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> there were many ideas from VMS, Smalltalk, the Genera operating system for Symbolics LISP machines, the classic Mac OS, BeOS, Plan 9, and other operating syst

> there were many ideas from VMS, Smalltalk, the Genera operating system for Symbolics LISP machines, the classic Mac OS, BeOS, Plan 9, and other operating systems that we can learn from and that would be very useful to have today. Since we're at it, I'd add: Amiga. And I'm not sure, but maybe AREXX also deserves a mention too.

kragen 7y ago
What were the interesting ideas in AmigaOS? I don't have any experience with it, except that I played Harmony on it one day around 1990.
- blihp 7y ago
  I don't recall any when compared to other OS's of the day. The special sauce of the Amiga was its hardware and the games/applications that it enabled. Tools like ARexx and Amiga Basic were better (IMO) than what you got on other platforms, but the OS itself was rather meh. I guess you could say it was rather interesting in the sense that it had preemptive multitasking (years before PCs and Macs would) without memory protection... but that's hardly something you'd want to carry forward to present day.
  - kragen 7y ago
    What was better about AREXX?
    - blihp 7y ago
      ARexx was basically AppleScript before AppleScript existed. It was widely supported by most Amiga productivity software since it was a selling point in the same way AppleScript support is/was for Mac apps in terms of being the de-facto scripting solution on the platform for automating tasks. So if REXX was the dream, ARexx was the realization of that dream on a personal computer.
- flohofwoe 7y ago
  I think the most interesting aspect of AmigaOS was that it brought features only known from much more expensive workstations into a cheap home computer. To my knowledge there haven't been any outstanding innovations on the software side that haven't been available in other operating systems too, but it did so in a computer that was 10..100x cheaper than a UNIX workstation with a comparable graphical user interface. AmigaOS was more like a stripped down UNIX (preemptive scheduling, but no memory protection/process isolation), MacOS looked like a toy in comparison to be honest, at least from the technical side. In the later years, AmigaOS (or rather its applications) offered a glimpse into a future how applications and the underlying operating system could work together to create a professional working environment, applications didn't feel isolated, there were standards in place how UI applications can be controlled from the command line, how they can be automated through scripting, how applications can talk to each other, and how they can be extended via operating system plugins (for instance if one application added support for a new image format to the operating system, all other application dealing with images automatically gained support for this new image format too). Basically: how can the straightforward automation from the command line brought into the domain of UI applications. Alas, it was a glimpse into a future that would never happen.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    I rather think of it as a stripped down version of a Xerox PARC workstation. With exception of SGI and NeXT, UNIX never had a multimedia culture.
    - kragen 7y ago
      That sounds right. Also PARC had Cedar, which did multitasking without memory protection, which Unix didn't usually at the time. BTW, I'm curious what you think about the question I asked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083468

kragen 7y ago

What were the interesting ideas in AmigaOS? I don't have any experience with it, except that I played Harmony on it one day around 1990.

blihp 7y ago
I don't recall any when compared to other OS's of the day. The special sauce of the Amiga was its hardware and the games/applications that it enabled. Tools like ARexx and Amiga Basic were better (IMO) than what you got on other platforms, but the OS itself was rather meh. I guess you could say it was rather interesting in the sense that it had preemptive multitasking (years before PCs and Macs would) without memory protection... but that's hardly something you'd want to carry forward to present day.
- kragen 7y ago
  What was better about AREXX?
  - blihp 7y ago
    ARexx was basically AppleScript before AppleScript existed. It was widely supported by most Amiga productivity software since it was a selling point in the same way AppleScript support is/was for Mac apps in terms of being the de-facto scripting solution on the platform for automating tasks. So if REXX was the dream, ARexx was the realization of that dream on a personal computer.
flohofwoe 7y ago
I think the most interesting aspect of AmigaOS was that it brought features only known from much more expensive workstations into a cheap home computer. To my knowledge there haven't been any outstanding innovations on the software side that haven't been available in other operating systems too, but it did so in a computer that was 10..100x cheaper than a UNIX workstation with a comparable graphical user interface. AmigaOS was more like a stripped down UNIX (preemptive scheduling, but no memory protection/process isolation), MacOS looked like a toy in comparison to be honest, at least from the technical side. In the later years, AmigaOS (or rather its applications) offered a glimpse into a future how applications and the underlying operating system could work together to create a professional working environment, applications didn't feel isolated, there were standards in place how UI applications can be controlled from the command line, how they can be automated through scripting, how applications can talk to each other, and how they can be extended via operating system plugins (for instance if one application added support for a new image format to the operating system, all other application dealing with images automatically gained support for this new image format too). Basically: how can the straightforward automation from the command line brought into the domain of UI applications. Alas, it was a glimpse into a future that would never happen.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I rather think of it as a stripped down version of a Xerox PARC workstation. With exception of SGI and NeXT, UNIX never had a multimedia culture.
  - kragen 7y ago
    That sounds right. Also PARC had Cedar, which did multitasking without memory protection, which Unix didn't usually at the time. BTW, I'm curious what you think about the question I asked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083468