5 ms·

Have you thought through the first principles? What is it about the Commodore/AmigaOS brand that is worth resurrecting? Is it hardware? Is it software? Will

Have you thought through the first principles? What is it about the Commodore/AmigaOS brand that is worth resurrecting? Is it hardware? Is it software? Will this redesign be a competitive advantage to current OSes? Does the world need another OS? I'm not raining on your parade. I'm just trying to help in the thought process. Don't let anyone get in the way of your dreams.

gavanwoolery 10y ago
Thanks - all very important questions. A large part of marketing is perception. There was nothing radically different about the Mac when it got to the Intel/BSD revision - other than the overall user experience. Everything felt very clean and precise - from the hardware to the software. That said, I think there is huge room for improvement in a couple areas. One is rethinking the programming environment - how easy it is to get into, how fragmented it is by a hardware ecosystem, how can you gain C-level performance while making the environment less rigid, how can you make dependencies a no-brainer, how can you make a UI system so good that nobody will want to use anything else - the list goes on and on. I would love to rethink hardware but realistically that is the difference between a million dollar startup and a billion dollar one. That said, the superficial aspects of hardware have room for improvement or niches that can be attacked. For example, I would love to have a portable device (like a laptop) that is able to compete with the comfort of my desktop (and yes, I regularly use the best laptops - they do not compare to my desktop in my experience :) ). I.e. something that can be ported around easily, but does not necessarily have to rest on my lap. Does the world need another OS? Technically not - because need is a very strong word. :) Does the world want a better OS? To be honest, I am not sure how strong the demand is or how great the apathy is there - I think only the real-world market could tell. In a way, its really similar to the question "do we need any more programming languages?" We can make do with what we have, but I would be arrogant to say we could not produce anything better. :)
mromanuk 10y ago
What I expect as a user? A "plug and play" computer, where you can play games or "program" easily. Maybe there is a place for a product like that, similar to apple iOS playground for iPad. Not sure about the form factor, but should be kind of mobile
- gavanwoolery 10y ago
  Yes, this is very close to what I envision. It would be very cool to get a computer where you can instantly boot up and program on with the same ease as PET BASIC or QBASIC, yet have all the power of modern hardware at your disposal.
  - jakub_h 10y ago
    You mean something like Oberon?
    - throwaway7645 10y ago
      Probably that or maybe TempleOS. TempleOS comes with a C-compiler and it's own C like shell language. All the work of one man. There is always HaikuOS too.
  - walterbell 10y ago
    Carl Sassenrath, the Amiga OS architect has been working on a new language for the last 20 years: http://www.rebol.com http://www.rebol.com It has been cloned: http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html Both are open-source. Red has a Windows GUI and the OSX GUI is close. The language ranges from high-level DSLs to system programming.
    - throwaway7645 10y ago
      A footnote to those interested: REBOL never really made it because it was closed source and cost some $ back when Perl was super popular even though the language had some amazing DSLs. Making a GUI is a built in one-liner. It was also slow (only interpreted). Red is that language, plus ability to JIT, and do native code. You can mix and match native and interpreted code too. Use types when and where you want. It has no installation. Just an exe that is a few MB. It can create super tiny executables too. I cannot wait for it to get to 1.0.
    - gavanwoolery 10y ago
treehau5 10y ago
> Does the world need another OS? The answer to this question, and other variants like it -- "does the world need another ____" to me boils down to ethics and vision. Maybe we don't need another version of this product, but maybe we can have a product just a good with a better vision and supports making more ethical decisions, and then we can expect over time the technology or the engineering, or the manufacturing process to catch up. Another thought I have is deeply experienced operating system developers seem to be fading away. I could be wrong, and maybe the world doesn't care but we shouldn't take forgranted that OSes have gotten as good as they will get. Maybe a new OS will help inspire another generation of OS developers. (I would be one. Would love to hack on some low level, hard computer science problems instead of the same, mundane, line of business apps I build every day)
- gavanwoolery 10y ago
  You are correct about OS developers fading. The need simply is not there any more and the demand now revolves mostly around high-level jobs. Even in my case, I noticed that the vast majority of companies do not need someone who has written their own X - it is far more valuable to be versed with mainstream implementations of X. It is also something I find worrisome. Programmers spend their lives building up unique knowledge, only to have it fade into oblivion. We keep reinventing the wheel but don't care to invest in keeping the wheel rolling. :)
Clubber 10y ago
>What is it about the Commodore/AmigaOS brand that is worth resurrecting? Nostalgia, and you can't really resurrect nostalgia. I loved my Commodores when I was growing up, but times have changed. The BBS software that I ran and modded are long gone, the friends I would post with are long gone, the doors would be fun for about 5 minutes. It was great, but it's like meeting a great childhood friend that you haven't seen in 20 years. Most of the time, it's fun to reminisce, but there's nothing new there. We've both changed.
- gavanwoolery 10y ago
  Yep, it is like trying to make new Star Wars films. The magic is just gone. Still, the Star Wars brand remains strong, even if just by virtue of magic long past. :)
- obarthel 10y ago
  I agree that there is nostalgia involved, but it is only part of the picture. From a software developer's point of view the Amiga is worth resurrecting because the operating system design represents a promise that you can get great power and flexibility out of modest means, by keeping complexity at bay. It wasn't always so rosy, but you could pack quite a punch by developing products for the Amiga. The system gave you a lot of leverage, which architect Carl Sassenrath rightly referred to as "empowering the user". The development environment (a 'C' compiler, a debugger and a decent text editor would see you through) and the operating system documentation were solid enough. You could comfortably hold the entire design of the system and its APIs in your head. That kind of knowledge is rare these days, given how complex our platforms of choice have become. I have been an Amiga software developer for more than three decades now, through the good times and the less good times (it used to be a hobby, became a business, now it's a hobby again). It does give you perspective, and not everything that came around in these last three decades measured up so well: how much of the power of the hardware platform ends up in the hands of the user? The (for lack of a better word) "thin" Amiga operating system layer allowed you to squeeze a maximum of performance out of the hardware. I recall that during the late 1990'ies Amiga networking software, tested against a HP-UX based logic analyzer's networking performance in the lab, came out on top.

gavanwoolery 10y ago

Thanks - all very important questions. A large part of marketing is perception. There was nothing radically different about the Mac when it got to the Intel/BSD revision - other than the overall user experience. Everything felt very clean and precise - from the hardware to the software. That said, I think there is huge room for improvement in a couple areas. One is rethinking the programming environment - how easy it is to get into, how fragmented it is by a hardware ecosystem, how can you gain C-level performance while making the environment less rigid, how can you make dependencies a no-brainer, how can you make a UI system so good that nobody will want to use anything else - the list goes on and on. I would love to rethink hardware but realistically that is the difference between a million dollar startup and a billion dollar one. That said, the superficial aspects of hardware have room for improvement or niches that can be attacked. For example, I would love to have a portable device (like a laptop) that is able to compete with the comfort of my desktop (and yes, I regularly use the best laptops - they do not compare to my desktop in my experience :) ). I.e. something that can be ported around easily, but does not necessarily have to rest on my lap. Does the world need another OS? Technically not - because need is a very strong word. :) Does the world want a better OS? To be honest, I am not sure how strong the demand is or how great the apathy is there - I think only the real-world market could tell. In a way, its really similar to the question "do we need any more programming languages?" We can make do with what we have, but I would be arrogant to say we could not produce anything better. :)

mromanuk 10y ago

What I expect as a user? A "plug and play" computer, where you can play games or "program" easily. Maybe there is a place for a product like that, similar to apple iOS playground for iPad. Not sure about the form factor, but should be kind of mobile

gavanwoolery 10y ago
Yes, this is very close to what I envision. It would be very cool to get a computer where you can instantly boot up and program on with the same ease as PET BASIC or QBASIC, yet have all the power of modern hardware at your disposal.
- jakub_h 10y ago
  You mean something like Oberon?
  - throwaway7645 10y ago
    Probably that or maybe TempleOS. TempleOS comes with a C-compiler and it's own C like shell language. All the work of one man. There is always HaikuOS too.
- walterbell 10y ago
  Carl Sassenrath, the Amiga OS architect has been working on a new language for the last 20 years: http://www.rebol.com http://www.rebol.com It has been cloned: http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html Both are open-source. Red has a Windows GUI and the OSX GUI is close. The language ranges from high-level DSLs to system programming.
  - throwaway7645 10y ago
    A footnote to those interested: REBOL never really made it because it was closed source and cost some $ back when Perl was super popular even though the language had some amazing DSLs. Making a GUI is a built in one-liner. It was also slow (only interpreted). Red is that language, plus ability to JIT, and do native code. You can mix and match native and interpreted code too. Use types when and where you want. It has no installation. Just an exe that is a few MB. It can create super tiny executables too. I cannot wait for it to get to 1.0.
  - gavanwoolery 10y ago

treehau5 10y ago

> Does the world need another OS? The answer to this question, and other variants like it -- "does the world need another ____" to me boils down to ethics and vision. Maybe we don't need another version of this product, but maybe we can have a product just a good with a better vision and supports making more ethical decisions, and then we can expect over time the technology or the engineering, or the manufacturing process to catch up. Another thought I have is deeply experienced operating system developers seem to be fading away. I could be wrong, and maybe the world doesn't care but we shouldn't take forgranted that OSes have gotten as good as they will get. Maybe a new OS will help inspire another generation of OS developers. (I would be one. Would love to hack on some low level, hard computer science problems instead of the same, mundane, line of business apps I build every day)

gavanwoolery 10y ago
You are correct about OS developers fading. The need simply is not there any more and the demand now revolves mostly around high-level jobs. Even in my case, I noticed that the vast majority of companies do not need someone who has written their own X - it is far more valuable to be versed with mainstream implementations of X. It is also something I find worrisome. Programmers spend their lives building up unique knowledge, only to have it fade into oblivion. We keep reinventing the wheel but don't care to invest in keeping the wheel rolling. :)

Clubber 10y ago

>What is it about the Commodore/AmigaOS brand that is worth resurrecting? Nostalgia, and you can't really resurrect nostalgia. I loved my Commodores when I was growing up, but times have changed. The BBS software that I ran and modded are long gone, the friends I would post with are long gone, the doors would be fun for about 5 minutes. It was great, but it's like meeting a great childhood friend that you haven't seen in 20 years. Most of the time, it's fun to reminisce, but there's nothing new there. We've both changed.

gavanwoolery 10y ago
Yep, it is like trying to make new Star Wars films. The magic is just gone. Still, the Star Wars brand remains strong, even if just by virtue of magic long past. :)
obarthel 10y ago
I agree that there is nostalgia involved, but it is only part of the picture. From a software developer's point of view the Amiga is worth resurrecting because the operating system design represents a promise that you can get great power and flexibility out of modest means, by keeping complexity at bay. It wasn't always so rosy, but you could pack quite a punch by developing products for the Amiga. The system gave you a lot of leverage, which architect Carl Sassenrath rightly referred to as "empowering the user". The development environment (a 'C' compiler, a debugger and a decent text editor would see you through) and the operating system documentation were solid enough. You could comfortably hold the entire design of the system and its APIs in your head. That kind of knowledge is rare these days, given how complex our platforms of choice have become. I have been an Amiga software developer for more than three decades now, through the good times and the less good times (it used to be a hobby, became a business, now it's a hobby again). It does give you perspective, and not everything that came around in these last three decades measured up so well: how much of the power of the hardware platform ends up in the hands of the user? The (for lack of a better word) "thin" Amiga operating system layer allowed you to squeeze a maximum of performance out of the hardware. I recall that during the late 1990'ies Amiga networking software, tested against a HP-UX based logic analyzer's networking performance in the lab, came out on top.