CEO of Amiga, Inc. Interviewed

vlangber submitted an interview with Bill McEwen about the current state of Amiga, Inc. and their plans for the future. Bill says, "[W]e established the concept and vision of a scalable, embeddable, multi-threaded, memory protected operating system or digital environment that would run from a cell phone to a server. This is what you are going to see us deliver." While Amiga OS4 has been in pre-release since 2004, a final release is planned for later this year.

Please - STOP killing Amiga!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please - stop using Amiga name. Amica was a respectful brand and now it's a legend. Please do not kill Amiga with anything you have - use new product name instead. Don't do like General Motors company did to Chevrolet brand - Chevrolet was a well known and well respected brand all over the world - now General Motors call Korean made cars Chevrolets. They have totally raped the brand. I hope it won't happen with Amiga.

now then,

[joe 155]

I like Amega as much as the next guy (well, maybe a lot more than the average non-/. crowd) but I do wonder what the hell is going on here, what are they doing? why are they doing it? what gap are they trying to fill?

Take for example;
"While Amiga OS4 has been in pre-release since 2004, a final release is planned for later this year."

So, a pre-release was in 2004, and it's now 2006 and it's not a final yet? who is working on it? They are talking about OS5 in TFA but there seems to be some doubt about whether or not the kernel is even written - from TFA "...asked if they were interested in developing the kernel for OS5. This implies that the kernel hasn't even been started. If the kernel work hasn't even started, the eventual release of OS5 seems very uncertain and far away"

So they create something and don't ship it then try and say they are further along than they are, then just not give a clear answer about what is going on, it was all "oh, yeah, I know the schedule, but I won't tell you". I have serious doubts about what is goign on here... and that was before I found out that there were only 5 people working on it!

Commodore are back too

[mccalli]

Feels very strange to look at their web site though, somehow to me the name just doesn't click in the modern era. Here's what Commodore are doing today [commodorecorp.com]. As I understand it, a company bought all rights to the name and launched themselves as Commodore. Via the Retrobits podcast [libsyn.com] I heard an interview with a US salesman for them - apparently they're quite serious about the Commodore name, and want to revive the spirit and attitude of working rather than just the name.

Having read about the way Commodore worked I'm not especially certain that's a great strategy, but it'll be interesting to hear what happens.

Cheers,
Ian

I have a great idea for a name for their new OS

[spirit_fingers]

Pink.

Re:The old screen pull down trick?

[smallfries]

The real problem was the lack of progress. When the Amiga came out in 1984 it blew away *everything*. But IBM was already carving up the business world and so the Amiga never really made inroads. Apart from in Austraila oddly enough - Lassiters used to run on one. As a games machine it was amazing. But then what really changed over the years? The AA chipset was a minor speedbump. The AGA chipset finally made the difference but it was too little too late. Over the two decades that followed Intel blew Motorola out of the water, and the console world went through how many generations?

Now (and only now) we are finally reaching the stage where the Amiga has been replaced. Linux is sufficiently Amiga-like (because they both use the same unix design principles). We've finally reached a stage where custom chipsets are returning - although now mine hangs off an AGP slot rather than being directly soldered onto the motherboard. When the desktop gets offloaded to the graphics card again the commodity PC will finally have caught up with the Amiga in elegance, having eclipsed it in power long ago.

(And yes, the new Nvidia cards are marginally more powerful than a copper program...)

Re:Why "Amiga"?

[fatphil]

For me, the Amiga philosophy was picked up more by MorphOS and Pegasos than this new so-called "Amiga".

http://www.morphos.org/index.php3
http://www.pegasosppc.com/

However, for familiarity I run linux on my pegasos box (a loaner from work, noone else uses it).

I'll fess up to being an ex Atari ST fan. I'd have bought an Amiga if I could have afforded it. It was better, just out of the reach of my limited budget.

FatPhil

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Re:The old screen pull down trick?

[Tekoneiric]

I have to differ with your option. I find that using multiple screens would be just as useful today as then. I encounter various gfx intensive programs that prefer the screen to be 16 bit depth and others that prefer 32 bit. Due to the nature of my work, I normally have a lot of windows open and ready for me to access. I would much prefer to have them grouped on screens. As it is, I maximize the ones I can to sort of simulate multiple screens plus I have a remote desktop terminal opened to a server.

I miss the sliding screen feature because on the Amiga I would often slide a screen down so I could see a bit of information on the screen behind the one I'm working on. I wish I knew of a hack to allow me to slide windows down when they are maximized. When I was on the Amiga, people would get dizzy watching me fly thru the various windows and screens. I would switch to a screen do what needed and back to another so fast that most people would hardly realize what I did. If they blinked, they'd miss the screen switches entirely. On WinXP, swapping maximized windows isn't nearly as fast as swapping screens on the Amiga.

There are quite a few features I miss from the Amiga days: Arexx, the list command, the way the Amiga handled mounting/unmounting of devices, the way device/volume names were handled, assigned logical devices, bi-state icons gfx, icon tool types, and ReadArgs. Those are the main ones I miss.

More AmigaOS features

[Burz]

20) Virtual folders that unify two or more real folders.

21) File-change notifications

22) The WINDOW: device... create and manipulate windows as files. The parameters would be passed like: open("WINDOW:0/0/400/100/Window Title"); which specifies window location, size and title. Also SPEAK: could accept parameters for voice synthesis.

23) The whole disk-based portion of the system was located under one abstract assignment, SYS:, which could point almost anywhere

24) Each filesystem had its own root. The root of the current path would be accessed with a simple colon prefix (instead of VOLNAME:). The CLI would remember previous dirs and take you back to them with 'pcd'.

25) Escape codes could be used to draw bitmaps within console windows, although this was an unintended feature.

26) DOS had pattern-expansion that at the time was between globbing and regex in richness. Pattern support, as I recall, depended on the program intentionally passing the pattern string through an AmigaDOS expansion function which returned a linked-list of files. This has the advantage of not needing 'xargs' due to fileset size; but you had to use an xarg-like utility for certain commands because they did not internally support expansion (these few commands were written for single files, so these cases were rare).

27) A Unified bitmap and scalable (Agfa) FONTS: location, and I recall that rendering functions were later unified. This was more Mac-like and way ahead of the PC (which had balkanized fonts upto Win95). The bitmap fonts could be 32-color and also animated like GIFs. The first PC OS to handle loadable font-display through GPU coprocessing (the Blitter).

28) Each filesystem was 'bisected' with the allocation map and main dir in the middle of the partition, and each new file assinged to grow on one side or the other. Supposedly this kept head thrashing minimal in certain scenarios.

29) Most commands were 're-entrant' and could be configured to pre-load and link in memory to perform as if they were internal to the CLI. Since each command was equal to the parent CLI process, no process-creation or other overhead was incurred, and it saved memory and instruction cache as well.

30) Programs (apps) were often just the main binary plus the matching "binary.info" file (which defined the icon and params). Ones needing libraries, AV data and such were simply played inside of a 'drawer' (folder) to keep everything together, so installing a program often meant copying its folder onto your HD (wherever you liked) and install wizards were kindof rare.

31) CLI escaping and quoting were powerful but very clean, and much less likely (IMO) than bash to lead to misleading code (especially when pattern expansion was in the mix). Adoption of Unix-y features was very selective, and the OS as a whole was probably more true to the everything-as-file concept than a typical Unix workstation.

32) Event-handling in the standard devices was sophisticated enough that daemons were rare.

33) The core OS (scheduler+DOS) knew the difference between a thread, shell-bound process, user-facing GUI process, a handler/driver, and something called a "commodity" which is similar in function to OSX Dashboard widgets. Many tasklist utilities would display them quite distinctly as a result, and just show the apps by default.

34) Racter: 3rd-party app that combined an Eliza-like engine with an animated 3D metalic female face (circa 1986).

35) Diga! Also about 1986, a multiplexed VT-100 app that could (with two Amigas) transfer files both ways while chatting, with resume, CRC etc.

and ...

42) Had both NIL: and NULL: devices that functioned differently. :-)

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Re:Pure vaporware

[dreadclown]

Only "AmigaDOS" (fileIO/CLI) was based on Tripos and BCPL; Commodore outsourced that to a UK company to get AmigaOS V1 out the door.

It was wretched. Slow, bloated and lacking functionality

Programming example: convert strings from null-terminated to first-byte-contains-length, then right-shift the address 2 bits right so that the BCPL runtime can left-shift it back again to use it ...

Most of the functionality and all the really nifty stuff in that area, e.g. file-notifications, came after it was completely re-implemented in C for AmigaOS V2. (~30 system-calls in V1.3, ~150 in V2.0)
Much of the design for this rewrite was lifted from the free-beer (I forget if it was open source) "AmigaDOS Replacement Project"

Almost had dBASE on the Amiga!

[TheTiminator]

I used to work for Ashton-Tate before it was bought out by Borland. Though it was very hush hush at the time, I personally built a business plan for porting dBASE III Plus over to the Amiga. We had a group of Amiga developers lined up to do the port. The marketing and business plan showed that there was a profit to be made if the port was done. I managed to get the honchos from Commodore to meet with Ed Esber and with management from the Amiga development company. After a couple months of serious work to pull it all together, it fell apart in the board room. With A-T focused on other platforms, and the mistake they made with dBASE for Mac (which really didn't have anything similarity to dBASE), they decided to not follow the Amiga market. I personally feel that if they had, that the Amiga platform and market would've been a lot different and would have been taken more seriously.

But hey, it was a fun project. (Ah, the good old days.)

Voice of Dissent

[Thumper_SVX]

Well, not necessarily here on Slash... but here's my opinion.

Where's the "killer app" for this operating system? I mean, really? Sure, in my opinion there has always been room in the past for new operating systems, but I'm afraid that ship has sailed a long time ago. There are already a smorgasbord of good operating systems out there that meet the needs of modern developers both on the desktop and in embedded systems. So where's the compelling reason to scope out one more OS platform when developing either of these platforms?

Embedded systems need a good real-time operating system, or at least one that is light on resources. OK, so by default I know in a few years we're going to be seeing really powerful embedded systems, but that will only open the door to increase the OS footprint using existing OS's. They're all still being developed, so they will continue to grow as the hardware platforms also continue to grow. This isn't new, this is just economics of the computer industry 101.

Today if you want to develop an embedded platform you have a multitude of good choices of platform. I don't see much market for yet another OS. If you want quick and dirty development on the cheap, you've got Linux kernels... if you want well polished and flexible you've got Symbian. If you want something verging on a desktop OS in complexity you've got CE / PocketPC / Whatever they hell they're calling it this year. Take your pick... and these are only the high-profile contenders. For each of these, there are probably a dozen other alternatives that work just as well. I don't see how AmigaOS is going to compete in this market space.

Now to the desktop side. Sorry, I still don't see it. In many ways I feel OSX was the natural spiritual successor to AmigaOS. Many of the things that made it great are quite obviously inspiring similar or even identical functionality in OSX. That's natural; many of the things AmigaOS did were only great by the standards of the time. And today, only Apple does the same thing with the unified architecture of platform an operating system... Microsoft can't compete there because they have such a wide range of hardware to support. As long as Apple maintains control of the hardwar they can tune the OS to said hardware and provide a user experience not a million miles away from what AmigaOS gave us 20 years ago.

Even then, on the desktop side you have a multitude of choices again; Linux, BSD, Windows, you name it! There are even Windows workalikes, MS-DOS platforms. And if you think DOS is dead you've obviously never worked in the embedded space. Sure it may just be a bootstrapper for your applications rather than a true OS, but there are plenty of people still coding in the 16-bit DOS space, sometimes with 32-bit extensions where required. Hell, I even maintain a DOS installation in a Parallels virtual machine on my Macbook so I can do development in the environment... so there's yet another desktop OS to compete with.

I loved the Amiga platform. I had two of them; a 500 and a 1200. I also had an Atari ST which I loved just as much. Having said that though, the only compelling reason I can find to even look at the new AmigaOS is for the purposes of nostalgia. Sorry, that doesn't cut it either for me. I've done the nostalgia thing... I've booted these OS's in emulators and checked them out. They're dated and do nothing that modern OS's don't. Sure I can view these platforms through rose-tinted spectacles and profess my love for the stuff they did, but by modern standards they just fail to impress on most levels.

I'm not saying we've reached a plateau with regard to operating systems... I personally feel that all the major players have plenty of places to go. However, just another OS with a desktop metaphor interface in an already crowded market place... you'd have to give it away to make it viable unless it does something incredible. Look at Be. Great OS, and to my mind the closest we've been to an AmigaOS like experience on Intel architecture... but they tried to sell i