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Amiga

Amiga Comeback? 169

Posted by CmdrTaco from the we've-heard-that-before dept.
An anonymous reader sent us linkage to a fairly lengthy ZD Net story on Amiga and its "Comeback" (if you're keeping count, this is approximately the 293 thousanth time someone has suggested an Amiga comeback). They talk about Amiga 'net appliances and low cost Amiga PCs.
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Amiga Comeback? More

Amiga Comeback?

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  • We want a ZD filter!

  • I went to an amiga convention in St. Louis a couple of days ago. I love the old machines, but it seems like the wind has been let out of everyone's sails.

    One of the big things that seems to keep the Amiga alive is the video toaster/flyer. It's great for budget editing, and even more, still. Of course, Newtek told us that they're open-sourcing the flyer software (cool!). The thing is, they've got a new PC capture card/software combo. It isn't a toaster yet, but the guy we talked to (the east coast sales rep) called Amiga a "dead, well... comatose" platform, and then all but said their new hardware is going to be the toaster for PC. He pretty much hinted that the hardware does stuff the software doesn't yet, and with a software upgrade you've got a full uncompressed film quality flyer on your hands.

    Bye-bye Amiga. :(
  • Actually, I have (at home) a SCSI tape unit that takes standard audio cassettes! The only reson I don't use is the only scsi card I have is VLB and the VLB slot in my computer is taken by my video card (et4k). When I get some more memory (RSN) I'll be able to get my second 486 going and hopefully use that tape drive. Hmmm, wonder what its capacity is....
  • Obv. this proves that MS can't have a monopoly.

    Seriously, I never owned an Amiga, but was impressed with the way it had separate processors for everything that went on. Back then, the CPU on an x86 machine did all the work. Now we have sound cards, 3D cards, and the idea is to offload everything from the CPU to some other processor. The Amiga did have an influence on today's technology.
  • Posted by The Incredible Mr. Limpett:

    Yeah! I can play a mean game of Karateka...I think I still have that 5 1/4 floppy here somewhere.

    What about the TI99/4A in all it's brushed stainless steel glory. That was actually the first one I owned. I know it wasn't the best, but I must've had a hundred cassette tapes with my little basic programs on there. hahaha

    Let's bring back cassette tape storage!


    ----
    "Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a
    villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify."
  • Posted by KenM:

    The value of anything is a subjective thing...

    To *you* an Amiga has only antique & novelty value; to those who kept their Amigas updated & capable and use them to do their daily computing tasks, they have as much value, maybe more than your personal workstation has for you.

    If you only invest for financial gain,and your only measure of value is monetary, you must be one dimensional indeed...
  • Posted by KenM:

    It was based on Tripos (ever hear of that?) and written in BCPL. It did take a *little* longer than 4 weeks though, but was still done in an amazingly short time. But the first release was pretty rough and used to crash left right & center unfortunately giving the Amiga a reputation of being a crash-box. The 1.1 release a few weeks later was quite stable...

    But full preemptive multitasking in 512K, wow. And I remember being blown away when I saw my first digitized photo in 4096 colors on an Amiga... remember, this was the days of XTclones with 16 color CGA. The AT and 64 color EGA were still on the horizon.

    The Amiga would handle 8MB of RAM at a time when Bill Gates was saying "no one will ever need more than 640K" :)
  • Posted by GimmeZeroZero:

    I don't think there is much point in comparing
    assembly to C or any other HLL.
    x86 does really suck when compared to 680x0.
  • Posted by JerTheNerd:

    and the reson it is alive, is that we keep it alive. There isn't any big marketing infrastructure, no profit margin, it's just the love people have for their GOOD operating system. (man that sounded cheezy)

    The only forseeable way (in my humble opinion) Linux is ever going to die, is if all the hackers suddenly say "Eh... this sucks." and go work on something else.

    That seems fairly ridiculous at this point. At least that's my humble (linux user for 2 weeks now WOO HOO!!) opinion. :-)

    "My brain suffers from chronic IRQ conflicts."
    Jer
  • There was once a long article in Byte on Exec, however their web archive doesn't go back far enough. Exec is a simple message passing kernel that internally uses exec lists as a common data structure. Unfortunately it relies a lot on a globally shared memory system (i.e. no memory protection) - hence the need for a completely new kernel.
  • Yes. It's true - the A600 is a dead machine. Not upgradable. However other Amiga's are very much alive and well, some of them are even running Linux.

    You don't seem to understand. Noone is talking about reviving the A600, or even OS3.1. This is something modern and new.
  • My .sig isn't about using computers. It's about programming. Duh!
  • Well, what's the point in Apple? What's the point in Linux? It's another option. Once upon a time you could create innovative computers, now the best we can do is Apple's new colors. The good thing about the net (and Linux) is our tasks don't require a Wintel box. If hardware engineers could get back to playing with some interesting architectures it would be good for computing in general. I think they should just run BeOS or Linux on it this time instead of doing another OS.

    Just my $0.02.
  • Without ZD Net, Slashdot wouldn't have any news. ;)
  • Because it gives us another choice, which is a good thing. Whether or not they'll succeed is the real question. And why would they use Intel chips is another...
  • Hell no. An x86 based Amiga would surely put the last nail in the coffin. Even if it's not going to have Motorola inside (god bless them 680x0's!) it sure as hell better not have Intel. Hell, my 14mhz 68020 easily outperformed my 120mhz Intel...
    Bah.
  • Newtek has been making the Video Toaster for PC-based systems for several years now. They started doing so as soon as they realized that their Amiga-based product lines were not going to succeed if the Amiga was going to die.
    Or in the immortal words of the original Amiga developers, "We made Amiga. They(commodore) fucked it up." (found in 1.2 ROMs with some funky keystroke combo upon startup)
  • Put the original disk if you have it (heh, yeah right) in the drive upside down, then boot. The entire game will play upside down. Of course, the copy of the game I once had, many moons ago, was distributed as a two-sided game, complete with the upside down version cracked with the upside down version of the cracked message from the first side. 'twas cool. br0derbund used to be cool. whatever happened to them?
  • The day before Commodore went out of business, you could get an A1200 for $349 and an A4000 for $1899.

    The day after they went out of business, those prices (I witnessed this personally) went up to $549 and $2499 respectively.

    Wasn't Elvis worth more dead than alive?
  • A couple things the Amiga has always offered and will probably continue to offer:

    - Nowhere is it written that every OS wants to be UNIX when it grows up - the Amiga is not UNIX and thus brings a fresh perspective to OS design, while remaining robust enough that UNIX apps can be ported to it.
    - The GUI is integrated the way a GUI should be - preferences are basically systemwide, not merely toolkit-wide or API-wide. GUI and Shell are given equal billing and don't operate in separate universes. ARexx provides a platform-wide scripting mechanism that lets applications talk to each other. And on and on.
    - The Amiga speaks NTSC and PAL, and the proposed next-generation Amigas will speak HDTV. There is a real need in the home computer AND the video pro market for machines that consider television as a native language - allowing software to manipulate video whether the software was designed to or not (like using Workbench to genlock!).

    The Amiga has less than 0.1% market share right now, and I don't really see the classic Amiga line making a noticeable comeback - nor do I have convincing reason to believe the current batch of promises any more than the last 173 we've been given - but there really is a place for the Amiga, or some descendant of its spirit (and I don't mean Be, which seems to become more like a closed-source UNIX with each successive release).
  • According to my sources, Amiga Inc. thought so too. But they had a terrible time getting Be to cooperate - they wanted too much for licensing, taking too long to sign paperwork, etc. Finally they mutually said "f*** you" this time last year (a week before the Amiga convention where the partnership was supposed to be announced!) - and Amiga Inc. started talking to QNX after that.

    (I've heard that Sun was also on the list of "potential partners".)
  • amiga will use QNX Neutrino kernel, according to NTO it works on arm/strong arm/x86/ppc, just check http://www.qnx.com there's an "old" press release about amiga and QSSL
    --
  • What's so big about this? The current plan has been running smoothly and on track for about a year now (actually, I think it's exactly one year to-the-day the plan was originally announced to the public). The Amiga IS coming, and this time for real.
  • The beauty of the Amiga was how simple and stable it was to go in and fuss with the guts. The user had a high degree of control over the OS, and the hardware had handy features that still aren't available today
    (like splitting the screen between multiple resolutions)

    I remember software that did this on the Amstrad as well. I'm not very familiar with the Amiga, but I'm guessing this is the same thing, in which case you can can't change the resolution in the middle of a scanline. The trick is to just change the video mode at precisely the right time as the screen is being redrawn.

    If you find that interesting, you might want to dig up an old demo called "copper" (should be on the Hornet archive), run it, and read the docs that come with it. Guided by those docs, I once wrote a TSR for MS-DOS that, with practically no CPU overhead, scrambled the display (making it look like cable tv). I pondered making a virus out of it, but I was too damn responsible. It would have been the coolest virus ever, though. Just imagine the tech support calls! :-)

    Anyway, to get back on the topic, the same technique can possibly be used to achieve multiple simultaneous resolutions on a PC. I think the copper docs may even have covered that.
    --

  • It was a great computer for its time (in the Commodore 64 era). The Amstrad 6128 had 128K RAM, a screen, and a floppy drive. The disks took a whopping 196K. You could even run CP/M on it.

    Most people had a 646, though. That one had 64K RAM and a tape deck.
    --
  • If BeOS is being compared to a closed source UNIX then I guess Irix is the only candidate I can think of. Good enough for me-I hope SGI would consider BeOS instead of NT on their new visual workstations since they're not porting Irix to Intel.
  • They're right here
    http://www.broderbund.com/
    They sell stuff I'm sure some linux users will appreciate :)
  • SGI
    SUN
    HP
    all started on this same cpu for thier workstations.
  • Last night I saw a QNX demonstration on a P133 notebook with 48 megs of ram.....283 jobs running at the same time and the guy pulls the hard drive out. It kept running! Most amazing thing I've EVER seen. I've never had an Amiga but if the QNX/Amiga OS is even half as fast and stable as QNX 4.25, I'm going to be first in line to buy one. I just hope they're cheaper than QNX :^)
  • I have it on good authority that QNX (http://www.qnx.com) is being used as the underlying OS for the "new" Amiga workbench. Not sure if this is old news for this audience.

    It was supposed to be coming soon (1st Q) as a beta but I guess that has slipped. I thought their schedule was way too aggressive when I heard about it.

    This would be a double win - get all the kewel Amiga stuff ported to Intel and port more of the OSS/GNU stuff to Amiga.

    I like it! (if it happens)
  • yep, stable, strong, and fast.

    It uses a real microkernel. It's small too: 4kb

    Everything else loads as a daemon-like module. The OS itself is message passing based.

    Kewel stuff.
  • Wasn't Pagestream for the Atari first (not the Amiga)? Or am I confusing it with something else?
  • Actually, it was a whopping 7.14MHz
    Did you ever see an a5oo [nvg.org] webserver? :)


    amiga.nvg.org [nvg.org]
  • It's cute, it's got a o3o+883 combo and 32MB of RAM and a pcmcia ethernet card and runs a samba server on the local LAN, when it is not busy showing off animations for dept. of psychology here at the univ where I work.


    Our collection [nvg.org]
  • This is good news indeed. It seemed as though the only person in the Old Regime (how many Old Regimes have there been so far?) who really gave a shit was Petro T. At last he is in good company. All the Amiga has ever really needed to succeed is dedicated and visionary leadership. It sounds like now we have a chance.

  • LOL

    Oh that's got to be the funniest thing I've heard all week (OK, so it is only Tuesday). "...Looked suspiciously like an A2000 with the name plate removed" ... BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HA
  • "Hear hear" as they say in Parliament.

    If people want to know what ZD thinks they can go there and find out for themselves. As much as I love discussing Amigas, I don't think this article needed to be posted. Slashdot readers already know the score, Amiga users certainly do, and I don't care what ZDNet thinks about any of it.

    As far as general news stories go, they are usually reported in 20-30 different sites on the web and you can often get good info straight from the source or other involved party. WE DON'T NEED ZD NEWS ON SLASHDOT.
  • Your mother must be so proud.
  • Don't know, but what couldn't the Amiga offer today?
    Maybe the Amiga could offer a good standard for all those device (not like MS did with software)
    I remember reading in a french linux magazine, that new Amiga-OS or something will be made by QNX... That's a good point, maybe he will be POSIX?
    Anyway, Amiga was great and i can't be bad for us if it comeback
  • The Amiga is _not_ the computer of choice for NASA. Somebody at Hanger AE likes Amigas and uses them for local processing and displays, that's fine.

    Most NASA desktop systems are IBM PC clones running some variety of Windows. There are some Macintoshs, though they seem to be slowly fading away. Some people have UNIX workstations.

    For data acquisition, processing and display, many different types of systems are in use. But the trend in new systems seems to be towards IBM PC compatible systems, unless the requirements justify a more capable and expensive system. Many projects don't have the budget to buy expensive VME systems or UNIX workstations.

    NASA's current approach is "faster, cheaper, better" with the emphasis on cheaper. COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) is the magic word.

    Taka a look at http://www.sewp.nasa.gov if you are interested in what NASA is buying these days. Not a single mention of the Amiga.

  • The only correct statement is that the computers are loaded from mag tape. The current computers don't use ferrite core memory. They may be slow by modern standards, but they are certainly much faster than any HP calculator. They don't blue screen or generate guru meditation errors (obligatory amiga content).

  • You act as if Intel was unheard of until IBM came around. Acutally, the very first personal computers (Altair, etc.) were Intel 8080-based.

    The IBM PC was just a "16-bit" version of your average CP/M machine in it's day. Just substitute the 8088 for the 8080, and substitute a clone OS (MS-DOS) for CP/M.

    The reason the IBM succeeded was that it solved the lack-of-standardization mess for floppy drives, video devices, tapes, etc that existed in the CP/M world. Plus, with up to 640K RAM, it could take 10 times the amount of memory as an 8080-based system.

    Early Sun machines used the 68K, as did some IBM machines, but those were big $$$.
    --

  • If you've ever seen the "Revenge of the Nerds" PBS documentary, there's an interesting part:

    When IBM broached Microsoft to write PC-DOS, they actually thought MS owned CP/M, because they'd only seen CP/M running on an Apple II with a Microsoft 8080 board inside. (But that's actually another story...)

    Anyway, the real CP/M guy was too drunk or something, so MS ended up with the DOS contract. They took one look at the specs for the IBM PC and realized that it could be cloned by other manufactures. (IBMs only property was the 4K BIOS, which had open specifications.) They even called up Intel to conspire in this plan.

    So, Microsoft brokered a deal where they got paid only $50,000 for MS-DOS 1.0, but they could re-sell it anywhere they wanted. So, the clone market was born even before the first PC was manufactured.

    I guess we can draw the conculsion that IBM was either stupid, didn't care if their computer was cloned, or didn't think PCs were going to amount to anything. If anything, the PS2/OS2 initiatives were an attempt to capture market control from Intel and Microsoft that IBM never had anyways.




    --
  • I used to wonder at this too. Then I realised its the whole geek/hacker/nerd thing, characterised by "If its possible, it must be right"
    So, if a link is clickable, it SHOULD be clicked.
    If a ZDNET filter is possible, it should be made.
    There Is No Other Way (tm).
    These guys just can't help themselves, there's no point in trying to retrain them. Guess that means I'm Not A Geek (Damn!). Then again, wihout this mentality we wouldn't have Linux, so I'm not going to complain any more about this failing....



  • Nowadays, though, multitasking OSes, NTSC output, digitizing cards, paint, draw & 3D apps, and stereo sound are standard or easily available on any PC.

    Excuse me, but expanding an arch with design flaws as deeply based as x86 (irq and port conflicts etc) just can't compare. Amigas are done right from the ground up, and manage to be extremely elegant and low-footprint in the process.
    --
    Paranoid
  • So after you discover that evolution sort of has left you behind, do you think you have a chance of making a comeback? Maybe marketing?

  • Being a real programmer is not about doing hard things - it's about getting something real done. It's about being lazy and still getting the job done. And while it is true that small amounts of handcoded assembly will be faster, writing whole programs in assembly is impossible and would be slower overall than well optimised high-level code anyway (as well as buggier). Furthermore, the time spent in rewriting in assembly would usually be better left to tuning algorithms.
  • It's very true. The PC and the "Toaster Box" were linked to one another. The software on the PC was basically just a user-interface for the Amiga2000/Toaster product sitting next to the PC box. The "PC Toaster" hardware was just a link between the devices. The PC didn't really do much real work, short of perhaps some fun with Lightwave here and there. All the muscle was next door!
  • I don't know. It certainly sounds like a lot of excellent news coming down the pipe from Amiga Inc., but it's very true... we've heard good news before. I'm a crazed fanatical Amigahead, and have been for years. But through the last few years, I've learned to be very cautious when lending any optimism to these press releases.

    Yes, I WILL believe it when I see it, but until then I think it's more pipe dreams and vapourware. Amiga Inc. is heading in the right direction, they just desperately need to pick up speed and start getting somewhere. The market ... or what shreds are left of it ... have seen too much shit to keep sucking back on empty promises.

    Amiga News [amiga.org] is a handy place to get the latest scoop on what's going down in the Amiga market... though Slashdot these days is starting to become a close second or third! :^)

  • D'oh!

    For the umpteenth time... they're only using Intel chips for their development system. The final "next-generation" (for lack of a better term) Amigas will be out there with a yet-to-be-announced processor. It ain't gonna be no Intel, that's fersure.

    (Make all the grammatical comments you want. I wrote that last sentence like that on purpose. If you want to dock marks for it, take it up with my high school English teacher.)

    Intel platforms are cheap to come by, and work well with off the shelf parts. Nice for development. Hell... the original Amiga architechture (hard & soft) was developed on Sun Workstations way back when...

  • The AmigaOS going to be built in layers around the QNX neutrino. That's QNX's contribution. The rest of the OS is probably going to be handled by Amiga Inc. and coders like Haage & Partner.
  • An stock A4K doesn't cost $4000. That's an insane price.

    Then again, realize that Amiga prices are primarily inflated because of a lack of market share. Take the tech in an Amiga box and apply the same mass-marketing economics to it as you would to standard PC components, and it would cost a bungload less. That's the way it was back when there was still a company pumping out boxes.

    As for low cost, nobody said you needed an Amiga4000 to do all that stuff. Ever heard of an Amiga1200? Low cost, low profile, damned powerful.

  • The A600 was a low end, barely expandable, downsized piece of shit. If it wasn't for it's applications in things like kiosks and such, I wouldn't be able to think of a concrete reason why anyone would want to purchase such a hideous bastardization of am Amiga.

    Of course it was cheap. That was a big factor in its favour...

  • I don't know about that. Frankly, I'm happy to see ANY decent mention of the Amiga in the mainstream digital press. The more coverage the better, IMNSHO.

    I wouldn ever have tripped across the article if it wasn't for my incessant monitoring of Slashdot goodies...

  • Really, what's the point? When the Amiga was introduced, it did a lot of things PC's and Mac's couldn't. Nowadays, though, multitasking OSes, NTSC output, digitizing cards, paint, draw & 3D apps, and stereo sound are standard or easily available on any PC. What could the Amiga possibly offer today that can't be duplicated on the computers already on our desks?
  • We need to have a seperate place for ZD Net's corporate asskissing articles... that way we can ignore them :0
  • Be should at least port to Amiga. As long as Amiga will give them specs, I don't see any problems with it. It would be nice to see the Amiga replace the BeBox if they do go with a PPC chip.

    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
    I run BeOS. The rules don't apply.
  • Why are there more posts from ZDNet than normal all of a sudden? We KNOW that they are a crappy news source! So maybe they're funny because they're so bad, but this isn't the type of news I'd like from Slashdot. By the way Rob, love the new site. -n
  • I saw Jim Collas's speech at the Amiga99 convention, and had the
    pleasure of speaking to him at the party on Saturday. He is truly
    a man with a vision, and if anyone can turn their new hardware into
    something deserving of the Amiga name, it is he. He understands what
    the Amiga meant to people when it was introduced, and how it has
    managed to stay with so many people til today.

    He believes that there is a place in today's market for non-PC, non-
    Windows computers. I believe that, too. This man stepped down from his
    position as Senior Vice President at Gateway to become President of
    Amiga, Inc. That takes balls. That takes vision. I for one know that
    he really is going to work at this -- this is no half-hearted attempt
    like what the Amiga has seen over the past 5 years. This is genuine.
    There will be new Amigas for enthusiasts (read: nerds) and for end-users.
    Jim Collas is not making this stuff up. He really feels strongly about
    this. I believe it will happen. Now, whether or not these machines will
    succeed is a question that cannot be answered. I believe that there is a
    place for them in today's computer market. Other people do too. Gateway
    does. Ted Waitt, president of Gateway, is excited about this.

    Yeah. So. This isn't just hogwash hype. They're really working on this
    finally. No more B.S.

  • Uhmmm... what? Point me to an URL to Video Toaster/Flyer hardware for the PC.

    AFAIK, there's no such thing, because PCs suck, and can't do anything
    cool and innovative like that. >;)

  • No. Linux is doomed to obscurity.
  • One thing I was really happy about was that Petro has a place in the new Amiga, Inc
    hierarchy of executives. I'm sure all the information is on Amiga Inc's website.
  • The Amiga's hardware is nice and its OS is nice. But there's something underlying that really makes
    the Amiga what it is. There's a Spirit. What Gateway/Amiga is doing now is looking at what made the
    Amiga so special back in the day, and seeing how they can reproduce that today. I think that's
    possible. I think there's a place for that. It's not based on the original OS because it can't be.
    It's not based on 68K because it can't be. That would almost be a dead-end right away. The currently
    available Amigas are for Amiga-lovers. They're not for a mass-market. The new ones will be.

    I, personally, see very little Spirit in a UNIX-based operating system like Linux. Sorry.

    And, FYI, there will be Classic-Amiga boards that will plug into the new machines. These will essentially
    be 68040/68060-based Amigas on PCI cards.
  • For those who do want to revive the Amiga, the source code for AMOS and STOS have been released. Check out http://www.clickteam.com/web/amos/amos.htm
  • Well, I'm glad to say that Apple is FAR from failing.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I'd certainly hesitate to call it an Amiga if it's just some black box on top of a TV. Those can still be found. Try looking on ebay. [ebay.com]

    The beauty of the Amiga was how simple and stable it was to go in and fuss with the guts. The user had a high degree of control over the OS, and the hardware had handy features that still aren't available today (like splitting the screen between multiple resolutions).

    RTG and RTS were excellent architectures that still aren't well matched in the mainstream world.

    The OS had hooks all over the place, it was incredibly straightforward to alter aspects of behavior with legal, sanctioned hooks. This kind of flexibility is only paralleled (badly) by the X model.

    A set-top box, without the AmigaOS, isn't exactly something I'd be interested in calling an Amiga, or paying money for.

    Bring out one of them PPC based desktops, though, and I'll plunk down cold hard cash.
  • Wot's an Amstrad?
  • Funny, that Phase5 sure looks an awful lot like an accelerator card, not a nice crispy box.

    The money's there, just waiting for me to not have to send it to 4 or 5 different shady-looking places in some dreadful second-world country to get a usable box out of it.
  • Sounds like a neat box. Was it rouhly equivalent to the C64 in gee-whiz special effects capabilities like graphics and sound?

    That it ran CP/M makes it sound as though the target market was somewhat different.
  • I can fondly remember my old A500 with 1meg RAM, no HD, 2 floppies. I even remember painstakingly drawing and animating that little red and white ball in DPaint III. I had this nicely redone desktop with this custom-drawn pointer, and some really good games.
    The game I remember most was a D&D flight sim, where you flew these dragons around and killed things. Anyone else ever play that?
    --FroBugg
  • Most likely the Amiga will never come close to the number of sold PCs. But how big marketshare does a computer company really need in order to survive today? Is 5% enough, or does it take more?

    The PC is not really my dream computer. I would gladly buy a niche computer, if only I know that it will survive for at least some years ahead. (oh, I don't know if the Amiga is intented to be a niche computer or not...)


  • I will not believe it until I see it.
  • The 1.3 Workbench *WAS* crappy (according to modern standards), went to Guru meditations all the time, and all that shit. 2.04 was *MUCH* more stable (it was really rare to see a Guru with it), and 3.1 was... Simply great. Well, and given that so many people (like me) zKicked their 1.3 A500s into thinking they had a 3.1 ROM (isn't that great?), we had zero problems with it.

    Now, for old machines you still had the incredible GOMF (Get Outta My Face), that took care of most guru meditations...

  • Debian (Score:1)

    by sklib ( 26440 )
    Debian already runs on amigas, so apparently getting a good OS wouldn't be a problem if Amigas came back.
  • Just the facts:

    Linux is an OS.
    Windows 9x/2000/NT is an OS.
    Mac OS 8.5 is an OS.
    Mac OS X is an OS.
    Irix is an OS.
    QNX is an OS.

    The Mac 680x0's and G3's are computers.
    The Amiga is a computer.
    The SGI machines are computers.
    The x86 machines are computers.
    The Imac is a silly-ass toy ;)

    There seems to be some confusion over these points. It's possible to tweak, overclock, throw memory at, throw video cards at, and throw OS's at these machines in just about any combination. Doing these things costs $X for some components and $1.5X for others and $.75X for yet others. You can strip down or upgrade your machine to the point that it's an essential part of your home-heating system. However, it's assinine to say that one setup is "better" than any other. Whatever you use is up to you.

    If the Amiga comes back in a big way, that'd be cool. It had a lot of genuinely new things to offer. Something else to mess with. [That's my on-topic comment so they don't have to send search planes for me]

    My Mac-lovin' roommate and I will be building a Linux server sometime in the near future. It will more than likely be some flavor of AMD machine with a ridiculously large hard drive, but don't make the mistake of calling it a Wintel machine. Bill Gates has a very bad predilection for shiny things. Steve Jobs has repressed anger toward anyone who is not Steve Jobs. Linux developers need to take a walk once in a while.

    The point is that whatever you choose is just fine. If you present me a machine/OS or a brand of machine/OS and call it better, I can throw a few dollars at another system/OS and show you up.

    The best thing is that you can have Linux on nearly any of these machines. After all, that's the whole point of This Old Slashdot, neh?
  • What are these people waiting around for? If all gateway is going to do is put a x86 type computer together for easy surfing and use amigas name
    you guys are getting ripped off. I can identify with the underdog and wanting a different solution to MS domination. But at least get with a
    architecture that is in the marketplace. Besides which amiga lets you play quake II?
  • So you have used an Amiga 500. It's like saying PC's are crap, because you used a 25Mhz 486 with Win 3.11 and it didn't multitask. Come back when you've tried an Amiga 4000 with a PPC and gfx card...


    Vidar
  • Bravo!
    I used to be one of those "church of Amiga" kind of guys, now I own a peecee and I'm even M$ certified, but I still love my Amiga and use it every day, and was disgusted with all the trash the users here piled onto a technically superior machine and OS (despite its age)
    I don't preach Amiga anymore, I guess I'm tired of being laughed at or asked who makes it and will it run windoze? but if you folks here are so shortsighted as to think that Linux will fare any better than Amiga has, despite its technical superiority, then you're sadly mistaken.
    Thanks 'anonymous Coward' for calling a spade a spade and telling these losers where to get off.
    Paul
    pak@erols.com
  • Wrong! The only thing worse than an Amiga advocate is a Team OS/2 advocate. My nightmare is being trapped in an elevator with a guy wearing a "Ross for Boss" T-shirt and a "Team OS/2" hat just as his medication wears off.

    Cheers

    multiplexo
  • My Amiga can autoload Mac PC Atari Amiga MSDOS disks can your PC.
    How about autoplay any OS software.....
    ONLY AMIGA MAKES IT POSSIBLE !!!!!!!

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