5 ms·

Yep I remember the BeBox :) Many more will probably try and fail, as it is not an easy thing to accomplish. That's why I'm leaving it "dream" territory for now.

Yep I remember the BeBox :) Many more will probably try and fail, as it is not an easy thing to accomplish. That's why I'm leaving it "dream" territory for now. :)

EdSharkey 10y ago
I always felt like Amiga had a weird factor about it that kept it from being ubiquitous and mass-market. They had the whole co-processor fetish, even in the re-envisioned hardware platforms after all the acquisitions. Amiga always felt painfully fixed in time. Part of piling all the features into the CPU is it gives old software a chance at longer legs. Modern PC's have the GPU, which seem to have morphed into special-purpose general processors through herculean API and driver efforts. I do wish the GPU could fade into the main CPU though, it feels like a sidecar concept until it does. CPU vendors and OS vendors need to do a better job at adding features to new software while supporting old hardware. The planned obsolescence of hardware in newer operating systems seems foolish to me. A ruthless productivity UX is my "dream". I envision taking a non-mainstream OS like Haiku or the open source Solaris and building a new desktop environment for it. Standard hotkeys for actions across applications that go far beyond copy/paste, a very specific and detailed User Experience Guidelines that ONLY target desktop/large screen applications, and a fixed, standard desktop theme and look-and-feel that will only be updated once per decade. I would strongly encourage users to choose not to reskin the desktop or customize their keystroke mappings. Productivity demands that a standard interface is presented to all users who sit down at the machine. I would be accessibility-first, and all standards and conventions would work magnificently with screen readers and magnifiers. No chasing fads, no reporting user telemetry back to the mothership, privacy is a given. My unparalleled stability and north star vision will be my only real selling points. I'd charge good money for my OS, and my slavish fanboys would pay up for every upgrade and t-shirt I put on offer after my yearly mock turtleneck pitch. That's my dream, at least, hehe.
- teddyh 10y ago
  > I do wish the GPU could fade into the main CPU though, Like this, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Uni...
  - EdSharkey 10y ago
    Yeah! I want that kind of design to win.
- jimjimjim 10y ago
  Maybe it wasn't so in the US but in the UK, Europe, Australia and NZ the Amiga WAS mass market. It was an affordable home computer (when 'home computer' was a phrase). The transition to business computers is where they lost the plot and got out commoditized by pc box makers.
  - EdSharkey 10y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean to denigrate the platform by saying it wasn't mass market. Obviously, it sold millions of units, and was successful in its time. I'm probably viewing the Amiga through too much of a contemporary lens and just being too critical. But, at the time the Amiga was out and selling, I recall thinking it was a wacky piece of kit. It was brilliant but weird hardware with rough edges on the software side, and that wasn't what I was looking for in a computer.
  - bootload 10y ago
    "Maybe it wasn't so in the US but in the UK, Europe, Australia and NZ the Amiga WAS mass market." While I know of quite a few people (at least 4) who owned, used Amiga, the Amiga was always the rich-mans computing option. Most home computing at that time was Commodore, PC even Trash-80s.
- gavanwoolery 10y ago
  Amiga's real death blow was a frivolous patent lawsuit IIRC. Still, your ideals mirror mine quite a bit. I have long been against discrete GPUs and specialized APIs/units, which have led to fast triangle rasterization at the cost of the beautiful and creative flexibility pure CPU coding once allowed. In fact, I'd be happy with a step backwards in graphics for this cause. I don't think gameplay has advanced significantly from the days of Doom and Duke3D (at least with regard to graphical improvements), and the more advanced graphics have led us down a rabbit hole of production costs and complexity. Quite a few people enjoy coding on the Pico8 for this reason. (http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php) I'd really like to build a cohesive UI/UX experience with fairly rigid standards and an eye towards elegant programming implementation, data-binding, fluid layout, etc. Distributing an application should be a no-brainer, but at the same time programmers should not be handcuffed by over-the-top security constraints. Rather than go nuts trying to satisfy every hardware combination, take a more console-ish approach with a sane set of limited hardware. You could not please everyone, but they are trusting you to make the hard decisions. Which is another Jobs thing (I swear I am not a fanboy, more of a Woz guy, but many of his philosophies are relevant here) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65_PmYipnpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65_PmYipnpk Annual turtleneck pitch mandatory :)
  - EdSharkey 10y ago
    You are my people!
  - walterbell 10y ago
    Are you familiar with Alan Kay's Viewpoints research on KSWorld and OMeta? What do you think about Qubes on a Skylake Skull Canyon NUC (small desktop with Iris Pro and Thunderbolt) as a desktop research platform? Qubes/Xen would allow existing Linux/Windows to run in parallel with an experimental OS. There is a cross-OS compositing graphics stack (like VMware Workstation Unity) in Qubes that tries to balance security with usability - could be extended. Qubes also has hardware-rooted measured launch ("anti evil maid") to verify the integrity of the TCB, with keys under user/owner control. As systems get more complex, we need boot-and-runtime integrity measurement to ensure components have not been unexpectedly modified. An interesting area of research is "data sovereignty" as a counterpoint to "surveillance capitalism". We need a modern storage API that shares the data portability goals of the EA/Amiga Interchange File Format, http://www.martinreddy.net/gfx/2d/IFF.txt http://www.martinreddy.net/gfx/2d/IFF.txt & http://www.fileformat.info/format/iff/egff.htm http://www.fileformat.info/format/iff/egff.htm. As new data rendering capabilities are added to the OS, apps get support for free, as IFF delivered on the Amiga. In exchange, apps cannot lock user data into proprietary formats. This data interoperability then enables multi-app data analytics and UX compositing, with OS enforcement of user ownership and policy, rather than vendor or cloud policy. Since app/service vendors are impermanent, standardize data interchange APIs with OSS implementations, ensuring the survival of user data. Combine this with KSWorld/Rebol ideas about DSLs for OS-enforced user extension of apps (think Excel declarative programming), and "apps" become data pipeline components, instead of fixed-function GUIs where users have to plead for changes.

Yep I remember the BeBox :) Many more will probably try and fail, as it is not an easy thing to accomplish. That's why I'm leaving it "dream" territory for now. :)

EdSharkey 10y ago

I always felt like Amiga had a weird factor about it that kept it from being ubiquitous and mass-market. They had the whole co-processor fetish, even in the re-envisioned hardware platforms after all the acquisitions. Amiga always felt painfully fixed in time. Part of piling all the features into the CPU is it gives old software a chance at longer legs. Modern PC's have the GPU, which seem to have morphed into special-purpose general processors through herculean API and driver efforts. I do wish the GPU could fade into the main CPU though, it feels like a sidecar concept until it does. CPU vendors and OS vendors need to do a better job at adding features to new software while supporting old hardware. The planned obsolescence of hardware in newer operating systems seems foolish to me. A ruthless productivity UX is my "dream". I envision taking a non-mainstream OS like Haiku or the open source Solaris and building a new desktop environment for it. Standard hotkeys for actions across applications that go far beyond copy/paste, a very specific and detailed User Experience Guidelines that ONLY target desktop/large screen applications, and a fixed, standard desktop theme and look-and-feel that will only be updated once per decade. I would strongly encourage users to choose not to reskin the desktop or customize their keystroke mappings. Productivity demands that a standard interface is presented to all users who sit down at the machine. I would be accessibility-first, and all standards and conventions would work magnificently with screen readers and magnifiers. No chasing fads, no reporting user telemetry back to the mothership, privacy is a given. My unparalleled stability and north star vision will be my only real selling points. I'd charge good money for my OS, and my slavish fanboys would pay up for every upgrade and t-shirt I put on offer after my yearly mock turtleneck pitch. That's my dream, at least, hehe.

teddyh 10y ago
> I do wish the GPU could fade into the main CPU though, Like this, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Uni...
- EdSharkey 10y ago
  Yeah! I want that kind of design to win.
jimjimjim 10y ago
Maybe it wasn't so in the US but in the UK, Europe, Australia and NZ the Amiga WAS mass market. It was an affordable home computer (when 'home computer' was a phrase). The transition to business computers is where they lost the plot and got out commoditized by pc box makers.
- EdSharkey 10y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean to denigrate the platform by saying it wasn't mass market. Obviously, it sold millions of units, and was successful in its time. I'm probably viewing the Amiga through too much of a contemporary lens and just being too critical. But, at the time the Amiga was out and selling, I recall thinking it was a wacky piece of kit. It was brilliant but weird hardware with rough edges on the software side, and that wasn't what I was looking for in a computer.
- bootload 10y ago
  "Maybe it wasn't so in the US but in the UK, Europe, Australia and NZ the Amiga WAS mass market." While I know of quite a few people (at least 4) who owned, used Amiga, the Amiga was always the rich-mans computing option. Most home computing at that time was Commodore, PC even Trash-80s.
gavanwoolery 10y ago
Amiga's real death blow was a frivolous patent lawsuit IIRC. Still, your ideals mirror mine quite a bit. I have long been against discrete GPUs and specialized APIs/units, which have led to fast triangle rasterization at the cost of the beautiful and creative flexibility pure CPU coding once allowed. In fact, I'd be happy with a step backwards in graphics for this cause. I don't think gameplay has advanced significantly from the days of Doom and Duke3D (at least with regard to graphical improvements), and the more advanced graphics have led us down a rabbit hole of production costs and complexity. Quite a few people enjoy coding on the Pico8 for this reason. (http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php) I'd really like to build a cohesive UI/UX experience with fairly rigid standards and an eye towards elegant programming implementation, data-binding, fluid layout, etc. Distributing an application should be a no-brainer, but at the same time programmers should not be handcuffed by over-the-top security constraints. Rather than go nuts trying to satisfy every hardware combination, take a more console-ish approach with a sane set of limited hardware. You could not please everyone, but they are trusting you to make the hard decisions. Which is another Jobs thing (I swear I am not a fanboy, more of a Woz guy, but many of his philosophies are relevant here) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65_PmYipnpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65_PmYipnpk Annual turtleneck pitch mandatory :)
- EdSharkey 10y ago
  You are my people!
- walterbell 10y ago
  Are you familiar with Alan Kay's Viewpoints research on KSWorld and OMeta? What do you think about Qubes on a Skylake Skull Canyon NUC (small desktop with Iris Pro and Thunderbolt) as a desktop research platform? Qubes/Xen would allow existing Linux/Windows to run in parallel with an experimental OS. There is a cross-OS compositing graphics stack (like VMware Workstation Unity) in Qubes that tries to balance security with usability - could be extended. Qubes also has hardware-rooted measured launch ("anti evil maid") to verify the integrity of the TCB, with keys under user/owner control. As systems get more complex, we need boot-and-runtime integrity measurement to ensure components have not been unexpectedly modified. An interesting area of research is "data sovereignty" as a counterpoint to "surveillance capitalism". We need a modern storage API that shares the data portability goals of the EA/Amiga Interchange File Format, http://www.martinreddy.net/gfx/2d/IFF.txt http://www.martinreddy.net/gfx/2d/IFF.txt & http://www.fileformat.info/format/iff/egff.htm http://www.fileformat.info/format/iff/egff.htm. As new data rendering capabilities are added to the OS, apps get support for free, as IFF delivered on the Amiga. In exchange, apps cannot lock user data into proprietary formats. This data interoperability then enables multi-app data analytics and UX compositing, with OS enforcement of user ownership and policy, rather than vendor or cloud policy. Since app/service vendors are impermanent, standardize data interchange APIs with OSS implementations, ensuring the survival of user data. Combine this with KSWorld/Rebol ideas about DSLs for OS-enforced user extension of apps (think Excel declarative programming), and "apps" become data pipeline components, instead of fixed-function GUIs where users have to plead for changes.