AmigaOS 4

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.'"

Spaceballs?

FTA: "this brings things up to ludicrous speed."

Prepare for the jump to ludicrous speed!

Re:Spaceballs?

I grew up with an A500, A600, then A1200, and various Macs. There is just something 'boring' about using a Windows PC. That's not being elitist or anything, I genuinely just enjoyed using Amigas and Macs more. The Amiga really did switch tasks immediately, I'd forgotten that. The multitasking was way ahead of anything Windows had at the time, and probably even has now. I've not been keeping up with Mac OS for a while (since we got a PC in 98), and the fact that Apple is more associated with iPods than computers these days kinda turns me off the idea of getting a Mac again. If they brought out Amiga OS for x86, or at least made it runnable on non-Amiga PPC hardware, I'd get it.

I think I read this article last night (thanks Firehose :p ), and someone mentioned that they should port it to the PS3. That would be awesome.

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 :D Hehe

Switching XP - Amiga

Not that a brand new platform isn't cool but work desktop?

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,

Dude, buy more RAM. RAM is cheap.

no constant reminders for updates or to download new virus definitions

It's a new OS, of course it's got bugs and exploits. But hey! Security through obscurity.

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.

But you've lost all your work?

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

It's interesting to think whether it's a waste *not* to use the extra CPU cycles and memory we have these days, by coding efficient apps, or whether we should push a system to use every resource it can, for example by having the computer handle all memory issues instead of the programmer (I've never liked the idea of Java handling memory cleanup, when the programmer should just be doing his job properly.. not that I've done a lot of C++ coding for a few years now, and haven't used Java much either). I guess the thing is, that if you're running one application only, like a game, you want it to be using all the resources it can, but when it comes to word processors and browsers, you want them to have as small a footprint as possible. When it comes to the OS, you reaaaaally want it to hardly use any resources for its own nefarious deeds - having the system need a 128MB 3D graphics card or whatever just to run the interface as it's meant to be, seems a waste. In the future it will probably be common practice, but right now, I think Microsoft are just taking things too far... unless the interface really does improve the functionality of the OS in a useful way.

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

From your eulogy:

To be honest, not even Amiga can lay claim to that title ["inventor" of microcomputer-level multitasking], as OS-9 was running on the TRS-80 Color Computer well before Amiga's release.

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

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,

Dude, buy more RAM. RAM is cheap.

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. :-/

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

See, the article author does have a point.

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!

Re:Switching XP - Amiga

How this got modded insightful, Mods only know!

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.

so many memories...

...whatever happened to my old Amiga 500? I wish I knew...

Short memory

Interesting that he would mention not worrying about viruses. If history repeats itself that should be short lived. 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. Hopefully the new OS is better guarded but the limited user base is likely to be it's best defense.

Re:Short memory

Yes it did.. it knew that there was a floppy. Pretty slick. I would try to put this amiga os on my laptop on a partition. Gives me something fun to try.

Re:Short memory

It wasn't a motorized floppy (in the sense of insertion and ejection) but it did detect a diskchange automatically. However if when it scanned the directory block on the disk, it found it was corrupted, it would run a disk validator program. Unfortunatelyhe first place it would look for the disk validator program was on the floppy disk that was in the drive, so a hacker could write a virus that maskeraded as the disk validator and it could automatically run whenb the disk was inserted.

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)

I suppose in the year 2038....

..I'll be mentioning something cool in Mac OS LXVIII and some idiot will say "Why, we did that in Amiga OS 4, and we did it better!"

Thank Goodness!

Now I can get ProComm to dial into those old Telegard BBSes that I still have the phone numbers for in my Apple Newton. I hope that someone ports a terminal emulator that supports the RIP protocol, because ANSI and AVATAR are just boring.

This will completely let me replace my Coco3.

Tradewars door, here I come!

So how much computer is the amiga?

The wayback machine says:
http://www.archive.org/details/Amigaand1985/ [archive.org]

The only question left

Will it run Duke Nukem Forever?

What is it used for?

The Amiga's killer app was video production which has been trivial now on Macs and Windows XP for years. Even the Video Toaster that was cherished by Amiga users now requires a P4 or Athlon and Windows XP. It seems to me that Amiga OS doesn't offer that much when compared Linux, BSD, OS X, and Windows. Heck, I'm even going to throw WM5 in there since it has better browser choices.

Re:What is it used for?

The Amiga's killer app was video production which has been trivial now on Macs and Windows XP for years. Even the Video Toaster that was cherished by Amiga users now requires a P4 or Athlon and Windows XP. It seems to me that Amiga OS doesn't offer that much when compared Linux, BSD, OS X, and Windows. Heck, I'm even going to throw WM5 in there since it has better browser choices.

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.

The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

The reason the Amiga was special was that it was a quantum leap for computers of the time for the following reasons in no particular order:

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 .info files for executables (a local registry for each program)
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.

Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers

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 .info files for executables (a local registry for each program)
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 :-) Surely you haven't forgotten the 16-bit wars already!

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 :-) What you would need them to do is sell their top designs for $20, which isn't going to happen.

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.

How often?

...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.

And just how often does that happen?

emulator or vmware?

i'd really like to try AmigaOS 4 out.. I google'd some screenshots, and it looks fun to experiment with just for something different.. i'd like to try emulating an Amiga system.. Or possibly using something like Vmware.. does anyone know if this can be done?

What's wrong with this summary?

There's something not right, here...

Something not up to Slashdot standards...

Ah... there's no "dept." caption/commentary!

From the nothing-to-see-here department

That was the first thing I noticed, too! I couldn't work out what was "wrong" with the story - some sort of disturbance in the force :)

Re:What's wrong with this summary?

Ah... there's no "dept." caption/commentary!

Let me be the first to suggest this be assigned to the "He's dead, Jim." dept.

It's a shame...

...that there's no new hardware that will run this. Still, all this fun is a completely moot point if there is no new hardware available to run OS4 on.

Re:It's a shame...

I will keep using Amiga for spite. I hate whoever killed this superior operating system.

Only Amiga is worth using. If you disagree, you deserve worse than death.

Not to point out the obvious but...

no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications

I hear not having any will do that for you.

I don't get it...

I know it was a cool OS back in the day... but now hasn't it been surpassed by just about every other operating system / linux distribution? Also... if you can't buy the hardware for it whats the point? To say "Hey... I got Amiga OS on a CD!"

Can it even be run in a VM environment?

OOOH!

I hope it can play old Amiga games like SuperCars and Lotus!!!!!! and who could forget dear old Eliza, the simulated psychologist: "Please elaborate on ****"

Why Amiga? Why not Zeta?

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.'

If you're looking for a fast booting and obscure operating system I'd recommend something more like Zeta (what has become of BeOS).

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 ... shit, I've got to look that up!

Nice Nostalgia

A quick Google will reveal that I was very deep into the Amiga at one time, and a lot of the platform architecture still holds a lot of appeal for me. I wrote a eulogy [vwh.net] for the platform about 12 years ago. Even to this day, I still judge a platform's value by how it stacks up against the Amiga's design and philosophy.

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

Memory protection... sorta

New features include limited memory protection

Welcome to the 1990's, Amiga!

-matthew

Amiga4Life

I dont care what anybody thinks. I love the Amiga, and it was a sad day when I had to give it up because it was not keeping pace with the rest of the world.

Awe inspiring games came out of that machine, Out Of this World, and Another World all the stuff from Delphine Software for that matter. To this day I think about how those games were designed, and it still effects me on a basic level as I work on my multimedia projects.

All I got to say is keep the Amiga posts coming I love to listen to peoples version of the days of old. And down with the naysayers, you will never understand the power of the dark side my padawan learners!

http://www.amigaforever.com/ [amigaforever.com] Biatches! :)

After reading TFA

While I enjoyed a review of all the old programs and whatnot, this would be like a company buying windows 3.1 from microsoft, updating it to 4, and a reviewer touting the joys of lotus smart suite or eudora.

I am a fan of old hardware and my old macintosh 512 lives on in a basilisk II emulator which I will occasionally use to play some of those old mac games. (galax ftw!)

Anywho, I am all for an OS and hardware being limited to the hobbiest domain, sort of like using ham radio instead of IRC, but I shudder to think what would happen if an OS that lacked rudimentary memory security until recently was unleashed upon the harsh interweb en mass. I'm certain amiga OS would have even less security than OS/X and a lonely hacker could ruin a lot of people's fun.

I miss my Amiga too.

...of course, more than anything I miss the fact that I could access that box of 3.5" floppies with all my .MODs on them. Does anyone know if the newer OSes (including this one) will have some sort of backwards compatibility for FFS-formatted floppies?

That's not our Amiga; It's Amiga-branded

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.

download?

...i still can't find a download link.

If I were Amiga OS' chief designer ...

I'd do the sensible thing: 1) migrate to ppc, 2) put in large chunks of BSD code and 3) migrate to x86.

AREXX

I had an Amiga 1200 when I was in college, the early 90s. One of the sweet things that the Amiga OS had was AREXX. It was a simple scripting language, but it was able to listen to and talk to applications that had an AREXX port. So you could write scripts that allowed entirely different applications to communicate with each other for any imaginable purpose. That was fun and--even by today's standards--unique.

Not only fast reboot - NO shutdown

I find it interesting TFA never mentioned my personal "quirky little favourite" of AmigaOS. Not only are the reboots amazingly fast, but you don't need to shutdown. If I want to turn it off, I press the power button. If I want to reboot, I give it the three finger salute (that's either "Ctrl Amiga Amiga" or "Ctrl Alt Alt" (depending on if you want a soft or hard reboot) for anyone paying attention) or hit the reboot button on the front of the computer. There's no "shutdown" required.

Interesting hardware

While I agree diversity is a Good Thing, I see a PC where the major difference is a PowerPC processor instead of an x86 one pretty uninteresting.

For what it is, it would be far better to release it for x86 processors. Even Apple did it.

I want a 16-core ARM CPU, Burroughs B5000-like memory and hardware-assisted garbage collection. The simplistic PC architecture has lived far too long.

The Amiga Could Run THREE OS's at Once!

I was the managing editor of .info magazine, which covered the Amiga exclusively until 1992; just before it died, we did.

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.

I want my CPM!

Screw that.

Article explains why it won't take off

The article's 3rd and 4th paragraphs explain why it has taken so long to be developed, and why nobody knows how much long-term maintenance there will be. The software was held hostage by dying companies. And it still is.

Fool me twice, shame on me. Open it up, if you want it to live. Until then, it's going to have the same kind of maintenance problems it has had for the last 15 years, and the next major update will be in 2022, if ever.

And as usual, freeness has technical consequences and isn't just a damn fool idealistic crusade:

Adding full memory protection would break too many existing Amiga applications

In earlier versions of AmigaOS, when you asked exec for memory, you passed some attributes to AllocMem(), one of them being MEMF_PUBLIC, which if set, meant "this indicates that the memory should be accessible to other tasks." The catch is, with AmigaOS up through 3.x, this attribute didn't actually do anything. But theoretically, it could have been fairly easily used to add memory protection to an Amiga with an MMU. Just give each task its own address space, except for its public blocks which could all share memory. This would have given the Amiga most of the stability of modern systems, while also retaining its blazingly fast IPC. But, as the article says, adding this feature would break many old apps, because those apps were written either before the MEMF_PUBLIC was added to the spec, or the programmers just didn't do it right, or whatever. If AmigaOS had implemented memory protection, those unmaintained apps would allocate their IPC buffers privately, and fail when they tried to pass a message.

Now, imagine if this situation happened with Free Software, such as GNU/Linux. What would people do? They would fix the broken software, duh! It doesn't really take a lot of effort to grep through source looking for AllocMem()s and adding an attribute if it's being used to allocate a message buffer.

But on AmigaOS, you didn't have the damn source to most of your apps. A lot of really popular programs were no longer maintained by developers that had left the platform, and some source had even been completely lost. D'oh!

Being unmaintainable retards technological advance. It's that simple.

I don't know what how the AmigaOS 4 guys finally decided to implement memory protection, but from the article's description, it looks like they had to make serious compromises. Then they admit that maybe with AmigaOS 5 (due out in 2022 by my above predictions) they'll finally get to Do It Right (probably by throwing away the legacy apps, or running all the legacy stuff in a single virtual machine which just can't talk to the rest of the system). Heh, reminds me of how OS/2 or Windows deals with MSDOS apps. In my Amiga days, a comparison of AmigaOS to MSDOS was fightin' words. ;-) This just ain't pretty, and yet, being pretty is what the Amiga excelled at.

Blessing and Curse...

I got an Amiga 1000 in 1985, and used it extensively. Now, this was before my exposure to DOS - my two machines before that were a TI99a, and an Atari 800xl.

It shaped my concept of what an operating system should be at a time when Windows was little more than a dos shell application, and the Macintosh was a monochrome icon holding tank - neither of which would do preemptive multitasking then - or for many years to come. It was a multimedia computer before there was a concept of that in the mainstream. It had many of the capabilities that we take for granted today - as others have mentioned.

In the late '80s and up until the early '90s I was stuck with using DOS and Windows applications and programming environments - neither of which were satisfactory after my experience with the Amiga. So having the Amiga was both a blessing and a curse; while it gave me a window into the future, I had to suffer with the substandard Intel single-tasking PC clone systems, which took off. Thankfully Linux came along - and I was one of the early adopters of that - over a decade now.

Is Amiga dead as an OS? Many of the things that people found useful in the Amiga can be found today in Linux (applications that just work, less resource intensive, preemptive multitasking, excellent development environment etc). I think from a practical perspective, there is no need to use the Amiga. Nonetheless, it does have some advantages, not the least of which is its small installed base - a similar benefit that Linux once had (tight knit community for assistance, lack of a serious attack from crackers, etc).

P.S. -- I remember playing 'Arctic Fox', and using an IBM PC emulator on the Amiga in the mid-80s. What other software did folks fondly remember using on the Amiga?

640x0? I'd love to see that.

Am I missing something? Wouldn't 640x0 resolution be invisible? (640 columns but 0 rows)

If the Amiga had lived, I might be working in IT

I sometimes think that if the Amiga had lived on, I would be working in an IT or tech-related field today.

I had an A500 as a kid and later got an A1200 when I was about 13. On the A1200 in particular, I learnt the ins and outs of how AmigaOS worked including the command line, not just the GUI. I just loved all the clever things you could do to it, like assigning volume names to a directory or set of directories, the ease of multitasking, and how easy it was to plug in new libraries, new fonts, or any variety of new OS extension you wanted just by putting it in the right directory. I also loved the way that what you got on your screen in terms of the GUI actually represented the way the directories were set up on the computer, unlike the Windows of the day with its Program Manager.

Not long after I got the A1200, Commodore went to the wall and within a couple of years it was clear that the Amiga was dead. You couldn't get one here in Australia anymore for the most part and it didn't seem to be doing any better overseas. There was no commercial software and the magazines were closing down. I lost interest in computing generally, and when I finally replaced it with a Windows 98 PC a few years later, I didn't bother to learn the ins and outs of it - I just used it like a regular user.

I don't know what it was, I could just never get into the Windows PC and I still don't care about them today. I can still tell you the specs of my A1200 (OS 3.0, 14Mhz 68020, 10Mb RAM, 560Mb HDD in the end) but about all I can tell you about the one I have these days is that it has a Core Duo processor and it runs XP.

Yeah

Couldn't the 6 of you who are still interested just start a mailing list or something?

Re:Yeah

Couldn't the 6 of you who are still interested just start a mailing list or something?

So that would include 6 interested people + at least 2 guys who keep posting "Amiga is Dead" over and over?

Re:please..

die already. the amiga's time has come and gone.

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. //Scuze me...

Re:Let it rest in peace!

The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.

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

Re:Let it rest in peace!

The Amiga died for one reason. Closed Source on a Closed Platform.

The proprietary nature of the platform had little if anything to do with the Amiga's death ... in contrast with the incompetence, self-serving nature and maliciousness of Commodore's management. The Amiga is further proof that technical excellence is insufficient to win, keep and expand market share unless backed up by marketing, commercial and strategic nous. The Amiga deserved to be the pre-eminent home/office OS of its time. With proper support I think it would have had a shot at being number two in the market.

Re:Open Open Open? AROS!

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.

...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.

I can achieve this effect on Linux with virtual consoles.

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.

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.

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:Who cares...

The Amiga is dead... get over it.

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.

Re:boot time

I'd guess bloat. I would assume that Windows is an order of magnitude or two larger than this OS. That said, though, I've heard of people cutting XP's boot time to 12 seconds. Still, I have no idea why "modern" OSes take so long to boot. Linux takes a couple minutes on my computer, and I hear Macs are similar to XP. Personally I run the BeOS which is similar to Amiga in boot time (I've heard of people booting in 5 seconds). And that's to a fully usable desktop (no login, ready to open Firefox), while checking for hardware changes (you could swap out your video card and there's no prompts or delay). So fundamentally I don't see any reason why other OSes can't boot in 10 seconds or less.

Re:boot time

Windows gets a lot of flak for booting slowly, but in my experience, Windows XP is unbelievably fast compared to Windows 2000 or Fedora Core. Between work and home, I've got two Fedora 6 desktops, two Windows XP desktops, and a Mac OS X laptop that I work with regularly, plus a number of servers running Win2K and various Linux distros. The two XP boxes are ready to log in in 10-20 seconds. Win2k and Linux tend to take 1-2 minutes, regardless of hardware speed. I haven't measured the OSX box, but it's comparable to the XP system. Possibly a little slower, but nowhere near the Win2K and Linux systems.

Re:please..

die already. the amiga's time has come and gone.

What's really sad is the fact that there "was" a good market for amiga type machines in the 1990s, when webTV and other set web browsers were in vogue. Hell, just expand out, what was it called CD32, their game/cd console, and poof a good game machine and something the parents could use to check their stocks and e-mail.

I "imagine" that AmigaOS would be rather handy for hand held applications. It was designed to operate at very low resolutions, did multimedia before it was a term, multitasking, all of this with only a 68000 and less than 1 meg of memory. in this age of bloatware, it's actually rather ideal for this nitch application.

Re:The obligatory..

amigaone can run linux :P

Re:The obligatory..

I'm pretty sure all Classic Amigas can run Amiga Linux, a rarely heard of flavor of Linux. And AmigaOne's can run pretty much any PPC Linux without any problems.

Re:boot time

There was an Ask Slashdot a while back about why Windows doesn't have a faster boot time. I don't remember what the final consensus was, but how come this OS is able to boot so quickly? Why can't Windows do this?

The biggest problem with Windows boot times is that Windows just does too much stuff. Windows XP, on a first full boot with no additional software, uses somewhere in the region of 90MB of RAM just do so standard system stuff. All those programs have to be loaded and initialised before you can log in.

At a guess, this system does less stuff by default, and is therefore faster to start. Simple, really.

Re:Long live Amiga!

I know you were just trying to be funny, but...

* Synthesised Boot-Block Error and Guru Mediation Codes!

I haven't seen OS4 guru yet, so I don't know if it really does. Instead we have this lovely little thing called "Grim Reaper" that just lets us kill the process when it dies painfully. In instances where I have seen a harder crash (only with the pre-release (beta) versions), it's just frozen completely.

* That Robo-Speech program we all used to type dirty words!

The original version of "Say" from m68k AmigaOS systems runs fine on OS4 :)

* A button that simulates "Blowing on the floppy to make sure it loads this time"!

My AmigaOne doesn't have a floppy drive - sorry!