever it takes, but concentrate on making it the system to envy. Carve out a niche in the graphics and video market, and go from there.

Re:It's dead, Jim

I'm getting tired of these "Amiga is Dead" posts. A product dies when it has no support from both users and manufacturers. Since neither of those is the case, Amiga is not dead.
------

It's dead, Jim

I come to bury the Amiga, not praise it.

In 1994, I leveraged the knowledge I'd gained using an Amiga and Impulse 2.0 to get a job creating 3D models using 3DS for DOS (R2), running on '486. I was lucky. The Amiga was a toy, Impulse was a toy, and I considered myself lucky to have a $3K program running on a $3K computer (at my client's expense) for a change.

Using DOS and WfW 3.11 for the first time, I missed the close coupling between GUI and CLI that the Amiga OS had, and the opacity of the startup scripts (compared to autoexec.bat, config.sys, win.ini, and system.ini).

All the while I'd been using Macs to do digital audio and MIDI sequencing, along with DTP and video editing and Director scripting (since version 1.0). But I missed the control that the AmigaOS command line afforded. Eventually, I discovered MacShell, a CLI for MacOS 7.x, but as a userland app it lacked the speed I craved and the power I needed. The power of "/".

Fast-forward to the year 2001, Dave.

I have a fricken' fast machine with a closely coupled GUI/CLI system...Mac OS X on a G4/466.

It's like an Amiga on steroids, and it runs Photoshop, Quark, and Illustrator, along with Apache, ftpd, gcc, and ssh.

"Nostalgia is a disease of dogs." -- Lenin

Woof.

k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank

Sure it can survive

but I wonder if Amiga can ever really succeed, what with the continued promises, delays, rearrangements, direction changes ...

How log has the Amiga really been dead anyways (and this is NOT a flame) ? At least 15 years ago, for all intents and purposes. The fact that it has eked out an existence for this long in its little niche seems to be to make the best case for long term survival. Heck, I've been predicting the demise for Apple in the next year, for 15 years now, and finally have to concede it will survive.

Re:Sure it can survive

How log has the Amiga really been dead anyways (and this is NOT a flame) ? At least 15 years ago, for all intents and purposes.

That's an overestimate. It may have been fading 11 years ago, but Commodore didn't go belly up until less than 10 years ago. I'd say that up to and through the introduction of the A4000 (which was something like 1992), the Amiga was an alive and viable, if niche machine. 15 years ago, the A3000 hadn't even come out yet, and there is something to be said to the argument that the A3000 was the "best" Amiga that was ever released. (The A4000 was clearly a more advanced machine, but it was behind the curve when it came out, whereas the A3000 was still ahead of the curve.)

Mind you, I still have an A3000. I almost never use it any more, but up until less than 1 year ago, I still used it reasonably regularly. There was more "life" in the Amiga after it was dead than there are in a lot of machines. However, since Commodore went under, there's been very little other than hope to sustain Amiga users. For a long time, the rebirth was "just around the corner." This company, then the other, was going to renew the Amiga. After about six iterations of that, even I finally gave up. Sure, there have been advances (OS patches, 68060 accelerator boards, PPC accelerator boards, even some software advances), but it's been limping since C= went under, and nothing has renewed it since then.

If a new company comes out with something amazing that succeeds under the name "Amiga," it really will at this point be only the name that is the same. The down period has been too long for any real sort of continuity. As such, I have to admit that I'm no longer really that interested, and won't be unless what comes out is truly amazing on its own terms.

-Rob

Linux on the AmigaONE?

From what has been said of it, the amigaone board is basically a relatively pc-like board with pci slots, usb, etc., except that it uses a PPC. It seems like this is exactly what is needed as a linux platform, that is, a standards-based, non-apple, ppc motherboard. If its anything like they say, this thing might very well be my next linux box.

Some food for thought (or why Amiga will succeed)

If you consider the big picture of the current OS environment, you see that microsoft is succeeding in getting the normal people of the world to buy their stuff. I'm not talking servers here, I'm talking desktops. Linux can fend for itself on the server, but ask pretty much any smoe who uses windows for general purposes to switch to Linux and remain at the same productivity level and you might have an issue. MacOS is good but it's tied to the hardware so I can't use it, can you? BeOS has abandoned ship. Atheos will work but needs alot of things to succeed. In general, to succeed in the desktop OS marketplace, you need a combination reliable office software + hardware support + usability + easy to use multimedia software + somewhat brainless operation + games. Microsoft has all of these, Linux, MacOS, Beos, etc. doesn't. AmigaOS, although slightly dated, has a viable degree of all of those. Frankly, as a normal person, you can get work done easily on Windows. AmigaOS you can't now with speed, but you will. I don't own an Amiga, but I will purchase an AmigaOne. I am a programmer as well, and I will probably program for it as well. Look at the big picture of where various OSs are going and you will see that AmigaOS has one of the most innovative plans to get into the desktop arena. Better that any company I've seen other than MS. I believe they can do it. None of us can say they won't because (1) there's a hint of bias in everyone and (2) no one whose posted here (including myself) has seen all the NDA'd plans and betas that Amiga is preparing. Recommendation: be skeptical that's fine, but if it shows up, embrace it as one of the few viable MS alternatives.