Sixteen Degrees Of Separation 156
With the release of the new SDK, fans are treated to a showing of forward motion by a company bearing the name Amiga. The new management has gone out of its way not to announce projects until they're near completion, and this forward motion is only creating angular momentum for the thousands of Amiga zealots who are getting in line to wait for new hardware. While most take a wait-and-see attitude towards the new Amiga, there's certainly a lot of excitement brewing with partnership deals with Corel and the strong support of Linux as a development platform for the new AmigaOS.
The guys at Amiga are interested in doing something new and interesting. I recently spoke to Amiga VP of Development Fleecy Moss. "The concept of an operating system has been dying for quite a long time. What we're looking at is creating a dynamic digital environment, in which the most important thing is the producers and consumers of digital [content] matter, and they don't really care how they got there, or what they used to get there, they just got into this environment. You know, you can take it anywhere, you should be able to use any hardware with it. For the lynxey type, the hackers, the geeks, whatever you want to call them, they would want to get down dirty and nasty with the stuff. But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff. We're really trying to create this higher environment for developers and for users. It really is where we're moving towards the Gibson dream."
While the guys back in the home office cook up new things to connect us, the Amiga community is all about community. These guys are hardcore zealots fighting for their platform like angry lions. I recently got the opportunity to speak to Wayne Martin, news manager at Amiga.org, an Amiga news and information site.
Slashdot: What is the most important thing in the Amiga community right now?
Wayne: Being involved, I think. It's going to take a while for the new systems to arrive on the market, and it's pointless just sitting around and waiting for them to come. People need to be involved in promoting the Amiga. People need to start code, planning new projects, generally just getting involved. People really need to be active, they need to be out there, saying 'Look, we've got this brand new operating system coming out, and it has got features that nothing else has. It's the best, we think it's the best, here try it.' Amiga's got the best activists in the world."
Slashdot: What excites you about the new Amiga operating system?
Wayne: That it gives users choice. Instead of being restricted to the PC, you get to pick what hardware you want, and after all, that's the most expensive part of the computer. If you've got a job that doesn't require a 500Mhz Pentium III, a smaller chip, something cheaper, you can pick what you want because the operating system runs on so many chips and so many pieces of hardware. It gives the user the choice that they really need.
Slashdot: Do you feel that the purchase of the Amiga name from Gateway was a good idea?
Wayne: Yes, I do think it was a good idea. Gateway had some good plans, but I don't think their heart was quite in it, really. I think they meant well, but it really needs to be in the hands of people that want it on the market as much as the community does, and that's what the new Amiga brings, because it's staffed by Amigans, and you're not going to screw yourself over.
Slashdot: What's the best thing about being a part of the Amiga community?
Wayne: I think being able to go anywhere, and knowing that there's somebody there who knows what it's like to be an Amigan, who has been through the same things. It's like having a giant network of friends all over the world. You can go and stay at people's houses, if you want. You can be sitting on a bus, and talking to a person, find out they're an Amigan, and instantly, you're friends. You don't get that on the PC, if you're sitting next to somebody on the bus, and 'Oh, you use Windows, too!' It's not exactly the same kind of thing. When you're an Amigan, it passes being a computer user. There are some Amiga users who use it and they love it. There are some people who go much further than that, and it's more of a religion. It's coming even closer to a race of people, in a way, who all seem to think the same. They're very stereotypical, fanatical in some cases, but I think it's all generally there that the people have the right idea, and they're there for the long haul.
Slashdot: What is the stereotypical Amigan?
Wayne: A stereotypical Amigan is fanatical, loudmouthed, doesn't shut up about the Amiga, somewhat like me, I'm a perfect example. If you can possibly realize why we are so like that, you can see. It's like having this brilliantly cool toy, and nobody else can experience it like you have. It's almost like having a divine experience to search for words, something like this. You've got to tell everybody about it. They may not understand, but if you can get through to one more person, wow. That's them helped out, especially in the world of the Microsoft monopoly.
Slashdot: Given that Amiga's original big sell was stereo sound and multimedia capabilities, how do you feel about BeOS?
Wayne: Nice try, but no cigar. Be had a good idea, they wanted to make a media OS. It's obviously a hybrid between MacOS and AmigaOS. When it was there and ready, nobody came. It's a bit of a pity really, because it's not a bad OS at all. But if they can pull their act together, well, good on them, but I don't really see that happening too soon.
Slashdot: What about the 'soap opera' attitude the industry has towards Amiga? How does this affect the new company?
Wayne: Well, I wrote a small piece for Slashdot late last year. Within three days of writing that small paragraph, Amiga was owned by a different company, it was a different deal with AOL, and the entire computer spectrum for Amiga had changed, and that's just what it's like for Amiga. It's why I don't write articles anymore, because the second I do, the next day, the whole market has changed. That's the weird thing with this new Amiga. There's this eerie calmness. It's not erratic, people aren't making rumors, they're not seeking this stuff out, because they're actually getting the information! That's very reassuring for this company, and I think we're going to see good things from them.
Don't expect any of those good things to be Open Source operating systems, however. Straight from Amiga President Bill McEwen: "If we do any Open Sourcing of our architecture, releasing code on the driver side would make the most sense. I don't think Open Source everything makes sense. This is a point where Bob Young and I would disagree. I think it's done great, great things in a non-consumer environment, but in a consumer environment, I don't think you can Open Source everything. It makes it too hard to have a commonality in the way everyone could use it, because everyone's got their own opinion, their own way of doing something better. Unfortunately, in a consumer world, that doesn't mean that it's going to be better for everybody."
When thinking about the amiga... (Score:3)
And think about how well that phrase has been fulfilled.
Seriously, the Amiga had advantages a long time ago in terms of hardware. Back then, it was truly a superior platform. It lost the hardware fight and as a result lost the operating system fight. Does Amiga honestly have anything going for it at all? It may have a few cool features, but we don't need Yet Another Operating System to choose from. The way the open-source movement works, any truly superior techniques will be incorporated into Linux or BSD (not the code itself, of course, just the idea). Regardless of how good or bad Amiga turns out to be, there is no way they will get any market share at all. The time for that was five years ago, and there Amiga failed.
nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
Amiga (Score:2)
Oh, please (Score:3)
Today, I can do the same things (and much, much more) with Linux, Windows, Mac, Be, etc. Hell, I can even simulate any of those machines with UAE [linux.de].
The Amiga had it's chance to rule the world and due (partly) to Commodore's incompetence missed its opportunity.
Please, dear fellows... let the Amiga rest in peace. Soil no further my memories of that great machine, and let her spirit join the pantheon of the great (?) machines of the past: the Sinclars, Apple ][s and the TRS-80s... the TI-99s and the Atari Jaguars...
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
Amiga: Comming back from the Dead (Score:1)
Outstanding interviews (Score:1)
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Less money, less admin, less machine--more power
Guru Meditation. (Score:2)
Wither the OS? (Score:1)
Re:When thinking about the amiga... (Score:3)
No it won't. Not everything can be. For starters, there's the Amiga's multiple (logical) screen based GUI. Linux needs to have a lot of legacy code to make it acceptable. Elate has the ability to run the same executable file on any processor. To do that on Linux, we'd need to totally rewrite the whole executeable format. Not impossible, but a lot of work, and all apps would have to be recompiled to benefit.
Re:What an "informative" review (Score:1)
References to BeOS (Score:3)
-colin
philosophers axe... (Score:1)
What is `amiga`? The scene has moved on, the hardware/os is defunct...surely it`ll just be a new `pc` with a new os and an `Amiga` badge on the front.
Wouldnt it be cheaper and a lot less effort to just stick an `Amiga` badge on the front of your pc and run Fellow, UAE etc?
Linux has replaced the AmigaOS (Score:3)
`this eerie calmness` (Score:4)
I think its called `people not giving a shit`.
Re:When thinking about the amiga... (Score:1)
How will the Amiga truly differentiate itself as it did in the past, by running someone else's Linux distro? (And this was/is one of the BIG reasons it had its success and lingering zealots) Even if they license it, and extensively modify it, it will still be primarily Linux, and probably run X. (Not that it is such a bad thing...)
While there are certainly marketing advantages to joining the Linux bandwagon, I would have rather seen them use BeOS or QNX/Neutrino. Both of those have distinct advantages (in different ways) that Amiga could've leveraged to position themselves to ship new Amiga hardware faster than rebuilding Linux.
IMHO.
sedawkgrep
What I thought when reading this interview.. (Score:4)
Slashdot: What is the most important thing in the Amiga community right now?
Wayne: Being involved, I think.
My brain: sounds like *BSD/Linux
Slashdot: What excites you about the new Amiga operating system?
Wayne: That it gives users choice. Instead of being restricted to the PC, you get to pick what hardware you want, and after all, that's the most expensive part of the computer. If you've got a job that doesn't require a 500Mhz Pentium III, a smaller chip, something cheaper, you can pick what you want because the operating system runs on so many chips and so many pieces of hardware. It gives the user the choice that they really need.
My brain: sounds like *BSD/Linux
Slashdot: Do you feel that the purchase of the Amiga name from Gateway was a good idea?
Wayne: Yes, I do think it was a good idea. Gateway had some good plans, but I don't think their heart was quite in it, really. I think they meant well, but it really needs to be in the hands of people that want it on the market as much as the community does, and that's what the new Amiga brings, because it's staffed by Amigans, and you're not going to screw yourself over.
My brain: sounds like *BSD/Linux
Slashdot: What's the best thing about being a part of the Amiga community?
Wayne: I think being able to go anywhere, and knowing that there's somebody there who knows what it's like to be an Amigan, who has been through the same things. It's like having a giant network of friends all over the world. You can go and stay at people's houses, if you want. You can be sitting on a bus, and talking to a person, find out they're an Amigan, and instantly, you're friends. You don't get that on the PC, if you're sitting next to somebody on the bus, and 'Oh, you use Windows, too!' It's not exactly the same kind of thing. When you're an Amigan, it passes being a computer user. There are some Amiga users who use it and they love it. There are some people who go much further than that, and it's more of a religion. It's coming even closer to a race of people, in a way, who all seem to think the same. They're very stereotypical, fanatical in some cases, but I think it's all generally there that the people have the right idea, and they're there for the long haul.
My brain: DEFINETLY sounds like *BSD/Linux.
Slashdot: What is the stereotypical Amigan?
Wayne: A stereotypical Amigan is fanatical, loudmouthed, doesn't shut up about the Amiga, somewhat like me, I'm a perfect example. If you can possibly realize why we are so like that, you can see. It's like having this brilliantly cool toy, and nobody else can experience it like you have. It's almost like having a divine experience to search for words, something like this. You've got to tell everybody about it. They may not understand, but if you can get through to one more person, wow. That's them helped out, especially in the world of the Microsoft monopoly.
My brain: Nothing more to see here..
Is it still amiga? (Score:1)
While what this company is doing seems to be in line with the Amiga name, how much of what they're doing is actually based on Amiga technology? Is it just an old name on top of completely new technology, or is there still an Amiga hiding somewhere in there? Will original Amiga apps compile with this toolkit?
At one point in time, the new Amiga had a commitment to develop a Linux operating system that would still run old Amiga apps MacOSX-style. Does this technology still exist?
Re:Oh, please (Score:1)
Funny you mentioned that. I had both of thosse. Got the TI-994/A in '82, and Texas Instruments left us out in the cold in '83. The Jag? Okay, that was my mistake. I found it funny TI had the nerve to get a bit snottty about the TI-994/A roms being passed around when its emulator debuted.
Amiga Innovations (Score:1)
Re:Oh, please (Score:1)
The Second Coming of the Amiga! (Score:1)
Imminent Death Of The 'Net Predicted!
-JD
How important is Hardware Independence (Score:1)
Virus Warning (Score:3)
WTF? (Score:5)
"The concept of an operating system has been dying for quite a long time.
Wow! Now that's an introduction that doesn't take prisoners. I guess we should be thankful for the guy telling us. I mean, it's not like OS implementations suck, it's the whole concept of the operating system that's dying. See, we are not going to have operating systems any more. We are going to have, like stuff, and then, like, other stuff will happen with it, and then, see, it's digital content in a Gibsonesque environment and we geeks will want to get nasty with it. But not an operating system, no sir, nothing like that. That concept is dead.
What we're looking at is creating a dynamic digital environment, in which the most important thing is the producers and consumers of digital [content] matter, and they don't really care how they got there, or what they used to get there, they just got into this environment.
Ah, yes. "Dynamic digital environment" -- sounds good, doesn't it? Of course we all here are stuck in a static analog environment, but the new Amiga will lead us into the new world.
Now, take producers and consumers of digital matter. These are free-wheeling guys, they don't care about anything. They don't care where they are, how they got there, what they are doing there, what kind of shit they are producing/consuming -- but, man, they got into this dynamic digital environment -- let's party!
You know, you can take it anywhere, you should be able to use any hardware with it.
Take what? The no-OS-digital-dynamic-whatever-something? Of course, since there is no OS the hardware doesn't matter. It's digital dynamic, baby, who cares about hardware! I'll just make a Beowulf cluster out of my toaster, microwave, and can opener and run it. I won't know how I got there, but, hey, it all doesn't matter, does it?
For the lynxey type, the hackers, the geeks, whatever you want to call them, they would want to get down dirty and nasty with the stuff. But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff.
Ah, we get to the interesting bits. The wonderful lynxey type -- I presume, long-time users of lynx? Yee-haw, we really want to get dirty and nasty with that dead operating system concept, you know, hack that corpse to pieces -- that would be nasty, wouldn't it? Or is "stuff" some other stuff? Is it that dynamic digital thingy? Let's see... "But even a lot of that stuff, a lot of them would rather get on and actually produce and do stuff". Ah, I see. Now it's crystal clear. It's THAT stuff. Now I understand. And I really want to get dirty and nasty with it, oh yeah... Wait, there is more: "do stuff, rather than having to go down and find that driver, and change their config files and all that stuff". More stuff! How wonderful! And, of course, all these lynxey people just hate going down on a driver, err, scratch that, they hate finding drivers and changing config files. Changing config files is eeeeevil. Everybody who does this should be shot. Or dumped into the dynamic digital environment where they won't know where they came from or where they are going.
We're really trying to create this higher environment for developers and for users. It really is where we're moving towards the Gibson dream."
Higher? Oh well, I'm not even gonna ask. But I am really interested, what is the Gibson dream that we are moving towards?
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. `It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. `It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency."
Ah, I see.
Kaa
I agree completely (Score:1)
I switched to Linux in 1997, and I've never looked back. Linux on a P233 so totally kicked my A4000 "super system"'s ass on every criteria I could think of to judge it. And I get source!
If you want to play "what if" imagine if Chicken Lips had open-sourced AmigaDOS around 1991 or so... the world would be very different.
Oh well, lost opportunities, spilled milk. The Amiga is DEAD boys. Dead as a coffin-nail. It used to be avant-guarde to be an Amiga user, now it's just sad.
Another opportunity for 'baby's first computer'? (Score:1)
Isn't this where the likes of Microsoft, and the latest Linux installers (SuSE, RedHat, Turbo from my experience) are trying to go now? Seems like people want a decent machine without having to learn anything once again.
If AmigaOS is as easy and pleasent to use as it was back in '85 then people should flock to it.
How to revive two industries in one painless step (Score:2)
yawn (Score:2)
The Amega was fantastic. A new generation expanding on the old one's philosophy could be fantastic. In the meantime, though, if I don't see something in the way of at least a feature list or better yet a press release announcing the signing of fab contracts, then I have to write Amega II off as yet another brilliant piece of vapourware and go find an actual existing platform on which to do some non-hypothetical work.
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short amiga history (Score:2)
Towards the mid-eighties people where becoming very cynical of the computing industry. Manufacturor where just churning out the same old machines but with different offers. Nothing ground breaking was on the cards. Part of the problem in this was that to help keep costs down the machines used off the shelf chips instead of custom designed ones. Many machines had the same chips in them like the sound chips.
In 1982 a group of designers got together to brain-storm over designing the greatest games machine ever. Those designers where Jay Miner (experienced desinger for Atari on the VCS system), Dave Morse (from Tonka toys) & RJ Mical (from Willaims the now legendary arcade firm). The managed to get funding from a trio of dentists and setup offices in Sillicon Valley. They named themselves Hi-Torro and put up the front of being
joystick developers. So secretive was this whole operation that the designers used code words when on the phones incase they where tapped. They decided that the least suspicious aliases would be female names. The explains the three main custom chips being called Paula, Agnus and Denise. This in turn lead to the machine picking up the
name of Lorraine & the company taking on the name Amiga (Spanish for girlfriend).
Although the main aim was to produce a pure games machine the first step towards a home computer was when they had to use a replacement for the intended Operating System, namely AmigaDOS. Usually games machine have very little in the way of an O/S as it's simply not needed. Thankfully the company Metacomco where totaly strung-up on
the Amiga's custom hardware that they gave the machine the then unique power to multi-task like a mainframe.
An amazing piece of luck became the Amiga in the form that consoles where dying out - people where no longer interested, so there was a gap forming for their new breed of home machine. Unfortunaley this flux lead to serious speculation by the big investors in the large computer companies, and many a software publisher.
Unfortunately the Amiga was nowhere near finishing and the machine (Lorraine) needed more funding to carry on. The dentists could not afford any more backing, so the team turned to the industry. They almost clinched a deal with Atari, but Atari where still negotiating when Commodore waded in and slapped a huge wedge on the table & said 'how about being part of our gang?'. The Lorraine now had the financial backing it needed.
Justifiably annoyed, and with a little knowledge of what Amiga where upto and some of those standard chips, Atari fudged together the Atari ST and beat Commodore on releasing the first 16-bit home computer. THus sparking off a war that would rage well into the 90's. Now both companies have been swallowed up by bigger fish.
The Atari ST was by no means (god this is gonna hurt to say this !) an awful machine. It did a fairly decent job of things but had no custom chips to power it. This lead to all the hard graft to be carried out by the CPU, which held the machine back hugely. The only things that where more attractive about the Atari ST where the fact that the cpu ran at 8Mhz where as the Amiga ran at 7.14Mhz due to internal architecture bottlenecks, and the fact the ST had a MIDI port as standard. The other killer difference was that the Atari ST was selling at about 799 ukp, and the A1000 was selling at about 1,500 ukp. Needles to say sales where slow.
Then the saving grace appeared, the A500. Tailored to themass-market. This then sparked the first of many vicious pricing wars betwix messers Atari & Commodore and they trashed anything in their paths. Due to a huge interest and the excellent PD (Public Domain) scene developing software, the A500 started to sell very well. Games where originally ported from the ST to the Amiga, but this soon changed as the A500 established it's self developers where writting on it and in some cases solely for it. The A500 sales where radically outstripping those of the Atari ST, and this encouraged third-party manufacturers to produce add-ons such as RAM and disk drives.
Workbench was hailed as a huge step forward in the right direction. Not a lot changed for several years only a new kickstart/Workbench (v1.3) was introduced and that was all. Most new developments where by the third party manufacturers, things like NewTek's (Developers of the Video Toaster) DigiView and DigiPaint, hard disks from people like GVP and scores of external disk drives and RAM expansions.
A problem with the Amiga's was that they had a distinct lack of documentation. Manauls where either lacking or too technical for beginners. This lead to Amiga owners taking the machine in hand and finding out what every nut, bolt, register & resistor did. This meant that many users had a better knowledge than the people at Commodore This lead to there being a wealth of free Public Domain software, that more often than not was a real god send. People could get down to the nitty-gritty of the machine and produce exactly the results they wanted. This lead to the transition that created the HUGE league of loyal
followers the Amiga had & has. It meant that the Amiga now belonged to the people, to be used in anyway they saw fit. So this could explain the totaly manic way an Amiga owner will defend their machine
New machines arived in the form of the A1500 & A2000. The A1500 was simply an A500 in a PC like box and all the PC like trimmings. The A2000 incorporated Zorro slots, a system of expansion slots which made life easier and expansion cheaper. It also contained a SCSI interface and a hard drive as standard.
Commodore then thought an ideal way of developing the Amiga into a home entertainment system was to coble an A500 and some recene hardware. They came up with the CDTV. It flopped, big time ! It was a marketing cock-up from start to finish and not very many units where sold. The only good thing was that Commodore/Amiga had showed a watching market what was to come in later years (No not that they would end up bankrupt!).
The A3000 was next out of the stalls, and it included some new nifty extras. It had the new Zorro III slots (for multiplexed expansion), a new Kickstart/Workbench (v2.0), some tarted up custom chips (the ECS Expaned Chip Set) & the new super sonic Motorola 68030 chip.
All these larks by Commodore & Amiga had attracted some dodgy looking sharks, in the form of Johnny SEGA and Nicky NINTENDO. They started ploughing large amounts of cash into cutom chip design and cute characters. Unfortunately instead of fighting back Commodore just rested on it laurels for a bit until it was too late.
A string on non-sensical arse-ups then caused unrecoverable damage. The A500 Plus showed up for a brief showing and was then kicked aside (along with the people who had brought one) to make way for the A600, which was also a total mess-up. People seriously lost confidence in the big C. And some Amiga owners felt short changed by their behaviour. A big bummer for Commodore was that they where losing money by the crate load with there over-priced & under-powered PCs and the Amiga was the only thing keeping them afloat. They made very little from selling their peripherals as they normaly where more (sometimes twice) expensive. They saw very little from software published unlike Sega & Nintendo who had license agreements.
Commodore released the new A4000 on a dubious public. Although the machine was extremely good, it was just too much money. It was in-line with the current PC prices but these where droping every day as interest in PCs started to rise. The A4000 was shelved as a 'serious users only' machine and people where left looking for the next home machine. This made Commodore chuck out the A1200, although it was never meant for release. They then set about producing the worlds FIRST 32-Bit CD console. The stage was set for a very nasty ending !!
Commodore - The last few months:-
The A1200 was selling well, many people where upgrading and a real interest was startinf to be taken in the Amiga again. The new AGA chipset was a real god send, but the fact that no high density floppy drive or a hard drive had been included as standard was a serious flaw. Also the new processor was not exactly up to the job, the A1200 still had 4 channel sound, and the Blitter chip was the same & handily reigned in by the CPU
and architecture bottlenecks. The CD32 was unleashed along with a large amount of
hype and an awful TV advert. Interest was growing in the machine when the proverbial excriment hit the draft making impliment and yes, i'm a tro11. Commodore had lost too much money and things where looking bad, they filled for a voluntary liquidation on a Bahams courts. The assetts where frozen and the supply of Amigas dryed up.
Despite reassurements that the situation was only temporary and the court said a buyer would be found within a few weeks/months it took almost exactly one year for the sale to go through. Although many interested parties (IBM, CEI, Dell - all pleadging huge amounts of cash (eg upto 24 million USD)took part in the cattle market like auction the final purchaser was a German third party PC manufacturer called Escom, who got it all
lock, stock (not much of that) & barrell for the bargin price of 10 million USD plus seperate deals for the UK, Dutch & Philippino assets.
Escom then had the daunting task of facing the Amiga using public & telling them what was about to happen to their machine. Escom or currently developing several Amiga based machines ready for release over the next 2 years and with the new breed of software trickling through on the Amiga; titles such as Alien Breed 3DII, Gloom Deluxe,
Xtreme Racing, Breathless & Worms; there is hope. The current Amigas can handle these titles just, so imagine the scope of any new machine. So keep your eyes peeled for perhaps the second coming. It would be a ressurection to match the one of 2000 years ago, but it's possible.
Let's take a trip in the Way-Back Machine... (Score:5)
Of all those, Amiga does something truly different, using nifty custom chips to give the machine a rich color palette and animation capabilities far ahead of it's time. The OS is pretty slick, too, and uses the hardware well.
Years pass. Commodore and Atari join the dustbin of history along with the Berlin Wall. Amiga survives briefly, being passed from owner to owner. After exhausting the capabilities of Motorola's dated 68000 processor series, PowerPC upgrades start hitting the marketplace, but few notice the improved performance possible. Thanks to a neat product called Video Toaster, Amiga has enough of an installed base that the market doesn't die completely, but it starts the long, slow fade into oblivion.
Cut to a couple of years ago - Gateway buys the remains of Amiga and potimism flares up that, in fact, they'll take the plunge into a new platform and out of the Wintel business. These plans, too, fizzle - Amiga instead becomes a "set of technologies" and an "information appliance", and it dies again. A handful of Amiga division people manage to extricate themselves from Gateway's clutches and split Amiga back away from Gateway.
Today, Amiga is now just another OS for Intel-based PC's. Whoopee do. As a platform, Amiga had the promise of continuity to the installed base, plus the opportunity to pick up converts from the weakened Microsoft monopoly. Apple's continued existence and profits prove that there is still a market for different platforms, if you give people a good reason to buy them.
The catch here is that Amiga now will have to compete with Be, Linux, Microsoft, and perhaps even Apple (if Darwin/OS X makes the jump to Intel) for mind and market share. It's not the same box anymore - it's just another Intel-based OS, though one that old Amiga software can be ported to relatively easily.
Though enough old Amiga users may buy generic boxes to run the "new" OS-only Amiga that Amiga will survive for a time, I think the ballgame's over. By dropping the hardware plans, they may have conserved capital (developing hardware is expensive, especially non-Wintel stuff - don't underestimate Apple's development costs), but at the sacrifice of long-term viability.
Meanwhile, Amiga remains the Rasputin of platforms. It just won't die!
- -Josh Turiel
Re:Is it still amiga? (Score:1)
Next week's line up (Score:1)
Slashdot: What is the most important thing in the Conspiracy community right now?
Fox Mulder: Being involved, I think. It's going to take a while for the Visitors to arrive on the planet, and it's pointless just sitting around and waiting for them to come. People need to be involved in promoting the Conspiracy. People need to start decoding, planning new projects, generally just getting involved. People really need to be active, they need to be out there, saying 'Look, we've got this brand new form of life coming out, and it has got powers that nothing else has. It's the best, we think it's the best, here try it.' The Conspiracy's got the best activists in the world."
Wayne Martin and Fox Mulder: They want to believe.
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Less money, less admin, less machine--more power
Re:I agree completely (Score:1)
I can offer a a direct comparision too, as i installed the mk68 Redhat 5.1 port on the A4000 at the same time i was running RH5.2 on the AMD. Even with an 060/50, PicassoIV card and more memory in the Amiga, it was still far slower than the AMD managed, slower than even the diference in clock speeds could account for.
AmigaOS is nice though. I prefer the simple startup-sequence and user-startup script's over the horrible, hair pulling, SysV init system; the systems directory structure made sense; shared library's where easy to add (ldconfig? You what?); real-time OS function hooks so you could hot-patch a running system; a half decent shell (IF you upgraded to KingCON, natch); multiple screens (With diferent resolutions on each if you wanted); i could go on, but i wont. There is still loads of stuff i miss from the Amiga that i just won't get on Linux. I intend to give AtheOS a go soon though
too little too late (Score:3)
Well, setting aside the fact that lots of vendors jumped into business relationships with Be, it seems like he could be describing his own future here. AmigaOS, 2001 Edition, will probably be "not a bad OS at all", but will anybody care?
He mentions the ability to run on older, cheaper hardware as a big advantage, but when I can slap together a killer NT or Linux box that costs little more than the change found in my sofa, or get one of those firewire-based Digital Video iMacs for a little more than a grand, is price really such a massive consideration anymore?
"Back in the day", what made everybody drool over the Amigas, above all else, was the Video Toaster. That's no longer enough to set them apart, because the void that was created by the "death" of the old Amiga has been filled.
This is great news for hard-core Amiga fans, who will finally get to play with their favorite OS on new hardware. The rest of us are happy for you. This will not change our lives much.
Re:yawn (Score:1)
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Whats an Amiga (Score:1)
My wishlist is quite long, and includes having a similar GUI, (but the desktop must be multithreaded), a nice simple API, be well designed for desktop video applications, be available in a small cheap keyboard shaped box , but still be useful for games, and use incredibly well designed low cost but fast hardware so that it doesn't have to rely on the CPU for speed.
Fulfilling this wishlist would guarentee them 1 sale. To get more than 1 sale, they would need to fulfil the wishlist of every other amiga user as well. If there are 2 contradictory requirements, then it should do both.
Re:Oh, please (Score:1)
I used to have all kinds of cool games for it, like Fathom and Parsec, stuff I'd play for hours.
I did my first real home programming on it, too, since the Timex-Sinclair just couldn't cut it. I had to back up my programs to cassette tapes when I was done with them. I made my own stupid video games with it.
It's a shame I can't find any TI-994A emulators out there. What's this about the ROMs being passed around? I'd kill to play some of those good old games again.
The great Amiga empire (Score:1)
They had great ideas. Separate processors for sound and video. Hmmm, only in the past few years have PC video card makers been doing that. A true multitasking OS. Very rarely did I have the OS crash when a program crashed. The software available was some of the most amazing stuff and you could create some amazing things with the limited amount of memory. 3D ray-tracing programs that could not only run in 1MB of memory, but also generate frames using that same memory with no hard drive is pretty impressive.
But even with my love of that platform I must say I am wary of any new developments. I think the big reason that Amiga was so successful was the combination of hardware and software. Both pieces were basically designed to do multimedia very well compared to other things in the market at the time. Now many of those niche features are in many different programs and OSes. I worry that any new developments may mar the history that is the Amiga.
AmigaOS vs. BeOS (Score:2)
Given the fundimentally different design philosophies and goals between something like Amiga and something like Linux, you're comparing apples and oranges. Most people use an alternative operating system because they like it better than mainsteam OS's. Not just because the hate Windows or want to look cool.
Since Amiga and Linux have radically different purposes, they'll draw different kinds of people who want to do different kinds of things with their computers.
Anyway, the new Amiga SDK runs on Linux, so now instead feeling estatic for running NetBSD on an A3000, you'll be able to feel estatic when you get Amiga OS up and running on Linux
Re:Another opportunity for 'baby's first computer' (Score:1)
I would have to agree with some of the other posters that these days the Amiga people really would have to bring something to the table to get people to take notice (e.g., make it free, make it open-source, make it somehow marketably different).
Re:Let's take a trip in the Way-Back Machine... (Score:1)
Amiga is the Rasputin of platforms, in that its been dead for quite a while now.
Re:WTF? (Score:1)
Re:WTF? (Score:1)
Re:What an "informed" reviewer (Score:1)
Mod this up!!! (Score:2)
I do like that last part you copied. "if you can get through to one more person, wow. That's them helped out, especially in the world of the Microsoft monopoly. " Welcome to the fold Wayne.
kwsNI
Re:When thinking about the amiga... (Score:1)
Re:References to BeOS (Score:1)
The really-real Amiga... (Score:1)
Seriously, I think of the Amiga like I think about the Newton and the 3DO - great, but ahead of their time (and lets face it, plagued with problems).
Multimedia? Who isn't concerned with multimedia these days!
I liked the old Amigas because they could do what everything can do now, multitask and multi thread. Remember Wordperfect for the Amiga? Remember how it beat the shit out of the Wintel version, at that time? Multimedia? So it could play good games, well, so could Nitnendo!
Their focus on multimedia is what killed them to begin with. If they would have advertised the OS itself more, they mighta had something...after all, it wasn't until Windows95 that most people could easily do what the Amiga could do...(but in fairness, I'd call Win95 much more stable than the Amiga OS...hey, the truth hurts sometimes...)
I loved the Amiga, but it has been surpassed in every possible way, alas...there isn't a market left for them to tap into.
Another multiplatform OS? (Score:1)
I miss the days of demos.
A well needed pinch of salt (Score:2)
John
Re:How important is Hardware Independence (Score:1)
portability?
stop equating 'computer' with 'desktop PC' for a moment.
John
Re:Oh, please (Score:1)
And for the record I have owned/own TWO amigas. First the 1000(nice external keyboard), and a 500 sitting in the closet.
New /. Poll (Score:1)
The next OS wars will be:
Amiga v. Be
Linux v. BSD
Linux v. Win
Mac v. Win
Mac v. Linux
Mac v. Be
Amiga v. Mac
Mac (Classic) v. Mac (OS-X)
Hemos v. Gates
Or will it be a battle Royal?
Tom
Sounding a lot like... (Score:2)
A stereotypical Amigan is fanatical, loudmouthed, doesn't shut up about the Amiga, somewhat like me, I'm a perfect example. If you can possibly realize why we are so like that, you can see. It's like having this brilliantly cool toy, and nobody else can experience it like you have. It's almost like having a divine experience to search for words, something like this. You've got to tell everybody about it. They may not understand, but if you can get through to one more person, wow. That's them helped out, especially in the world of the Microsoft monopoly.
Hmmmm... this sounds suspiciously like my Brother-In-Law when he talks to me about Amway. "Hey, I'm only trying to help you out. Multi-level marketing, baby, it's the future!
I don't know; maybe I'm weird but I don't want to join a cult, either Amway or the Amiga.
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Re:AmigaOS vs. BeOS (Score:2)
I'm really sad that BeOS isn't doing any better. From the day I first heard about it I thought the plans sounded fantastic. Admittedly, though, I haven't tried the OS myself yet.
The new Amiga is not an Amiga (Score:1)
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I really don't get it... (Score:2)
Re:When thinking about the amiga... (Score:2)
--
Re:When thinking about the amiga... (Score:2)
It is truly sad that you think the currently available choices are acceptable. Fortunately, there are some people still around who have higher standards.
Ok, that's a bit more reasonable. There's one catch, though: There are some "features" that can never be copied to a Unix legacy platform, such as the "no legacy" feature. If you've got an OS that goes around assimilating all the great ideas, then the one idea it will never be able to assimilate is simplicity.
Perhaps that's why systems like Linux and Windows are so damned slow, and many Amigans were getting erections at the thought of QNX Neutrino. Hmmm.. how much longer to the general Neutrino release? :-)
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I love Amigas..... but we need source. (Score:1)
The thing i see here is just another closed source operating system with an Amiga-like GUI and a Java-like programming engine. (correct me if im wrong) And a couple of cool Amiga guys that were able to get the Amiga name from Gateway...
I miss the Amiga hardware! Those machines were awesome toys
Re:The Amiga is not Jesus (Score:1)
Oh please. The Amiga could kick Jesus' ass any day. Even with one arm tied behind her back.
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I'd love to see it happen... (Score:3)
But I just don't think it's possible.
Before I get into rampant "I am a recovering Amigan" me-tooism, let me tell you why Amiga might have a chance, even after all the let-downs.
When I was living in Austin, TX, I got my hands on an A3000 with a good assortment of stuff in the mix for a couple hundred bucks, and ended up fiddling with it quite a bit. I eventually ended up getting a PC with windows on it so I could play games, and the A3000 went into the closet.
A friend of mine who was a former Amigan came over one day to pick up some hardware or manuals or something, and I hauled the A3k out of the closet to show him how far AmigaDOS had come just since 2.04, to 3.1. He just about cried to see that poor sucker boot up in under a minute and be running programs. That pathetic 68030@25mhz did the job just fine.
My point here is that this illustrates what we already all know intellectually; Amiga Diehards will never stop getting nostalgic about the Amiga hardware, AmigaDOS, and so on. If there was another AmigaDOS that was really slick and clean and had all the cool advantages of AmigaDOS back in the day (Like the patchlist, we're all fond of that) then you'd have all those people coming out of the woodwork.
I know we're used to thinking of linux and BSD folks as the big advocates nowadays, but if you gave the Amigans a new platform to get excited about, you could just about have them running around wallpapering buildings with six foot high Amiga logo posters of their own accord. Amiga types are just rabid, and I was no exception.
Keep in mind that I've recovered. I do still have an Amiga 1200 in case I run across a cool AGA game that I want to bust out and play; The A1200 has 2mb ram and a 80mb IDE disk in it, and it's reasonably speedy, but it's also an all-in-one system and it doesn't take up much space. As far as I'm concerned, Amiga is dead at the moment, and until it pops out with a completed operating system, I'm not even moderately interested.
Not that anyone's really interested, but what would float my boat utterly and completely would be a system for the ATX PPC motherboards hitting the market, and really good Athlon support; The mathlib needs support for heavily pipelined floating point, and so on. But that's not so important in the scope of this article, because all I'm discussing here is Amiga fanaticism.
So what makes Amigans more fanatical than the linux and *BSD types? They grew stronger through adversity. While other people were bragging about how badass their PCs were, Amigans were buying accelerator cards and (With the exception of MUI-GUI) were finding more ways to do things smarter rather than by taking the brute force approach. As a result, software on the Amiga had a tendency to do the same things all the other systems did, at mostly the same speed (Unless you're talking about povray) and on inferior hardware. Let's face it, the A4000 stopped being competitive long ago, as other people have pointed out.
We all know what killed Amiga, so I won't go into that here. If you don't know what killed Amiga, I'm surprised you've read down this far. What Amiga can't afford (Then again, they couldn't afford this a year ago, five years ago, etc) is to alienate the people they have left. I think a lot of people will come back to the fold, as it were, from linux or *BSD or what have you if AmigaOS is just cool enough. That's a big part of what made it work before, and it's the single thing they have to leverage now. It's necessary to do everything right... A journaling filesystem, good SMP support, driver support for the most useful hardware immediately (That means everything big; DVD cards, Nvidia and 3dfx graphics cards, and more sound cards than just the soundblaster line.)
But finally, it is absolutely imperative that it maintains all the benefits of the original AmigaOS; Autoconfiguration. Immense amounts of configurability at the user interface level. A wonderful flow of information from Amiga corp. to the users and developers. And let's not forget another badass ROM Kernel Manual... oh wait, never mind :)
Re:AmigaOS vs. BeOS (Score:1)
Where have you been?
Mac market share has been growing. They are a long way from the dark days of 97-98. They have (almost exactly) the same market share and growth trajectory as another of my favorite (think penguin) OSs.
The only OS _losing_ share right now id Win. At the hands of MANY players.
Tom
Hahaha (Score:1)
New and interesting... (Score:1)
So.. cool technology: been there, done that. How about... a sustainable business for "new and interesting"...
FUD alert! (Score:1)
Sheesh!
J.
Re:Oh, please (Me too, but I *totally* disagree) (Score:1)
No way in hell. No OS will ever be as great as Amiga OS. If we can just get someone to keep it up to date with current PCs and speeds we wont have to use Windows or Linux anymore. Shouldnt be using Linux for a desktop OS anyways..IMO.
I didn't know this was legal... (Score:1)
Fleecy Moss [...]
Man, they're now buying and selling marketing people now? Hmm, perhaps we could sell a couple of ours...
Re:On the subject of "Let it die" (Score:1)
Tom
How many times do we have to go through this? (Score:1)
There is only one reason to create a brand new Operating System. The time to create an OS is when you look around and realize you simply do not have the tools to fill an important niche in your devlopment or system needs. Linux played on the fact that sysadmins did not want to go with a buggy NT and the commercial Unixes were stabbing people for massive bucks to make up for their limited server sales. BeOS wanted to fill the niche for a great multimedia OS but between companies that already had the halfway decent Macs and the over-priced SGI boxes the Be folks seem to barely have a chance. (BTW, I really hope they succeed because it is damn good desktop OS.)
Until, the Amiga folks can come up with a compelling reason for buying the Operating system that justifies the price of the whole computer people will continue to ask, "So what?"
What's the Gibson Dream? (Score:1)
Yes, please! (Score:3)
Please, dear fellows... let the Amiga rest in peace. Soil no further my memories of that great machine, and let her spirit join the pantheon of the great (?) machines of the past: the Sinclars, Apple ][s and the TRS-80s... the TI-99s and the Atari Jaguars...
Right. First of all, lets take a look at your list of machines:
Sinclairs, Apple ][s, TI-99's : Lovely little 8-bit machines. First computers for many a hacker. Fun for cutting your teeth on, and (largely) had BASIC in ROM. Then, when you were done with that, you could strip out the BASIC and start learning about programming the hardware directly. This was cool, but they all performed the same purpose, equally well by and large. You can do that on a Linux box today if you want to, so for hackers, these machines are fondly remembered. But there was no large user base of non tech-savvy people. Most of those who had these machines programmed as much as used commercial software. Very few just used it for games, unlike the Amiga. As for the Atari Jaguar.... Nice idea, crippled by a market that had no space for it.
The Amiga had it's chance to rule the world and due (partly) to Commodore's incompetence missed its opportunity.
Have to agree with you there, however, it still hurts that businesses seemed reluctant to use a machine that wasn't produced by Big Blue. On top of that CBM wasn't known for pushing the envelope on anything other than games machines (C64 etc). At least Apple was fondly remembered by the geeks who'd programmed the Apple ][s in school (I don't think the million-dollar Ridley Scott '1984' commercial harmed them either). The Amiga's only major failure in 1985 was on the marketing front. Of course, later came the interminable management cock-ups, but don't get me started on them.....I personally believe that the Amiga was strangled at birth, and never given a proper chance.
Today, I can do the same things (and much, much more) with Linux, Windows, Mac, Be, etc. Hell, I can even simulate any of those machines with UAE.
Actually, UAE still doesn't emulate quite quickly enough (scrolling and audio sync still not right on my Athlon 700!). Last I heard, no-one had come up with an implementation of the Amiga's multiple screen function, although Be came quite close. Until I can word-process, edit graphics and create music at the same time, switching seamlessly through the tasks, I remain unconvinced that the ol' Miggy can be replaced in my heart.
I owned an Amiga 1000 in 1987. Back then it crushed any other machine like a grape when it came to multimedia and games. I even went on to buy an A500 and an A1200 AGA.
The points you make are valid, but the machines you describe use ancient hardware. They are the legacy that the new Amiga has to live up to. The evolution of the mainstream x86 operating system seems to make every new hardware iteration perform at exactly the same rate as the previous OS on the older hardware. The jump from the A500 to the 1200 felt much more tangible to me than shifting my dual-booter from my (95/RH6.0)P200MMX to my (98/RH6.2)Athlon. I genuinely hope that the new AmigaOS removes this feeling of stagnation that I feel is rife in the computer world right now.
OK, sorry about the rant. The reason I miss the Amiga most is that it allowed you to go as low-level as you needed. If you just wanted to use it for games, you did. If you wanted to be artistically creative, you could. No nasty installs, no registry. However, (and this is my pet peeve with the Mac) if you wanted to dig deeper, you could. It allowed you to learn how a modern computer worked at your own pace. Sick of games? Bored with being creative? Let's go into the CLI and find out how this thing works! And then later, you dig a bit deeper, finding out how to program the thing, first in maybe BASIC, then PASCAL or C, and then, if you were feeling really brave, in 68K assembler. However, if it got really heavy going, you could save your work, reboot the machine and it would be ready for gaming and productivity again.
Now, I'm not saying you can't do that in Windows, but everything you install and uninstall leaves a trace, usually in C:\WINDOWS, until your system gets bogged down and doesn't work anymore. Reboot, Reformat, Reinstall. In Linux, you generally need to be quite tech-savvy before you can do the most basic of things. (Although this is changing, there's quite a way to go).
The Amiga was the only machine I know of that catered for the whole spectrum of computer users, and coached those at entry level all the way to being coders without making them feel it was all too much for them. None of this had to do with the hardware, it was all how the OS used it. This is why I feel that there is still a great need for an Amiga-style OS, to bring new and experienced users together as a whole.
Purchased? That explains a lot . . . (Score:2)
Inquiring minds want to know . . .
However, if Amiga was using slave labor, it explains a lot about its failure to go anywhere . . .
Re:On the subject of "Let it die" (Score:2)
SuSE : Nice distro, but someone thoroughly new to computers would still have trouble getting it to do what they want. Not so on the Amiga (pop in a disk, watch it go!)
MacOS-X : Opposite problem. Nice BSD back-end, but how hard is it to get to? I have never got far enough into the workings of any MacOS to let me do or know what I want. Maybe (just maybe) MacOSX will be different.
You realise all this is before we get on to the subject of draggable multi-resolution screens, uniformity of operation. All three are either too techie or not techie enough to present a rounded UI. The Amiga OS did it all and met in the middle, something which no-one has done before or since.
Re:Yes, please! (Score:1)
The reason the Amiga was so cool is because it was so different from anything that had come before. Today, the functions it did can be done on almost any platform. Your point about them not doing it as well or as "elegantly" as the Amiga is probably true, but I think community efforts to shape Linux or *BSD into a better tool are more useful than reinventing the Amiga's wheel.
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
Re:Yes, please! (Score:1)
Goodness knows, you could never edit the system resource files (ResEdit) or learn how to code (in C or Basic) on a Mac. Funny. I learned it somewhere.
Tom
Re:What an "informative" review (Score:1)
On Bashing BeOS (Score:1)
Voi Vod, Soriben, Gortician are among the metal bands that have utilized the Amiga at one time or another...
GORTICIAN [mp3.com]
Anyone want to buy a CDTV, CD32, Amiga 2500/Toaster, Amiga 500/A530, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500+CD-Rom? I'm keeping the 1084s...
Re:On the subject of "Let it die" (Score:1)
As for Uniformity of Operation, I am only a novice (and fan) of the Amiga, but the Mac OS is easily as consistent with Menus/Widgets/Commands.
Agree that Amiga did get "right in the middle" between geeky and easy. Mac erred on the simple side, Linux errs on the geeks.
OS-X...anyone's guess!
Tom
Living dead... (Score:1)
I'm a great fan of the old C64 too - you still can't quite emulate C64 stuff properly on a PC (or maybe you can given the kickass new processors, but anyway). And some of the games (Wizball!) were cool. But the graphics and sound which were so good back then are just dated and blocky now. Amiga's gone the same way. Starglider 2 was way cool at the time - a filled 3-D flightsim at that kind of refresh rate just didn't happen until then. But now it's just another 3-D game, big deal.
It was great at the time, and you can look back on it and say it was a fabulous idea. But without investment to keep it up-to-date it just didn't move, and the competition in the PC market put their processor development into warp drive. Meantime we got specialist graphics companies doing graphics cards for the PC, and the competition there pushed development as well.
I don't deny they were good in their time. But to insist that they're better than current machines is as daft as classic car enthusiasts saying 50's cars have better handling and performance than modern cars - every measurable standard says it ain't the case. The PET was a revolution in its time too, so should we now release a PET2000, with 500Meg of RAM, hard drive and Linux OS? It blatantly wouldn't be the same thing - it would only share the name. Amiga's the same - what differentiated it essentially was the hardware (the OS was nice, but it was just riding on the hardware, and it wasn't too stable). If the hardware's no different from a modern PC, all you've got is a PC running a different OS, and I don't see anyone claiming that a Linux PC needs a different name just cos it's not running Windoze.
Grab.
Not quite what I meant..... (Score:2)
As for coding, point me to where it is encouraged out of the box? CodeWarrior's cool, but a bit expensive. Generally the feeling with MacOS is they prefer you to either stay behind the GUI curtain and use something like HyperCard or FileMaker, or get really into the deep end with a development IDE. On the Amiga, the CLI stage (learning how the file system and shell actually worked) really helped me understand how the machine worked, by giving me an intermediate ground in a way I don't think I'd have found so easy on a Mac.
Then again, I'm talking about from MacOS 7.6.2 onwards. I can't say much about the earlier incarnations, I could well be wrong.
zealots for sale (Score:1)
If not, I hope bill g doesn't hear about this.
Re:WTF? (Score:1)
I thought, "Hm, what color would look best on this layout."
Either way, your post rocked. good job.
nerdfarm.org [nerdfarm.org]
Re:too little too late (Score:1)
It'll give them a chance to play on a new OS on new hardware. Just because this one will have the same name doesn't mean that it'll be their favourite OS.
Re:What's the Gibson Dream? (Score:1)
How this applies, I have no idea. But a nice thought, eh?
Re:WTF? (Score:1)
BTW, I worked at Gateway when they bought Amiga, and there was so much excitement from the management about it that I seriously thought they were going to hold a press conference just to show the world how they could wet themselves in unison. Of course, I was also there when they totally lost interest in the Amiga. And why did they lose interest? Simple, the Amiga kicked ass when it was alive. But now, it isn't innovative anymore. If the new Amiga manages to come up with something cool, good for them. But I'm honestly sick of seeing this "Amiga is going to rock your world biatch" diatribe that I have been seeing lately. When it's actually done something call me.
Re:When thinking about the amiga... (Score:1)
"After being purchased from Amiga earlier this year, former marketing execs Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss ..."
Just remember the phrase "The south shall rise again!"
Re:What's the Gibson Dream? (Score:1)
Re:I agree completely (Score:1)
I got tempted by games too and was dismayed at how the Amiga had been left so far behind (of course it was 4 or 5 year technology by then). When I eventually got a K6-2/300 it fairly much sealed the Amiga's fate for me (especially with the Voodoo2 I bought for it).
The biggest difference I noticed was doing stuff with VistaPro, it was something I enjoyed doing on the Amiga 1200 (50 Mhz 68EC030 / 68882, 18MB RAM) with Imagine. On the PC I used VistaPro (it was on a coverdisc of all things) and it blew me away just how much faster the K6-2 was
In terms of the difference of the operating systems (Linux and AmigaOS).. yes, they're quite different.. I prefer the multi-user environment of Linux though and having Unix at home to play with (I got into Unix at university in 1994 and enjoyed it a lot). AmigaOS was, as you mention, slicker than slick. Part of the fun with Linux I found was , as I felt in my early days of the Amiga, finding things out and getting things to work. Once the last config file is tweaked and the last Prefs program honed to perfection then there's less to do with playing with the OS. That's when applications/games etc. are the key issue. That's where the Amiga lost me I have to say.. That and the exorbitant hardware prices
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Re:A well needed pinch of salt (Score:1)
OK, I suspect you mean that OS is dying as a viable business product that can be sold. That may very well be so and this being Slashdot, a lot of people around will tell you that this is a good thing, too. That I have no problem with.
However if you think of an OS in the computer science sense, basically as something that sits between the hardware and the applications providing some standardized services, then it's hard to see how that concept can be dying.
Just because consumers and content providers do not care about it does not mean much. They care about the specific microprocessor that runs their code even less, yet nobody is saying that Intel and AMD are going to wither and die in the near future. People like Neal Stephenson have argued (In the Beginning Was the Command Line) that operating systems are not going to be viable business products any more and I tend to agree with them. But that doesn't mean they are not going to exist any more.
Kaa
Re:Guru Meditation. (Score:1)
The guru's boxes that he speaks of are error messages including the address of where the error occured. It was meant to be funny.
Don't take it so serious! Nobody is thinking that they will make any new hardware based on the 68K series.....
Re:Oh, please (Score:2)
> let her spirit join the pantheon of the great (?) machines of the past: the Sinclars, Apple ][s and the TRS-80s... the TI-99s
I had a Sinclair right up until very late 80s (can't remember excatly when) when I realised the Amiga would allow me to do things that we're simply impossible with my Spectrum +3. That was why I changed.
More recently (Late 98 in fact) I finally gave in and bought a beefier machine to run linux on. This time though, it was not because there was anything impossible for the amiga that I could do with Linux. In fact I still struggle to find tasks that I can do with linux that my amiga can't. (and I mean real world doing things here, not OS internals like memory protection) I still use my Amiga today (it's basically a web terminal running voyager or ibrowse using my linux box as a www proxy across ethernet)
The reason I changed to Linux from Amiga though was nothing to do with the limitations of my A4000, but my disappointment at the company. I didn't think they we're doing the right things, and I didn't want them to be in control. In fact, I didn't want any company to be in control, so I chose linux. I believe many Amigans did the same for the same reasons. The Amiga community was once very similar in spirit to the current linux community (actually maybe recent is better than current - it's changed a bit lately)
I still like the AmigaOS (I never cared about the hardware that much after the initial wow-factor) and I'll tell you what, if AmigaOS was ported to a more modern architecture and open sourced, I'd be installing it like a shot. Right alongside my linux partition.
Re:Mod this up!!! (Score:1)
EXACTLY!
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Re:When thinking about the amiga... (Score:1)
Re:?? Nice Try, But No Cigar ?? (Score:1)
The only difference is that Be hasn't gone bankrupt
In the end, as a former Amiga developer and former BeBox/BeOS/BeANYTHING developer, I'll gladly jump on the Amiga bandwagon if they can show they are getting their sh*t together -- at least the Amiga was a real platform with a significant user base at one time. Don't forget that Be couldn't attract people when there was no cost just to look, and I don't see any big "rush" to the Be camp now that their "product" has been desperately made "free".
Talk about beating a dry skeleton...
Re:`this eerie calmness` (Score:1)
I was/am one of those Amiga fanatics. My old A2500/30 is still partially in comission. I used t o be one of those people, who preached about the Amiga to people who cared. I still do when I get the rare opportunity. I have a real affection for that machine.
Now the idea of the eerie calmness and "nobody gives a shit" is far too realistic. Hey, I give a damn, but I don't search it out anymore. So that is, in a way, not really giving a flying fsck anymore.
I think the parent post is correct. I really don't give a damn anymore. I've read far too many articles on the Amiga over the last several years about how it is going to come back and change our lives. Hogwash. Not ONE has followed through with a product that I've actually seen. Not that I don't want to see something come out from whoever owns the Amiga now, but hey. It's not the same machine anymore and the only thing that will live on is the name.
Why do I get the feeling I have to post one of these messages every few months? Sheesh..
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And into the future... (Score:1)
Unfortunately for the company that might consider this prospect, there is one key thing that can't be bought with Amiga. Steve.
Re:When thinking about the amiga... (Score:2)
Well, when I turn on the news I see a Texan and a man from Tennessee competing for a Presidency currently occupied by a man from Arkansas.
You were saying?
k., who thinks you have a purdy mouth.
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"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I'm glad they're not reaching for the stars... yet (Score:2)
I think it's safe to assume that any amiga advocate, past or present, probably uses an operating system for day to day tasks with which they are extremely dissatisfied. For them, the ability to play with the Amiga software while maintaining the ability to perform these day to day tasks is crucial. Amiga/TAO's intel-compatible software will also likely gain exposure to the growing amount of consumers who are toying with Redhat or Corel's linux distribution. I think this first step has to cater to the majority. As we all well know, especially in the software industry, quality does not equal sales, let alone does it create a market.
Although Amiga has clearly focused on Intel hardware as a development platform, their business model is also explicitly tied to various proprietary hardware architectures (appliances, devices, and possibly "computers"). I don't think anyone assumes that this first effort will actually replace our current OS and set of applications.
I'm trying to view Amiga's initial direction as a necessary step to regain trust, name recognition, and momentum in a market which fell victim to a very painful "soap opera", as Slashdot calls it. In fact, I'm sure this step pained Bill, Fleecy, and the others greatly.
I maintain, in classic Amigan fashion, a foolish hope that one of the "devices" we see in the future is a "home computer" comprised of great hardware and a hardware-dependent version of Amiga's OS/OE/whatever. Of course this goes against every word uttered by any vocal proponent of the so-called "convergence" market, but I still think the home computer is perhaps the most useful kind of internet appliance.
In the meantime, I'm just happy to have something interesting to play with on a computer -- it's been a while since I viewed it as anything more than a browser, compiler, and word processor.
The Amiga is dead, dead, dead. (Score:2)
I have no way of really describing the sheer impact that computer had on almost everyone who touched it. It was a vision of what computing would eventually become. Great graphics, multitasking, tons of memory, and wild expandability. It was, quite literally, 10 years ahead of its time. And those of us using it at the time *knew this* and evangelized it ceaselessly. Commodore sold millions of these machines based solely on word-of-mouth.
If Apple had had this machine instead of the Macintosh, we would all be running Motorola chips on our desks now instead of PCs. Seriously. It was that good. It just needed clever execution and management.
Commodore, on the other hand, didn't just shoot themselves in the foot on this one, they shot themselves in the head. They had the finest system-design team that had ever been assembled, didn't know it, treated them like dirt, and were somehow surprised when they all left. The Amiga never really moved forward because C= lost the resource that really mattered, the brains that had originally invented it. Had they preserved that team and kept them motivated, today's computing landscape would be far different.
But... christ. That was FIFTEEN YEARS AGO and the system hasn't made much progress in that time. The Amiga itself is dead. There is *nothing* that operating system does that modern OSes like Linux and NT don't do, and far better. (moment of epiphany for me was booting up Linux in late 1993 or early 1994 and realizing that, for the first time in eight or nine years, I could finally work with my PC the way I used to work on my Amiga -- more than one thing at a time.)
The look and feel is easy to duplicate with modern window managers. I can make Enlightenment work almost exactly like the Amiga's desktop did, and it is one hell of a lot more stable. Amiga just didn't have that great a desktop, folks -- it was nice enough for the time, but compared to what we're driving now it looks like GEOS on the C64.
I'm not sure what the Amiga team is doing. They may be doing something really neat. But it has no more relation to the Amiga than Battlezone 2 had to Atari's Battlezone or id's Wolfenstein 3D had to Wolfenstein on the Apple 2.
They are just capitalizing on the Amiga name and trying to redefine it to mean something other than what it really DOES mean -- an impossibly brilliant operating system design that dead-ended and died due to incompetent management.
The Amiga is dead and gone. Let's lay roses on its grave and think good thoughts about it -- and move on with our lives. Enough, already. Run an emulator if you're really nostalgic, but it's time to update to something modern and start over. There is nothing left worth salvaging in the AmigaOS.
Re:Let's take a trip in the Way-Back Machine... (Score:3)
Cut to a couple of years ago - Gateway buys the remains of Amiga and potimism flares up that, in fact, they'll take the plunge into a new platform and out of the Wintel business.
potimism (potimism) n.
Smoking so much pot that reason is overwhelmed, resulting in a tendency to expect the best possible outcome or dwell on the most hopeful aspects of a situation: "There is a touch of potimism in every worry about one's own moral cleanliness" (Victoria Ocampo). See also optimism [dictionary.com].
It's rare that we see such an apt choice of words. :)
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