6 ms·

I was obsessed with the Amiga when it was announced in the mid-80s. I saved my paper route money (when that was a thing) and bought the Amiga 1000 as soon as it

by cowmix 6y ago

I was obsessed with the Amiga when it was announced in the mid-80s. I saved my paper route money (when that was a thing) and bought the Amiga 1000 as soon as it was available. I loved the computer and I am thankful for how it set me up for my expectations about what personal computing should be. HOWEVER... I'm perplexed how I keep seeing all these projects over the years to revive the platform. AmigaOS was good for its time but there's nothing it offers now that any modern OS doesn't do now. For how cutting edge it was, it was an unstable POS too. GAH!

hvs 6y ago
Lots of have these what-if computers/operating systems of the past (Xenix, OS/2, AmigaOS, etc.). It's mostly just harmless nostalgia.
Scramblejams 6y ago
there's nothing it offers now that any modern OS doesn't do now This is why of any old OS I’d like to see revived, it’s BeOS[0]. To this day I’ve never used a desktop OS so fluid, so responsive and stutter-free. [0] Yup, there’s Haiku. I guess I just want that to be successful!
- User23 6y ago
  The BeOS demos at MacWorld Boston in 1997 were incredible. I've also never since seen a multitasking operating system with that level of user interface responsiveness. It really was wonderful engineering.
User23 6y ago
In Germany in the late 80s to early 90s the Amiga was the platform of choice for playing video games. It had great graphics and games were widely shared in the community. I wonder how much of the nostalgia is for the culture and experiences than the actual platform.
adamredwoods 6y ago
I did corn detasseling to save up for my Amiga 500. My first C program was on an Amiga. Good for nostalgia, not for modern times.
- icedchai 6y ago
  My first C program was also in the Amiga! I taught myself C from those “Abacus” books when I was about 14. I was using Lattice C. Fun times.
  - aphrax 6y ago
    Dice C for me, the author (Matt Dillon) is the guy who created Dragonfly BSD..
    - AndrewStephens 6y ago
      I also used Dice C, starting with the free version that I got from one of the Fish Disks. I didn't have dialup access to anywhere but a local computer retailer used to charge NZ$5 for Fish disks, which were my main source of software in small-town NZ. For a school project (fractals!) I needed floating point support, which the free version of Dice C didn't have. I wrote a letter to Matt Dillion and he very kindly sent me the 3 disks of the full Dice C by return post (about 4 weeks). I still remember what a pain it was to arrange an international money order to actually pay him. That must have been 1991. My program very slowly drew a 320x256 Mandelbrot set in 32 colors - as I recall it took about 90 seconds on a A500. By coincidence I was mucking around with Cuda the other day and wrote a short un-optimized program to draw a 2048x2048 Mandelbrot in 256 colors - over 80 times more data - in about 2 seconds. This 2 year old laptop is about 3680 times as fast as my old A500.
  - dgregd 6y ago
    Lattice C occupied two 3.5 disks so when I was compiling a program I had to switch the disks many times. Then I bought a second external disk drive and it was 10x improvement. As far I remember an executable was very slow for some reason. AMOS was much better for graphics and audio.
the_af 6y ago
It's nostalgia aimed at people who had these computers as kids. I know it worked for me with their pretty cool TheC64. Why not buy a real vintage home computer then? Well, in the case of the C64, vintage ones are unreliable, hard to get to work with modern screens and hard to get stuff in/out of them. You end up needing expensive extra hardware for all these things and for what? -- the retro remakes are pretty convenient out of the box, and give you the convenience of an emulator with the look & feel you remember from your childhood. However, if you didn't own one of these as a kid, then you'll find them pointless.
- andi999 6y ago
  Also with the c64 you do not really want to go back to that keyboard, do you?
  - dylan604 6y ago
    I'd rather use it than the Apple Butterfly keyboard. I used to bang out BASIC on a C64 with the hunt&peck method. Sure, I was 10, but I know I beat on it harder than I do now with actual typing. That keyboard never had keycaps fall of it. I cannot say the same thing about this keyboard on my MacBook Pro 2017 model.
    - Razengan 6y ago
      I’d rather stick with the Apple butterfly keyboard than many other keyboards, contemporary or historic. I’ve never had problems with it and I honestly prefer the short travel and snappiness.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - Razengan 6y ago
        Excuse me for having an incorrect opinion. Butterfly bad. Gib upboat.
  - 6y ago
snvzz 6y ago
>(AmigaOS) For how cutting edge it was, it was an unstable POS too. AmigaOS 1.0 release sure was. From 1.2 onward, it's trivial to get higher uptimes than windows 9x. I consider 2.0+ (~1991) pretty modern. I haven't seen a crash in a very long time, and I always have some Amiga running.
- LocalH 6y ago
  The only real problem with the AmigaOS architecture is the lack of memory protection.
  - iuguy 6y ago
    It's only really a problem if your software isn't designed for it. Most of the problems people had with DOS memory protection issues were due to the lack of standardization around memory management. Similarly so with Windows 3.x, running DOS programs from Windows on top of DOS was never going to work well. Even Windows95 had its problems. On the Amiga it didn't have this problem. There was AmigaOS and that was it. The base hardware was for the most part tightly coupled to the OS and the architecture was designed to provide standardised mechanisms for accessing hardware that were fairly stable. The Amiga had different stability issues of course, but my A4000 manages fine without memory protection despite having a full MMU on-board.
    - LocalH 6y ago
      I mostly meant in terms of security in the modern age. Few people in their right mind (in the realm of computing enthusiasts) would use AmigaOS as their only daily driver because of it. There’s a reason all modern OS architectures have memory protection as a core feature. In 2020 you really don’t want any process on your system to be able to access, let alone clobber any other process space.
kjs3 6y ago
Because it could be fun? Or is that not HN worthy?
kristopolous 6y ago
It's coveted by musicians and a number of other specialty applications. Specialty groups are rather time agnostic. The Technics SL-1200 turntable for instance (look it up, you've seen it) hasn't changed much in 50 years and Technics brought it out of retirement because the demand for used ones was so high So a 68020 is perfectly fine for these types of things. It's not a general purpose tool, it's a specific thing just like the Technics are for hobbyist and professional "turntablists" and not meant to substitute say Spotify
- megablast 6y ago
  The Technics SL-1200 is used by DJs all over the world to entertain millions. What is the amigs used for??
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    Techno and electro by artists which you may have not heard of but who have prestigious awards and Wikipedia pages. Along with the Prophet, Roland SH-101, TR-808 and TB-303, the Amiga is coveted vintage equipment. (For instance, this coldwave producer: https://www.discogs.com/artist/3805670-Equinoxious https://www.discogs.com/artist/3805670-Equinoxious ... That's almost exclusively 35 year old equipment) This album for instance, was produced on an Amiga and even has it in the album title https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=35Lv8J1VMog https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=35Lv8J1VMog Might not be your thing, sure, fine. That's not the point. There's a significant scene that uses amigas for this. Vintage Commodores have a fanbase all on their own in the electronic music world and get featured prominently in some videos such as (1:50) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-UdW-lmHSNY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-UdW-lmHSNY There's after market hardware, such as an Amiga 500 SCSI -> SD bridge because at one time old 50 pin SCSI drives were going for hundreds of dollars and people in this community started making modern retrofits so they didn't have to pay high prices for failing hardware.
    - robin_reala 6y ago
      There was a great video on jungle production by Pete Cannon where he demonstrates his Amiga setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDn7ZDcx9w0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDn7ZDcx9w0
zmix 6y ago
> but there's nothing it offers now that any modern OS doesn't do now Did you ever go past your A1000? Did you use AmigaOS2.1 and up? ...like...scripting all your productivity applications with the same scripting language and have them interchange data, this way, orchestrating workflows I still dream about on other systems? ...like... mounting RAM: or SOUND: or HTTP: or IMAP: or FTP: or ARC(hives): or (raw) MEM(ory): ? All without any Virtual File System? Just real device level mounts? #> mount HTTP: #> COPY HTTP:hostname.tld/~user/index.html TO folder/ ...like...having a hypertext standard, which can cross-reference all your includes, combine them with system documentation and have them appear on hover in your editor? And so much more... Yes, you can do all these things, the one way or other, on today's systems (except the mounting example,afaik). But with the Amiga these things were built-in. Which means, that, instead of system administration and time wasted on setup and tooling, you would just use the things and enjoy more productivity.
- ziotom78 6y ago
  Not the OP, but I understand the sentiment. Despite the many advantages of the platform, there are so many things that have evolved in the meantime: - Compatibility with international character sets (UTF-8) for data exchange - Support for modern peripherals like LCD monitors, printers, wi-fi cards, etc. - Access to external filesystems (Ext4, NTFS, remote storage, etc.) - Other I have never used Amigas, so maybe these points are all addressable with a recent version of AmigaOS, but I understand the OP's concerns.
  - zmix 6y ago
    > - Compatibility with international character sets (UTF-8) for data exchange > > - Support for modern peripherals like LCD monitors, printers, wi-fi cards, etc. > > - Access to external filesystems (Ext4, NTFS, remote storage, etc.) This is all supported with the current version of the OS (AmigaOS 4), however, due to no market share, only select devices are supported (the situation is like Linux (was), but much more extreme: printers (non-postscript) and WiFi cards, especially). It is other things, where the system did not age well: no memory protection and no multi user support. However, I do not want to place the Amiga as a viable solution for today's use. I just wanted to address the comment, I replied to, which was a bit too 'absolute' in tone for my taste. I did not find the criticism to be justified. Currently there is a hardware scene, that builds FPGA systems, that are fully compatible and meant to be run as stand alone, or as add-in systems and which can cope with most modern tasks, albeit CPU and GPU power is a limit, of course.
boomlinde 6y ago
> I'm perplexed how I keep seeing all these projects over the years to revive the platform AmigaOS was good for its time but there's nothing it offers now that any modern OS doesn't do now. Maybe you are perplexed because you misunderstand the intent of the project, and judge it on a basis that is unrelated to its intent. Considering the various other "mini" computers and consoles, including Retro Games' previous such project, THEC64, the idea here probably isn't to revive the platform as a competitor to a modern OS, or even what AmigaOS offers at all, but to create a toy for retro computer/retro gaming enthusiasts.
swiley 6y ago
Toy OSes are fun, that's why there's haiku and the open source windows xp.
flohofwoe 6y ago
The way that later AmigaOS versions integrated UI and command line workflows through OS APIs and design-guidelines is still mostly unmatched today IMHO, from today's point of view this is like a dead end in the tree of operating system evolution. Linux, Windows and MacOS all were behind in different aspects (and of course ahead in some others) but then developed into entirely different directions. I would like to have seen the ideas of AmigaOS ca. '92 developed further (instead of just merely keeping it alive and adding a new UI skin from time to time). Instead the command line and UI drifted further apart in all surviving operating systems.
Phil-bitplex 6y ago
There one thing it did, and OS/2 did that I really really really miss. Having different sized icons. I miss my giant Battletech icon :(

by cowmix 6y ago

hvs 6y ago

Lots of have these what-if computers/operating systems of the past (Xenix, OS/2, AmigaOS, etc.). It's mostly just harmless nostalgia.

Scramblejams 6y ago

there's nothing it offers now that any modern OS doesn't do now This is why of any old OS I’d like to see revived, it’s BeOS[0]. To this day I’ve never used a desktop OS so fluid, so responsive and stutter-free. [0] Yup, there’s Haiku. I guess I just want that to be successful!

User23 6y ago
The BeOS demos at MacWorld Boston in 1997 were incredible. I've also never since seen a multitasking operating system with that level of user interface responsiveness. It really was wonderful engineering.

User23 6y ago

In Germany in the late 80s to early 90s the Amiga was the platform of choice for playing video games. It had great graphics and games were widely shared in the community. I wonder how much of the nostalgia is for the culture and experiences than the actual platform.

adamredwoods 6y ago

I did corn detasseling to save up for my Amiga 500. My first C program was on an Amiga. Good for nostalgia, not for modern times.

icedchai 6y ago
My first C program was also in the Amiga! I taught myself C from those “Abacus” books when I was about 14. I was using Lattice C. Fun times.
- aphrax 6y ago
  Dice C for me, the author (Matt Dillon) is the guy who created Dragonfly BSD..
  - AndrewStephens 6y ago
    I also used Dice C, starting with the free version that I got from one of the Fish Disks. I didn't have dialup access to anywhere but a local computer retailer used to charge NZ$5 for Fish disks, which were my main source of software in small-town NZ. For a school project (fractals!) I needed floating point support, which the free version of Dice C didn't have. I wrote a letter to Matt Dillion and he very kindly sent me the 3 disks of the full Dice C by return post (about 4 weeks). I still remember what a pain it was to arrange an international money order to actually pay him. That must have been 1991. My program very slowly drew a 320x256 Mandelbrot set in 32 colors - as I recall it took about 90 seconds on a A500. By coincidence I was mucking around with Cuda the other day and wrote a short un-optimized program to draw a 2048x2048 Mandelbrot in 256 colors - over 80 times more data - in about 2 seconds. This 2 year old laptop is about 3680 times as fast as my old A500.
- dgregd 6y ago
  Lattice C occupied two 3.5 disks so when I was compiling a program I had to switch the disks many times. Then I bought a second external disk drive and it was 10x improvement. As far I remember an executable was very slow for some reason. AMOS was much better for graphics and audio.

the_af 6y ago

It's nostalgia aimed at people who had these computers as kids. I know it worked for me with their pretty cool TheC64. Why not buy a real vintage home computer then? Well, in the case of the C64, vintage ones are unreliable, hard to get to work with modern screens and hard to get stuff in/out of them. You end up needing expensive extra hardware for all these things and for what? -- the retro remakes are pretty convenient out of the box, and give you the convenience of an emulator with the look & feel you remember from your childhood. However, if you didn't own one of these as a kid, then you'll find them pointless.

andi999 6y ago
Also with the c64 you do not really want to go back to that keyboard, do you?
- dylan604 6y ago
  I'd rather use it than the Apple Butterfly keyboard. I used to bang out BASIC on a C64 with the hunt&peck method. Sure, I was 10, but I know I beat on it harder than I do now with actual typing. That keyboard never had keycaps fall of it. I cannot say the same thing about this keyboard on my MacBook Pro 2017 model.
  - Razengan 6y ago
    I’d rather stick with the Apple butterfly keyboard than many other keyboards, contemporary or historic. I’ve never had problems with it and I honestly prefer the short travel and snappiness.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Razengan 6y ago
      Excuse me for having an incorrect opinion. Butterfly bad. Gib upboat.
- 6y ago

snvzz 6y ago

>(AmigaOS) For how cutting edge it was, it was an unstable POS too. AmigaOS 1.0 release sure was. From 1.2 onward, it's trivial to get higher uptimes than windows 9x. I consider 2.0+ (~1991) pretty modern. I haven't seen a crash in a very long time, and I always have some Amiga running.

LocalH 6y ago
The only real problem with the AmigaOS architecture is the lack of memory protection.
- iuguy 6y ago
  It's only really a problem if your software isn't designed for it. Most of the problems people had with DOS memory protection issues were due to the lack of standardization around memory management. Similarly so with Windows 3.x, running DOS programs from Windows on top of DOS was never going to work well. Even Windows95 had its problems. On the Amiga it didn't have this problem. There was AmigaOS and that was it. The base hardware was for the most part tightly coupled to the OS and the architecture was designed to provide standardised mechanisms for accessing hardware that were fairly stable. The Amiga had different stability issues of course, but my A4000 manages fine without memory protection despite having a full MMU on-board.
  - LocalH 6y ago
    I mostly meant in terms of security in the modern age. Few people in their right mind (in the realm of computing enthusiasts) would use AmigaOS as their only daily driver because of it. There’s a reason all modern OS architectures have memory protection as a core feature. In 2020 you really don’t want any process on your system to be able to access, let alone clobber any other process space.

kjs3 6y ago

Because it could be fun? Or is that not HN worthy?

kristopolous 6y ago

It's coveted by musicians and a number of other specialty applications. Specialty groups are rather time agnostic. The Technics SL-1200 turntable for instance (look it up, you've seen it) hasn't changed much in 50 years and Technics brought it out of retirement because the demand for used ones was so high So a 68020 is perfectly fine for these types of things. It's not a general purpose tool, it's a specific thing just like the Technics are for hobbyist and professional "turntablists" and not meant to substitute say Spotify

megablast 6y ago
The Technics SL-1200 is used by DJs all over the world to entertain millions. What is the amigs used for??
- kristopolous 6y ago
  Techno and electro by artists which you may have not heard of but who have prestigious awards and Wikipedia pages. Along with the Prophet, Roland SH-101, TR-808 and TB-303, the Amiga is coveted vintage equipment. (For instance, this coldwave producer: https://www.discogs.com/artist/3805670-Equinoxious https://www.discogs.com/artist/3805670-Equinoxious ... That's almost exclusively 35 year old equipment) This album for instance, was produced on an Amiga and even has it in the album title https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=35Lv8J1VMog https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=35Lv8J1VMog Might not be your thing, sure, fine. That's not the point. There's a significant scene that uses amigas for this. Vintage Commodores have a fanbase all on their own in the electronic music world and get featured prominently in some videos such as (1:50) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-UdW-lmHSNY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-UdW-lmHSNY There's after market hardware, such as an Amiga 500 SCSI -> SD bridge because at one time old 50 pin SCSI drives were going for hundreds of dollars and people in this community started making modern retrofits so they didn't have to pay high prices for failing hardware.
  - robin_reala 6y ago
    There was a great video on jungle production by Pete Cannon where he demonstrates his Amiga setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDn7ZDcx9w0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDn7ZDcx9w0

zmix 6y ago

> but there's nothing it offers now that any modern OS doesn't do now Did you ever go past your A1000? Did you use AmigaOS2.1 and up? ...like...scripting all your productivity applications with the same scripting language and have them interchange data, this way, orchestrating workflows I still dream about on other systems? ...like... mounting RAM: or SOUND: or HTTP: or IMAP: or FTP: or ARC(hives): or (raw) MEM(ory): ? All without any Virtual File System? Just real device level mounts? #> mount HTTP: #> COPY HTTP:hostname.tld/~user/index.html TO folder/ ...like...having a hypertext standard, which can cross-reference all your includes, combine them with system documentation and have them appear on hover in your editor? And so much more... Yes, you can do all these things, the one way or other, on today's systems (except the mounting example,afaik). But with the Amiga these things were built-in. Which means, that, instead of system administration and time wasted on setup and tooling, you would just use the things and enjoy more productivity.

ziotom78 6y ago
Not the OP, but I understand the sentiment. Despite the many advantages of the platform, there are so many things that have evolved in the meantime: - Compatibility with international character sets (UTF-8) for data exchange - Support for modern peripherals like LCD monitors, printers, wi-fi cards, etc. - Access to external filesystems (Ext4, NTFS, remote storage, etc.) - Other I have never used Amigas, so maybe these points are all addressable with a recent version of AmigaOS, but I understand the OP's concerns.
- zmix 6y ago
  > - Compatibility with international character sets (UTF-8) for data exchange > > - Support for modern peripherals like LCD monitors, printers, wi-fi cards, etc. > > - Access to external filesystems (Ext4, NTFS, remote storage, etc.) This is all supported with the current version of the OS (AmigaOS 4), however, due to no market share, only select devices are supported (the situation is like Linux (was), but much more extreme: printers (non-postscript) and WiFi cards, especially). It is other things, where the system did not age well: no memory protection and no multi user support. However, I do not want to place the Amiga as a viable solution for today's use. I just wanted to address the comment, I replied to, which was a bit too 'absolute' in tone for my taste. I did not find the criticism to be justified. Currently there is a hardware scene, that builds FPGA systems, that are fully compatible and meant to be run as stand alone, or as add-in systems and which can cope with most modern tasks, albeit CPU and GPU power is a limit, of course.

boomlinde 6y ago

> I'm perplexed how I keep seeing all these projects over the years to revive the platform AmigaOS was good for its time but there's nothing it offers now that any modern OS doesn't do now. Maybe you are perplexed because you misunderstand the intent of the project, and judge it on a basis that is unrelated to its intent. Considering the various other "mini" computers and consoles, including Retro Games' previous such project, THEC64, the idea here probably isn't to revive the platform as a competitor to a modern OS, or even what AmigaOS offers at all, but to create a toy for retro computer/retro gaming enthusiasts.

swiley 6y ago

Toy OSes are fun, that's why there's haiku and the open source windows xp.

flohofwoe 6y ago

The way that later AmigaOS versions integrated UI and command line workflows through OS APIs and design-guidelines is still mostly unmatched today IMHO, from today's point of view this is like a dead end in the tree of operating system evolution. Linux, Windows and MacOS all were behind in different aspects (and of course ahead in some others) but then developed into entirely different directions. I would like to have seen the ideas of AmigaOS ca. '92 developed further (instead of just merely keeping it alive and adding a new UI skin from time to time). Instead the command line and UI drifted further apart in all surviving operating systems.

Phil-bitplex 6y ago

There one thing it did, and OS/2 did that I really really really miss. Having different sized icons. I miss my giant Battletech icon :(