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Yes, I think the high degree of integration, the ease with which you could work with the full capability of the hardware, and the lack of cruft made the Amiga a

Yes, I think the high degree of integration, the ease with which you could work with the full capability of the hardware, and the lack of cruft made the Amiga a highly immersive environment for the enthusiast user. I think about this a lot. I really want to know what the "Amiga feeling" was made of so I can reproduce or encourage it today. It was one of the main things I enjoyed about computers in the first place. I also think its important for Amiga people to pass these notions along somehow, in a similar way to people who've worked with Symbolics Lisp machines or other innovative technologies whose core ideas were not taken up by a mainstream that surpassed them for reasons unrelated to the actual value of those technologies.

vidarh 6y ago
It's tricky, because it's difficult to separate the things we remember with a feeling of nostalgia but that do not really matter from the things that were genuinely useful. I keep wanting to build some libraries and tools to experiment with this, but a lot of it is about culture, as I mentioned, which is often harder than the tech. One simple example is the AmigaOS ReadArgs() call. It provides a standard mechanism for parsing command lines. An important consequence of it is that auto-complete for Amiga terminals that supports it can do typed auto-complete for any application that uses it without anyone having to write auto-complete script or specifications. It's not a hard thing to do. The ReadArgs templates are really basic. Probably too basic. There are tons of good open-source command line parsers. All that's really needed is for people to settle on one with a suitable static spec format, and a mechanism for making it easy to extract that format from an executable. But it serves very little purpose unless you convince a lot of people to do it. There's a chicken and egg scenario there, in that it's a lot harder to find people prepared to spend time creating "standards" like that and pushing them than it is to find people to work on solving an issue with a more immediate payoff. Especially when you really need a critical mass of applications that supports these specs before the benefits starts becoming obvious.

vidarh 6y ago

It's tricky, because it's difficult to separate the things we remember with a feeling of nostalgia but that do not really matter from the things that were genuinely useful. I keep wanting to build some libraries and tools to experiment with this, but a lot of it is about culture, as I mentioned, which is often harder than the tech. One simple example is the AmigaOS ReadArgs() call. It provides a standard mechanism for parsing command lines. An important consequence of it is that auto-complete for Amiga terminals that supports it can do typed auto-complete for any application that uses it without anyone having to write auto-complete script or specifications. It's not a hard thing to do. The ReadArgs templates are really basic. Probably too basic. There are tons of good open-source command line parsers. All that's really needed is for people to settle on one with a suitable static spec format, and a mechanism for making it easy to extract that format from an executable. But it serves very little purpose unless you convince a lot of people to do it. There's a chicken and egg scenario there, in that it's a lot harder to find people prepared to spend time creating "standards" like that and pushing them than it is to find people to work on solving an issue with a more immediate payoff. Especially when you really need a critical mass of applications that supports these specs before the benefits starts becoming obvious.