CEO of Amiga, Inc. Interviewed 225
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.
Breathe out Justin (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Breathe out Justin (Score:5, Informative)
And I too knew a guy named Justin that claimed Amiga was going to take over the computer world...
Re:Didn't have a sound digitizer on-board. (Score:2)
Hey Guys (Score:5, Funny)
- Justin
P.S. You bros are the best! My mom says hi.
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Although at the time I'd agree that no GUI came close to AmigaOS, I'd argue that TOS was far superior to Windows versions up to and including Windows 3.11. It was on par with early MacOS versions as well. So it was a little blocky compared to MacOS's 512x384 display; what 320x200 display WASN'T blocky? But at least it wasn't monochrome; it could display up to 512 colors, which was second only to the Amiga in the desktop graphics department. To
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It might have been easy to add MIDI ports to the Amiga, but their presence-as-standard on the Atari was enough impetus for high-level audio software to be developed for the ST. Software that's still around [steinberg.net] today [apple.com], despite having long since left the Atari platform.
It might be one thing having sp
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At one stage in the music business (from about 86-95 roughly) million dollar studios had the humble Atari holding it all together at the
Why "Amiga"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Commodore really screwed up with the marketing. It was like plot of "The Producers"... do everything you can to make it fail.
Now it's yet again, "Wait until you see what we have planned!" Reminds me of the old days.
Whatever this company is doing, it's "Amiga" in name only. They really need to change the name and let "Amiga" die with whatever shred of respect that great machine once had.
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I feel the same way about Bugatti, but at least VW actually delivers product instead of talk.
KFG
Re:Why "Amiga"? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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Pegasos was supported on OpenBSD, but was dropped [openbsd.org]. Seems the Pegasos are made by a bunch of crooks.
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Saying that the Amiga was better than the ST?
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The problem was that the CxOs were too busy embezzeling funds, diverting money from the R&D and marketing budgets into their own coffers, causing AmigaOS AND the hardware to stagnate, while the PC was quickly catching up to and passing the Amiga's capabilities.
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Commodore managed to destroy all respect for the Amiga with the A600, A1200, CD-TV and the CD-32.
In fact they started the ball rolling by making sure that the Video Toaster would not work in the A3000, I guess they wanted to sell more 3000Ts at a substantial premium.
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"They" == "the Amigas".
Not "They == Commodore".
Understand? Amigas - good. Commodore - bad.
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"We made Amiga, Commodore fucked it up." [slashdot.org]
Re:Why "Amiga"? (Score:5, Informative)
No. The Amiga was a very powerful computer for its time and was also very affordable (in comparison with Macs at the time).
It had true preemptive multitasking from the time it launched in 1985. In comparison Mac OS didn't gain cooperative multitasking until 1988 with the introduction of Multifinder.
Much like todays computers have dedicated sound and video hardware, the Amiga had a custom set of chips to offload all video, animation and sound processing.
In 1985 it had the best color graphics available. I wasn't until 8bit color boards came out in 1987 that the still screen color capabilities of the Amiga were exceeded. Even then, the cost for a Macintosh 2 with color display in 1987 cost over 4 times what a single Amiga did. The Amiga was still superior in animation fluidity as well.
When most computers were making beeps and boops, the Amiga had 4 channel stereo sound that used 8 bit digital samples.
Because of the Amiga chipsets origins as a proposed game console, it was designed to display to a TV using standard NTSC and PAL signals. This gave rise to the use Amiga's in television stations as video hardware such as genlocks were inexepnsive. The release of the Video Toaster for Amiga brought huge television capabilities to the platform, once again at an price that was incredibly low at the time.
The Amiga was also a hotbed of 3D animation software. Several 3D applications were born on the Amiga, the most popular being Lightwave which has long since been ported to other platforms.
Amiga had an excellent shell and many applications were fully scriptable via a port of the REXX language. I went from Amiga to using UNIX systems and the time I spent learning AmigaDOS was a huge help.
So why did it die such a miserable death? Part of the blame is on the marketing efforts of Commodore which were simply terrible. But another key point is that the technology that made Amiga so great, the custom chips and preemptive operating system also held it back. The chips were not easily swapped out and too many programs (most notably games) made direct calls to the hardware. Even when they did update the chipset it broke a lot of older software for just this reason. Color Macs and PCs with cheap VGA cards were also coming down in price, making the Amiga look less attractive. The operating system was also hindered by the inability to implement things like memory protection, meaning the Amiga was prone to crashes that took the whole system down (much like Mac OS and Windows before Windows 2000 and Mac OS X). There was no easy way to build memory protection in without breaking old software - the same issue that led to Mac OS X supplanting the early Mac OS.
In a nutshell, there was a time in computing history when the Amiga was without a doubt the most powerful personal computer you could get for a reasonable cost and had features which simply were not available on any other platform for years to come.
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The old screen pull down trick? (Score:5, Insightful)
This may sound like a small, silly thing to stick on, but it does work to remind me that the Amiga was a unique combination of clever programming AND clever hardware at a special time in computing history - What makes this new Amiga an Amiga beyond just sharing a name?
I hope it's not Guru Meditations...
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'Clever' never scales very well, because clever design digs in to take advantage of warts and shine them into features.
In essence, that is why the Amiga could foster a loud proud subculture of users, and also why it could never grow beyond said loud proud subculture.
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One thing that really killed the Amiga as a games machine was the introduction o
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In fact, clever tricks in hardware exist on all sorts of platforms, and they still do today. For example, 3D graphics programming today involves taking into account the advantages and bottlenecks of current
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Nothing. It's like Atari. It's like any name which can be traded long after the people responsible for the name have been sacked, resigned, died etc.
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The Amiga name was passed around like a football and is being slapped on technologies that don't even pretend to have any connection with the original operating system and hardware by companies that also don't have any connection with the original work. The Macintosh now is certainly a very different computer than it was twenty years ago, but -- even though
Re:The old screen pull down trick? (Score:5, Informative)
What remained Amiga OS's big strengths were:
1) Real-time multitasking (not a big deal now)
1a) Well-developed support for proper vblank-timed animation (PCs painfully took many, many years to catch onto this. Animation without the 'torn' look was a 'frill' to PC users.)
2) Tight developer-community cooperating to ensure runtime stability
3) Inter-app orchestration through ARexx ports/scripts (and ARexx built-into the Kickstart).
4) The DOS filesystem semantics, where each filesystem was addressed by either its DOS ID *or* its volume-name. The latter could optionally prompt the user to insert volumes on an as-need basis.
5) Integration of desktop and CLI semantics: System utility binaries were GUI, unless called from the command-line. (No they weren't near huge.) CLI invocation meant reading params from line arguments, whereas GUI invocation simply read the params list within the invoking icon's properties. The param symbol-value pairs were easily edited from any icon's "file properties" window, and they could be flagged mandatory or optional. It was a great, common-sense way to tweak the system while staying within familiar desktop/filesystem paradigm.
6) Adding a new utility, driver, etc. to the system just meant dropping the file into its system drawer.
7) ASSIGNs
8) Intelligent, named pipes that could handle blocking and non-blocking IO from the CLI (if you knew what you were doing), and had FIFO/LIFO modes.
9) Stream and block device semantics that had parameter-passing (ex: 'copy SER01:/g10/sPARITY To SOUND:/v50') including AmiTCP sockets.
10) DOS-level management of Classes and Datatypes: Drop a datatype driver into the system so that class "bitmap image" can now read/write new formats like PNG. Most apps did adopt this framework!
11) A CLI and DOS that understood dates, incl. terms like "yesterday" (instead of each command interpreting strings as times and dates).
12) Lots of sh-like scripting additions, like command substitution. Runtime system variables were accessed from the elastic RAM: drive, but mirrored to the HD when told to persist.
13) 8-second bootup times
14) Apps and utilities always knew at least the basic Intuition GUI was available. No character/bitmap mode schitzophrenia.
15) After 1.x, GUI apps behaved like proper DOS entities: Compare to Unix, where a job-management signal like SIGSTOP will freeze an X11 GUI solid. (MacOS/Aqua does not suffer this conflict.)
16) The Zorro expansion bus (OK its hardware, but it was autoconfiguring like PCI back in the mid-80s).
17) Having users up/download/read simultaneously as needed on your packet-switched (pre-Internet) Dnet BBS, while playing sampled music files, while copying files between other drives, while compressing stuff at low-priority, while editing images on a 16MHz system without missing a beat! (If you animated hires+hicolor during all this, then you would see a slowdown due to DMA bandwidth being hogged). Certain top-shelf action games could also be played while heavily multitasking, but you had to experiement to see which ones would try to halt other processes.
18) No Swap!
19) We Amiga users got laid.
Comparied to the button-down, tight-polyester tuxedo and heavy orthopedic shoes of a "PC compatible", our Macs of the time were Art History 101 elbow-patches and loafers; an Amiga was like wearing acid-wash cutoffs while swinging on a trapeze with a complement of squirt-bottle acrylic paints. Other people thought it was a pacemaker for the early multimedia industry
Queue up Bruce Springsteen. "Glory Days...!"
What remained Amiga OS's big strengths were: (Score:2)
You missed one of the things I loved about Amigas. That was that Amigas could run MS/PCDOS/Windows 3.x as well as MacOS. Though I didn't have one then I saw an Amiga running MacOS and a Mac next to it and the Amiga was faster than the Mac at running Mac software. Back in '97/98 I bought my first PC and I ordered it from Gateway. When I ordered it I specifically said one reason I bought a Gateway was because they bought Amiga and I wanted to see the Amiga brought back. Big mistake. They didn't do anyth
More AmigaOS features (Score:5, Interesting)
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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This was one of my favorites. Although Mac OS X does this a little bit in its file displays (showing "yesterday" or "today" or "12:34pm" as necessary) I wish it went farther. I wish it was expandable and customizable so directories could show dates like "Christmas, 2003" or "Last Easter" or "Thursday."
Of course, I wish that I could get the Mac system clock voice to
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Of course... Wait. Why do you want that again?
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Eventually I plan to flip the whole thing anyway as a language learning tool, but I'm not ready for that yet.
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More like 1995.. Unless you had the big bucks for A nice windowsNT system. OS2 2.1 was also close but Windows 3 really was crap compared to Amiga OS.
The fact that anyone bought or developed for MS-DOS after 1984 just show the power of marketing over quality.
Mac, Atari ST, and the Amiga where all year ahead of what Microsoft had at the time.
And the Atari and Amiga
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Except that each virtual desktop has its own display properties?
And so you could have half of your screen running in 1024x768x32 bit color, and another running in 1280x1024x16 bit color? Is that acutally possible?
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This processor was basically synched to the raster beam display, and could be programmed to change screen resolutions at the end of a line. This meant that for example, the first 100 lines were drawn at 640 horizontal resolution, and the Copper could then change the screen resolution (e.g. 320) for the remainder. Very clever, but very
Re:The old screen pull down trick? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Yeah, volume names and assigns. Those were cool. I get tired of hitting the slash key so much. ;-)
As for ARexx, in modern desktop evironments, we do sort of have something a lot like it. DCOP [wikipedia.org] is essentially the same thing as an Arexx port, and it can be used in many languages (I know I can use it in python). Perhaps there's a Rexx that can use it, if your love was for the the language itself (rather than the general capability of having a backdoor scriptable interface to running gui apps).
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Check Ars' preview here: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/amiga.ars/1 [arstechnica.com]
One can only dream they got it right...
Please - STOP killing Amiga! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Alas, where is Kiki Stockhammer when you need her.
According to this [patswayne.com] she is back at NewTek [newtek.com] and in a sci-fi punk rock band, called Warp 11 [warp11.com].
Uphill battle, I'm afraid (Score:5, Insightful)
No company ever got successful with a single product that was applicable to all levels of possible applicability. Microsoft is successful because it makes ubiquitous desktop software, not because Windows XP is modular and its kernel lightweight and fast and embeddable. Sun makes a great VM that really runs well on servers, but it's not exactly a common language among the masses. IBM's AS400 is a pretty neat system, but I wouldn't want it as my mom's computer.
You need to pick your niche and carve it out before you go about trying to make your product ubiquitous. Success comes when people see your product and know immediately where it is applicable. Growth comes when you get them to see it applicable to their domain as well. However, if they don't see the first part, they won't accept the second part.
I knew a photographer who was pretty decent at any sort of photography that a client could dream up. From detailed macro work to poster-quality landscape work, this guy did it all. He had to do it as a hobby because he couldn't get enough work from his clients. He decided to nail down what his acceptable project type was and decided on industrial equipment photography. He can't take a vacation or spend his millions of dollars in profits because his phone is always ringing with new offers for work. By limiting his range of work, he became much more visible to those people who would hire him. Until he did that, he was just another guy among the crowd.
Amiga is just another guy among the crowd.
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I specialize [sic] in wedding, portrait, boudoir, commercial, industrial, food, model, school, sports, editorial, art, and pet photography.
"Established"? (Score:2)
now then, (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
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Apparently not well enough to know how to spell its name.
why are they doing it?
To make money.
what gap are they trying to fill?
Nostalgia.
Commodore are back too (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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I dunno how much they will be able to revive the spirit of the Commodore of old - Remember, when you bought the c64, EVERY port was documented in the back of the user manual, and if you had the programmers reference guide for the c64, it came with complete schematics!
Good luck getting that info for their new hardware...
Just my LOAD "*",8
I have a great idea for a name for their new OS (Score:2, Interesting)
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No, but "OMG Ponies!!1!" might win favor with many.
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Pure vaporware (Score:3, Informative)
1. AmigaOS 4 is in beta, but will not be finished until hardware is available to run it on
2. There is no hardware to run AmigaOS 4 on
3. No-one seems to be able to get licences to make compatible hardware
4. The market is fast shrinking, with the only company ever to make hardware (Eyetech) having given up
The worst thing is, even if they somehow do manage to get a final version of AmigaOS 4 out the door, what will you be able to do with it? Run the same old apps you were running ten years ago a lot faster. Sure, there are some updates, but even basic stuff isn't covered. No modern office suites. No email clients that support HTML mail, POP3 with SSL etc. No web browser that supports flash, Javascript 2.0, CSS or much beyond HTML 3.2. The last major commercial game released was Quake.
If the platform has been open-sourced years ago, it might have had a future. AROS is probably the best bet at the moment. I still love AmigaOS, but I just find it laughable when McEwan comes out with this crap. How many years has he been saying it now? For how many years has nothing happened? Remember World of Amiga 2000, when you told everyone there would be the new system and OS ready to see when in fact you hadn't even started? Show us the money Bill, or don't expect us to beleive anything.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nearly or shortly thereafter, OS/2 also took a dive due to MS' betrayal of IBM.
Then, as you mention, there was BeOS.
NeXT would have been another casualty without Apple picking it up AND getting the MS 'sanction' to save its bacon.
There was a lot of excellent, sophisticated stuff that gained l
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Yet ironically, the Amiga OS was based on the open source Tripos OS and BCPL compiler...
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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 compl
This is not serious (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems like some kind of a scam. What can one think after reading this:
It is obvious that either this guy has no idea at all of what is going on, or that he is lying and there is no development at all, the latter being much more likely. I read the other interview linked from the article and it was full of the same nonsense - definitely not anything that I'd expect from a serious business let alone its CEO. It is completely ridiculous.
Although I respect what Amiga was in the past (although I never personally used it), my advice to the Amiga fans and hobbyists is to forget about this "company". Amiga is dead.
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He can't tell because it will run on 73 bit and revolutionize everything! =)
I was.. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, now is not then, and we're all grown-up now with our business laptops. Where on earth can Amiga find a market now? They're not even close to being the same company or attempting to appeal to the same market. Is the market demnographic that defined the original Amiga buyer even still there?
Even the Amiga vision and sense of community has been fulfilled by Linux, which has unassailable advantages over Amiga Os and any other commercial product in that you can download for free and install on the hardware that you have already. I would love to see Amiga OS on sale again but I'm not sure even I could really find a need for it other than some misplaced sense of nostalgia, which would probably fade as soon as I booted it and realised I didn't recognise the new AmigaOs at all. Another nice OS with no third parties writing apps or games for it? If I wanted that I'd buy OS/X.
Re:I was.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. And you know why that has happened? It's because the creativity is there within the Linux community. Linux coders have free hands to do whatever they want to and create freely whatever comes to their mind without any deadlines. This is why commercial software will eventually fail - nowadays shareholders want more and more done within less and less time - this will result in bad code. Linux is free of all that crap. Nobody is pushing Linux coders, they have the time to make it right. They have the time to be creative. It's not possible to do that anymore if you're a coder in some software company. There are deadlines and shareholders that are making your job miserable.
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Hilarious, dude, just hilarious. It almost sounded like you said Linux had clean code and no ugly hacks. Funny stuff.
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My point was that not many _3rd party_ developers (ie. NOT apple) are writing products specifically for OS/X. How many less then, would write for Amiga?
Another Interview (Score:3, Informative)
good luck (Score:2, Insightful)
The development staff (Score:2)
A whole five? Novell devotes more than that to the Linux kernel alone, don't they?
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Yeah... I'm as much of a fan as the Amiga as the next man, but this is just embarassing. Even worse they go on to say this:
Are they serious?
Cheers,
Roger
Too late (Score:3, Insightful)
However in 1996/7 I went PC out of a need for more.
I've tried various other OS's over the years but have not been convinced.
Since OSX 10.4 things however have been different. Back i the day i used to head-butt mice to pretend to be a mac user in a derogatory way, however my new mac mini and macbook fill the extra the amiga used to provide in my computing life.
Yeah I still have a windows box for gaming and a kubuntu server for stuff but my macs provide my general computer needs and that sence of fun that was otherwise missing.
Should amiga release something i may bve tempted but i know its as much amiga as some company that buys some dead companies name to try and get ahead.
Times change, this does not mean new amiga will be bad, just not new amiga.
Anyway OSX is here and now and nice!
Uh huh huh? (Score:2)
So, how is Elvis? I hear that Roy Orbison and George Harrison are stomping on bugs quicker than Johnny Cash can crank out them line of BCPL.
Amiga has worked very hard to establish a .... (Score:2)
That is a reputation that is not going to vanish over nite.
If they really have learned from their mistakes, then they should have kept quiet until they actually have something to release.
Show me, don't tell me.
Almost had dBASE on the Amiga! (Score:2, Interesting)
What I found strange was. . . (Score:2)
Interesting, that.
I mean, who needs a computer system which was as stable, affordable and advanced as the Amiga when you could have the piece of gosa PC system which confuses and frustrates the hell out of everybody, wastes time and money, and which is now the de-facto norm in computing?
I dunno. The Amiga had that Open Source, non-corporate, power to the people feeling. I wonde
We don't want that. We want a home computer. (Score:2)
The difference between the Amiga and the PC is that the PC is a closed platform owned by Intel and Microsoft (not counting Linux
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What crack are you smoking?
The "PC" is the most open platform there is, being that it started off being designed with off the shelf parts. It is what it is today because it was so easily duplicated (remember they used to be called pc-clones?) by everybody and thei
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What I want, and many others, is a home computer/console hybrid with an open programmable standard hardware.
In other words, we want a console disguised as a computer that we can program our games on it without several layers of committee-design code to block us.
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I always thought of my Amiga as so much more than just a game machine with a keyboard...
Maybe you want a Nintendo wii? Sounds like it may be a relatively open machine...
Voice of Dissent (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Amiga OS Programmers (Score:2)
Someone other than a figurehead for Amiga should step up and make some comments that wont break NDA's....
Sad, Other than the Amiga OS was way ahead of its time, and very usable, if it was actively upgraded what would we have in our OS today? Vista and OSX wouldn't even be close to usability and eye-candy.
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"know almost nobody who is a PC fanboi, its just a solution that gets the job done in a decent manner."
Man, you must not know the people I know. The PC/Microsoft guys are the biggest homers/fanboys I know. The ones I know will say things like "I like Linux and OSX" until you start to replace some of their machines with Linux and or OSX. Then suddenly they show their true colors. Heck, I know a TON of shops that say things like "Our standard is Oracle,Apa
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Really - whilst there may be plenty of Amiga or ex-Amiga fans here, if you read through this thread, I have yet to see anyone defending or supporting what this particular current company are planning. So in other words, your claim of fanboism is completely out of date, and a strawman.
And were there Amiga fanbois in the 1990s? Yes there were - just as there were for DOS/Windows, MacOS and Linux, the only difference being that those fanb
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Some feller called Matt Dillon [freebsd.org] ported bash to the Amiga very early on.
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The Amiga had it all - a usable GUI, smooth preemptive multitasking, GENLOCk capabilities, incredible (for the time) graphics and sound, and plug and play. Not only that, but it had a real command shell, a very powerful internal BASIC, and early availability of many compilers. Automation capabilities were excellent (sadly, SOHO networking was not yet in place so the need for automation outside of animation shops w
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Commodore's alternative, the a590 was crap when looking at the specs (a 20mb st506 drive? wtf?) and didn't allow for as much memory, oh, and no 'turbo'.. but at least it worked well..
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And what's he talk about? Real-time, protected, yada yada, which most modern OSs do or emulate enough on today's multi-core machines not to matter to anyone but the hard-core.
He's stuck in the past. Quite spending money reinventing the wheel, and come up with something NEW. Come up with the first "Star Trek" OS that can understand hu
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Where? (Score:2)
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No thats not it. They're dead because hardware fails over time and no-one is making replacements.
Actually the same effect is happening with the users too, as the current crop of teenagers don't even know/care what an Amiga or a C64 is. They're currently discovering their own iconic symbols to get nostalgic about in 20 years time.
I can't help feel that they're missing out though, because consoles and ipods don't provide for
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