18 ms·

Little Things That Made Amiga Great

• hvs 6y ago
  As expected, most of the features were rare on home computers at the time, but have become ubiquitous (or unnecessary) on modern computers. HOWEVER, the `Datatypes` feature is really cool and would actually be a nice feature that still doesn't exist in Windows, macOS, or Linux. https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    It does exist in Windows, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wic/-wic-lh https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wic/-wic-lh https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions//dd443207(v=vs.85) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions//dd443207... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/customizing-file-types-bumper https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/customi... and in macOS, https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/ImageUnitTutorial/Overview/Overview.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004531-CH6-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Gr... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/MusicAudio/Conceptual/CoreAudioOverview/ARoadmaptoCommonTasks/ARoadmaptoCommonTasks.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40003577-CH6-SW15 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Mu... Although, yes I do concede it is more complex to implement, the way to do it depends on what kind of data type we are talking about, and it only works properly if the applications actually make use of the OS frameworks instead of doing their own thing. And as expected with the GNU/Linux "desktop", nothing does exist that comes close to it.
    • richardjdare 6y ago
      Wow, in 24 years as a Windows user I never knew about Windows Imaging Components, nor did I come across Image Units in the 4 years or so I was doing iOS dev on a Mac. I've never seen an end-user application that used them, or told me as a user that I could expand its functionality with them. In contrast, on the Amiga, I knew about Datatypes out of the box as they were written up in the user manual, and pretty much the whole developer community got on board with them. If an app used DataTypes it was a feature that the user knew about. The Amiga community seemed much more unified than today with respect to using all the latest features of the OS. Even the smallest public domain utilities provided AREXX ports so the user could script them.
      • paulryanrogers 6y ago
        Unity among a much smaller group is easier and more likely than a larger group
    • vidarh 6y ago
      That seems limited to specific types of media, though. Datatypes is a general purpose framework for creating a hierarchy of parsers for file formats. It can be images or sound, but also text, or anything else. E.g. here's a small sample of datatypes from Aminet, excluding anything sound and graphics related: * Datatypes for transparent decompression * Datatypes for syntax highlighting * Datatypes for parsing document formats (word etc.) * Assorted hypertext datatypes * Assorted datatypes for showing debug information and structure of various binary formats, like executables.
      • pjmlp 6y ago
        I just didn't want to list everything, hence why I added the remark "the way to do it depends on what kind of data type we are talking about", and yes I do not mean it was as exhaustive as DataTypes, as I don't know all use cases.
    • zimpenfish 6y ago
      I'm possibly missing something but that Image Unit thing seems to be a filter rather than a decoder? The Core Audio stuff is definitely datatypes though - converting things to a common backend format for apps to use.
  • tyingq 6y ago
    I'd always hoped that extended attributes (xattr) would be used for something like that. Nobody seems to use them, though, since they are optional and no standard naming scheme exists.
  • mrob 6y ago
    My favorite feature from the past is RISC OS's "adjust" feature, bound to the third mouse button. This had three functions: Selecting menu items without closing the menu. Toggling selection status of selectable icons (same as control+click in modern GUIs). Changing the length of text selections (same as shift+click in modern GUIs). Sadly, modern GUIs seem to limit themselves to two mouse buttons. Adding "adjust" would improve productivity if you had a three button mouse, and you could ignore it if you lacked mouse buttons and not be any worse off. Maybe there are other good features from early OSs we have forgotten.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    The Windows equivalent is/was COM and in particlar OLE ("object linking and embedding"). With appropriate DLLs you can make a new file format and drag-and-drop a file into Word and open it inside Word. The peak of this was ActiveX; in Microsoft's world around 2000, they really wanted you to be able to embed controls and programs in web pages and then put those web pages everywhere, including on the desktop background ("active desktop"). The problem of running third-party code inside your application is not just security but it tends to crash bady and put the name of the hosting application on the crash. Eventually Microsoft got so fed up with that, especially in the kernel, they built a system where video drivers could crash and restart while the OS kept on trucking, and use of COM has faded.
    • toyg 6y ago
      > The Windows equivalent is/was COM and in particlar OLE [...] it tends to crash badly The mistake was implementing this stuff in C++, which is way too fragile on its own. Had they built a separate VM to manage requests for these objects, it would have been no problem: VM crashes, host app just restarts it. But Java did not exist yet and VMs were not really a thing, resources were too scarce. I do think the ideas behind COM/OLE were pretty good, unfortunately real development on desktop OSes basically stopped mid-'00s so we might never know what it could have been.
      • pjmlp 6y ago
        UWP is COM + .NET type system, and the basis of modern stuff like WinUI and React Native on Windows.
    • pjmlp 6y ago
      For those not following up with Windows development, all major new Windows APIS since XP are ActiveX aka COM aka WinRT aka UWP. COM is pretty much alive and was modernised with .NET type system.
  • smallstepforman 6y ago
    BeOS (and by extension Haiku) has Translators: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheTranslationKit_Introduction.html https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheTranslationKi... Supports image, text, sound, streaming, etc.
• burlesona 6y ago
  I got really into computers in the mid-late 90s by which point we were mostly down to Wintel and Apple hanging on by a thread. What I remember from that era is that nothing was compatible with anything else. It took a lot of work to interoperate between two PCs, let alone cross the gap between OSes. So for a long time, I have kind of taken the current world of few OSes that are highly interoperable as being a great thing: you can build your own Linux machine and still do real work with people on Windows and Mac, etc. But the more I learn about computing in the 80s and early 90s, the more I’m impressed by the variety and diversity of ideas that came out of that era. I see now that today’s standardization has a real cost, which is that we don’t really see new ideas or new paradigms. For the HN crowd, especially those who are older than me and can remember the earlier era of computing, what do you think about that trade off and where we’ve ended up today? Are we better off living in a world where all computers can work together with minimal fuss? Or would it be better if we still had a wide range of vendors taking significantly different approaches and innovating at a much faster pace - albeit in incompatible ways?
  • Ekaros 6y ago
    What I'm personally bit horrified with is that "Unix" is the end all of OS design and so on. With some fundamental designs going back to 70s... Like everything being text. Which seems quite a mess in current world with multimedia and increased networking. Yes we have spend decades hacking to get it to work... But maybe more options and different designs would enrich us lot better. And really we do have layer that can connect all of the different systems together. Namely IP. So even if we had fundamentally different systems, there is no reason why intercommunication wouldn't be possible at this point.
    • swiley 6y ago
      IMO Unix hasn't taken over as much as people think it has. If you look at an OS more closely they typically have a POSIX API layer on top of whatever unique ideas they have. Even Linux does quite a lot of its own thing.
      • 6y ago
• gdubs 6y ago
  I very badly wanted an Amiga as a kid, primarily for the Video Toaster which included Lightwave. It was out of reach financially, but also on its way out with the Commodore corporate problems. My parents drove me to B&H Photo in Manhattan to take a look at one, but they were pretty honest about it being near the end of the line for Amiga, sadly. The closest I got was a subscription to Amiga World and a NewTek magazine if I recall correctly. I must have read and re-read the same articles on the visual effects for Babylon 5 about a thousand times. Despite the cost, the Toaster plus Amiga was insanely inexpensive compared to the alternatives of the time.
  • 7thaccount 6y ago
    It is pretty crazy to think that Babylon 5 had better special effects than TNG (in my opinion) and did it for cheap on the Amiga compared to Industrial Lights and Magic that TNG used.
    • LeoPanthera 6y ago
      It's a weird comparison. Babylon 5's special effects were very early CGI, but TNG has almost no computer graphics at all. (Nearly) everything was done practically, and with models. Personally I think TNG stands up better, and the fact that it was done practically and shot on film now allows a high-definition version to exist, which can never happen for B5.
      • mixmastamyk 6y ago
        B5 was done mostly in HD, they lost a few shots IIRC.
        • monocasa 6y ago
          Their effects weren't, which is the point the parent was making I think.
    • CyberDildonics 6y ago
      You might want to go watch that stuff again before you make your mind up. It is still impressive however that some of these amiga + lightwave effects were done with 12MB of RAM.
• codevark 6y ago
  I started programming in the 70s, on Z80s and a PDP-11. Then I moved to the Apple IIe. Also got a bit of early exposure to MS-DOS in the early 80s. When I first was able to get my hands on an Amiga 1000 (my friend got one as a graduation present), it completely blew my mind. The Amiga is still my favorite, and I have several that still boot up and work fine, even though they are quite a bit older than my kids, who do not always boot up and work. :) There are a bunch of things I still miss when working with Windows (for "work"), even though it is well documented that Microsoft ripped off a bunch of ideas and features from the Amiga (and early Macs). There are, of course, some things I've gotten used to in the intervening years, like increased CPU speeds, but the UI of my old Amigas is actually sometimes more performant than a brand new machine running a modern OS with thousands (or millions) of times the available resources. Go figure.
• BruceEel 6y ago
  Anno 2020, I still miss ASSIGN ... ADD.
  • stutonk 6y ago
    export VAR="$VAR:whatever else"
    • BruceEel 6y ago
      Yes, for things like PATH. But ASSIGN did more, you could essentially create a "device" (combining all ADD'ed things) that could be transparently accessed as such by other programs. It worked like a version of the Windows SUBST command accepting multiple arguments.
      • stutonk 6y ago
        Like a union mount?
        • BruceEel 6y ago
          No direct experience with union mounts (I'm on Mac) but it sounds like those would do the trick.
          • stutonk 6y ago
            If it is indeed a union mount mechanism, then that's truly a remarkable feature. Reading the documentation makes it sound like something akin to an symbolic link but perhaps not in the actual filesystem; I still can't tell if it's implemented in the kernel/FS or just the shell (or to what extent the two are integrated). If it's just the shell then this seems to be a shining example of where the POSIX interface is holding us back. In Linux, they've tried to implement union mounts a number of times (as UnionFS, aufs, and OverlayFS) because it's almost too complicated to get right for Unix-style filesystems and you need a bunch of kernel-level code. Do you happen to know if it was possible to create the ASSIGNs programmatically? Does deleting/renaming files in the ASSIGN work like you'd hope?
• mhd 6y ago
  Note that a lot of the "shell"/AmigaDOS details were inherited from Tripos[1], along with BCPL to implement that (the BCPL that begat first B and then C at Bell Labs). IIRC, that was a temporary solution until they got their own design running, but as usual, nothing lasts longer than a stopgap. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS
• EvanAnderson 6y ago
  Arexx ports for scripting IPC / automation, the standardized installer (especially the "Pretend to install"), and datatypes (which sort of exist in Windows at MacOS, but aren't exactly the same thing either) are the three features I'd love to see in current OS's. All three would need buy-in from application developers, and since using them would tightly-couple applications to the host platform I can't imagine that any developers would take advantage of them anyway. We've ended up in this world where a vaguely POSIX-flavored feature set is about the best we can hope for if a developer doesn't want to go "all-in" on a given platform.
  • zmix 6y ago
    Oh, yes! Sys:> mount IMAP: or the no-brainer Ram Disk.
    • vidarh 6y ago
      My favourite is FrexxEd (co-authored by the author of curl) - a text editor - that exposed all open buffers as files, so you could run script directly on the contents of the open buffer.
      • zmix 6y ago
        That's pretty cool and innovative! I didn't know that (though, I remember hearing about FrexxEd). I was a GoldED guy ;-)
• zozbot234 6y ago
  One unique feature of the Amiga that I've not seen referenced here is that programs, scripts etc. could reference removable media by label and if the media was not in the drive when needed, a Kickstart-managed requester would pop up asking for it to be inserted promptly. This made it very easy to manage even a single-floppy-drive system. Linux could support this even now, as all the required pieces are there (e.g. automount support) and it would be quite useful for a number of things; however it doesn't, AFAICT.
  • rob74 6y ago
    To be fair, this feature was more useful in the nineties than today :) And for the ones not familiar with Amiga jargon, a requester is what you would call a dialog box on other OSes...
  • toyg 6y ago
    > it would be quite useful for a number of things Would it really, though? CDROM are basically dead, what are you going to ask: "please connect another internet cable?"
    • kitotik 6y ago
      Prompting to connect to a remote server, insert a thumb drive, enter an encryption key, attach a backup drive would all be useful.
  • antod 6y ago
    I have vague memories of named pipes between GUI programs that also went along with datatypes. eg in the file dialog of GUI app 1 saving a file to something (I forget the details) like PIPE:foo, then in GUI app 2 opening that data from PIPE:foo without it having to go to disk (I suppose when you're dealing only with floppies that is a bigger deal than now). Am I hallucinating? ;)
• StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  >And we were fierce: if you think Apple fanboys are annoying today, be very happy you didn't meet an Amiga zealot in 1995. I was an Atari 8-bit guy, but I have a friend who was an Amiga zealot, and to this day every time we have a conversation he make an Amiga reference.
  • timbit42 6y ago
    > to this day every time we have a conversation he make an Amiga reference. The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that there hasn't been anything else comparable. I lived through that time and I reference it a lot as well because so many things today are based on the Amiga or still aren't done as well as they were done on the Amiga.
    • noizejoy 6y ago
      The Amiga was far ahead on several fronts including digital audio and video, but the Atari ST was the platform of choice for midi using musicians. A couple of today’s biggest DAWs (Steinberg Cubase & Apple Logic) have their roots on the Atari ST.
      • timbit42 6y ago
        There's always one in the crowd who can't resist bringing up MIDI. It's as if that's all the Atari ST achieved.
        • noizejoy 6y ago
          I'm very sorry to have offended you.
• adamnemecek 6y ago
  Was Amiga ever big in the United States? I had this realization the other day (which might be completely wrong) but it feels like US computing industry is a lot more business focused than the European computing industry. E.g. most DAWs are built by European companies (Ableton, Logic (before Apple acquisition), FL Studio, Reason, Bitwig). Same goes for the demo scene. The demo scene was really big in Europe, but it feels like it was never that big in the US (but I might be wrong). I legit wonder if part of the reason is due to the popularity of Amiga in Europe.
  • LeoPanthera 6y ago
    It wasn't big, but it did exist. While in Europe Amiga was the "default" games computer, the US adopted games consoles much faster, so most Amigas sold in the US were used for productivity purposes, and mostly video, due to the popularity of the Video Toaster.
  • socialdemocrat 6y ago
    Yeah that is my impression too. Always got the impression that PCs, Macs and Nintendo was bigger in the US. Growing up in Norway in the 80s I remember the Commodore 64 and Amiga really dominated the home computer scene. We used to read computer magazines from Sweden, so it must have been big there too. Pretty much nobody used Macs. Schools used a home grown Norwegian computer system called Tiki, with these odd keyboards with round orange keys. I had the impression that Macs where much more prevalent in the US due to school usage. My American wife has fond memories of playing Nintendo games as a kid. But for me it was all about Amiga. It was really sad that it died. It was a really enabling system. I compare to people who used Nintendo and we learned so much more. I learned to do Basic programming on the Amiga. There was even this Game making Basic called AMOS which as really ahead of its time. Using Deluxe Paint to draw was amazing. I learned so much about colors and shading from that. Then there was Assembly programming which was actually kind of nice on the Amiga. But before all that I remember making things like bootable disks with menus where you could select preferred program.
    • timbit42 6y ago
      The Amiga was somewhat popular in the US but I think it was mostly with people who had Commodore 8-bit systems and remained with Commodore when upgrading to 16-bit systems. There were a lot of Atari and Apple II systems in the US besides the C64 and Atari and Apple II owners likely upgraded to Apple Macs, the Atari ST and IBM PCs and not the Amigas. Beyond home computing, the Amiga got quite a bit of use in the video industry in the US. In contrast, Commodore systems were huge in Canada, where I live. All the schools here had 8-bit Commodore systems from the PET to the C64 era. This meant a lot of homes had the VIC-20 and C64. I only knew 1 person in my school with an Apple II and one with an Atari 800XL. Many of the Commodore owners upgraded to Amigas, especially once the Amiga 500 came out. Of course, Canada had 1/10th the population so there weren't as many Amigas as in the US, but a higher percentage of the population had them.
• Yuioup 6y ago
  No CD While AmigaDOS does have a CD command, it's usually not needed. Any command that evaluates to a valid path will automatically change the current working directory to that path How is that useful?
  • antiterra 6y ago
    It just means you don’t have to type cd before the path to change directories. It’s not a big deal at all, especially in the context of the DOS shells of the day or modern *nix shells. eg: > Quarantine/Trojan Will dump you into the Trojan directory relative to the current path. Unless.... Trojan is a binary, then it will run it. Oops.
    • mixmastamyk 6y ago
      The second is no different than any other shell.
      • antiterra 6y ago
        The point is that you might mean to change directories but accidentally execute a file instead.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• rektide 6y ago
  Speaking for the Dead is something I really really hope we can do more for computing. There's so many pasts that we forget. I want condensed good & bads of CORBA, SOAP, NeXT, ESB, & so many others. It feels like there's only dwindling folklore of so many of these things. At least I can point newcomers to C10K and Apache forking models to discuss some of the webserving systems architecture work that emerged around 2000, that gives a fairly broad view of the challenges & was afoot. But I've found few clear stories, clear tellings for so many of the faded technologies. Nice to see Amiga here somewhat avoiding that fate, having some stories told.
• 29athrowaway 6y ago
  You can create a ramdisk in Linux by using "tmpfs" as the file system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs Sometimes you can mount /tmp as tmpfs to have an extremely fast /tmp partition. You can make the change permanent via /etc/fstab
  • mixmastamyk 6y ago
    In the old days this was a big performance boost. Now with nvme ssds barely noticeable. Still most distros set up a few by default.
  • timbit42 6y ago
    Can you create a RAD: device and reboot instantly from it, like the Amiga could?
    • LeoPanthera 6y ago
      Only by cheating, you can save the contents of a tmpfs to disk on shutdown, and then restore it on boot. This can be done with a systemd unit or an init script.
      • josteink 6y ago
        But then it’s not a RAD disk but just a HDD boot which preloads things into RAM.
  • floatboth 6y ago
    Usually it's not really about speed, you usually want tmpfs on /tmp /var/tmp /var/run etc. to just specifically avoid persistence.
• 29athrowaway 6y ago
  The Amiga has a very impressive demoscene... Two Amiga demos that I like from The Black Lotus (TBL): - Eon (2019): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc (4:16 is my favorite part) - Starstruck (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM
  • WillFlux 6y ago
    Both great demos. I recommend watching Eon from the Revision 2019 Amiga compo stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwoyfH7TgEQ&feature=youtu.be&t=3268 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwoyfH7TgEQ&feature=youtu.be... Hearing the crowd react definitely adds to this one!
  • masterofmisc 6y ago
    Don't forget the Jesus on E's demo by the LSD group. https://youtu.be/0MjNsNW8DvM https://youtu.be/0MjNsNW8DvM. If I remember rightly, the LSD group also did the scene Grapevine magazine and also Dox disks.
  • icedchai 6y ago
    I remember watching some Amiga demos as a teenager and being absolutely blown away. This was roughly 1990 or so. "Shadow of the Beast" was also a game I remember buying and being totally amazed by it...
• socialdemocrat 6y ago
  After Switching from Amiga to PC, I missed the RAM disk for a long time for some reason. It has been so long ago now that I cannot remember my workflows that well anymore. But I seem to remember that the RAM disk was a really natural part of my workflow. I also remember how us Amiga users got really used to that you could set the layering of Windows specifically.
  • Corrado 6y ago
    I feel the same way. The RAM disk was so important for daily operations that I couldn't imagine not having it, yet I don't even think about it today. Speaking of layering windows (screens?) I specifically remember having 3 different resolutions open at the same time: normal (Workbench), HiRes (DPaint), LowRes (terminal). It was kinda magical to do all of those things at once and switch between them. Ahhh, memories...
• urbandw311er 6y ago
  I sold my very first piece of software (aged 13) leveraging the Amiga RAD disk. It was called ‘RADBench’ and essentially installed a mini version of Workbench into the recoverable RAM disk, so you could work better with floppy-based files by having key executables in memory. It’s still out there somewhere on the Internets. Ah happy memories dear old Amiga.
• Freaky 6y ago
  > Any command that evaluates to a valid path will automatically change the current working directory to that path You can get similar behaviour on Unix shells with options like: • zsh: `setopt auto_cd` • bash: `shopt -s autocd` • tcsh: `set implicitcd` I think fish has it by default but only for paths prefixed with tilde, ., /, etc.
• s4n1ty 6y ago
  I had an Atari 800XL, then a 520STfm, then a Falcon 030. Back in those days there was quite a bit of tribal rivalry between Atari and Amigas - but I have to admit that the Amiga's OS was way ahead of Atari's, which didn't even get true multitasking until the Falcon (which almost nobody bought).
• bhauer 6y ago
  A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time. I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's "mobile first" UX regime, we now have many desktop experiences that hide the scrollbars entirely—revealing them only on interaction—wholly removing any at-a-glance utility we enjoyed from proportional bars.
  • mixmastamyk 6y ago
    It’s even weirder when you realize how much more resolution we have now. A favorite implementation of mine was 4dwm on SGI. You could middle-click on the trough and it would go directly there, rather than the normal paging by left-click. Still try to use it everywhere and am disappointed.
    • masswerk 6y ago
      Option + click on Mac…
      • justforyou 6y ago
        Command + click.
        • pegasus 6y ago
          For me Command-click doesn't work, but Option-click does.
    • twic 6y ago
      In Cinnamon on Linux, the scrollbars in Firefox, Terminal, and Xreader are all proportional, and jump directly on left-click. Shift-click moves one page.
    • abrowne 6y ago
• smcl 6y ago
  I just can’t get over how those original Amiga screenshots always look stretched vertically. That would have driven me insane.
  • mixmastamyk 6y ago
    The font is tall and a bit ugly but could be easily improved. It was the late eighties after all.
  • timbit42 6y ago
    I don't see what you mean by stretched vertically. The square icons are square.
  • LeoPanthera 6y ago
    It's because the default screen resolutions are PAL (or NTSC), so they have double-height pixels to avoid interlacing. Regular progressive screen modes are also available (some may require the installation of a graphics card), and if you're using a much higher resolution, increasing the workbench font size also makes all the widgets bigger. High-DPI before high-DPI.
• reaperducer 6y ago
  One little thing that I always liked about the Amiga was that it could show human dates. I never owned one, but my friend had an Amiga 1000, and I remember the directory listing had dates like "Last Thursday," or "Christmas, 1990," or "An hour ago." I don't know if that was part of the stock Amiga OS, or an add-on, but it was awfully cool.
  • timbit42 6y ago
    "Last Thursday" and "An hour ago" were part of the stock Amiga OS but it didn't include "Christmas 1990".
• sebastien_b 6y ago
  Was quite fond of my Amiga - this blog post even taught me a couple of things I didn’t know. ARexx was pretty cool - I had written up an AmigaGuide glossary (index) maker; was quite slow, but became quite speedy when I rewrote it in C. I’m surprised it still has some advanced features that some OS’s lack (like system-wide desktop customizable fonts, which macOS still lacks)
• mixmastamyk 6y ago
  There was one version of Python ported to the Amiga. I believe it was 2.4 perhaps.
• rodgerd 6y ago
  > While certainly not a UNIX clone Yeah, that's why it was great. For me, ARexx and Datatypes still stand out. A standard scripting language with standard interfaces into all your desktop software is a magnificent tool, and one that common desktop OSes still don't have. Datatypes meant that every program could open relevant data; again, something you can't rely on even 30 years later on your desktop OS.
• cutitout 6y ago
  I love how the circuit diagrams were part of the manuals. Admittedly, an Amiga 500 was vastly less complex than a modern computer, but still: what today companies like Apple want to keep under wraps, so not everybody can just repair anything easily, everyone got whether they wanted/needed it or not. Amiga nostalgia isn't just nostalgia, the Amiga was great. From age 10 to 14 most of my life revolved around my Amiga 500 and then Amiga 4000, and while it was great then, too, I feel doubly blessed in hindsight, considering what tech has become and where it's heading, to have been allowed to catch a brief glimpse of what could have been. And the music. All that music.
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• squarefoot 6y ago
  Nice article that brings back memories. It missed a couple things surrounding the Amiga that contributed to make it great: Among libraries, the arp.library, whose windowing functions were somewhat precursor to the ASL library. Scala Multimedia, an absolutely top notch presentation/titling software. Many local TV stations were using it to add titles to their video material, advertising etc. Its animations were super smooth, the PC world had nothing that could come close. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5V0J2BB5Ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5V0J2BB5Ho The demoscene, it literally forged a generation of coders/artists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjHZ85KwzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjHZ85KwzM
• hexsprite 6y ago
  Fun trip down memory lane. My first C compiler was Lattice C which I made resident so I wouldn't have to swap floppies on my single drive Amiga 2000. I can see now how it was a great stepping stone to learning UNIX.
  • noizejoy 6y ago
    +1 for Lattice C (I had the Atari version). Wrote my first little Midi monitoring program with that one!
• quelsolaar 6y ago
  I really miss that, back in the days, there was still innovation going on in the OS space. Sure we get some features every now and then, but back then computers like the Amiga tried to come up with ideas that where fundamentally different from other systems. Its sad that I still long for some of the solutions the Amiga and Be OS brought to the market, 20+ years later. An Amiga1200 on a 14Mhz processor could boot to desktop in 1.5 seconds...
• appstorelottery 6y ago
  Wow, was reading the bit about resident programs and was reminded of the cold capture vector! Reboot the machine and your program could jump over the reset... fun times ;-)
• catfish 6y ago
  Back in 89 while stationed in Hawaii I worked for a small PC shop whose owner was a HUGE AMIGA FAN. Commodore worked their dealers hard, and just prior to Christmas that year he was required to stack 250 machines in inventory which just about broke the bank. Meanwhile I was hired to build PC clones for a few hours everyday. While I was there he would argue constantly about the superiority of the Amiga vs. the PC and though I knew he was right (486 PC's had just hit the scene) I would argue right back about the fact the PC's were winning due to the velocity of change in hardware, storage, video, etc. Anyway we got to the point with it that his wife started yelling at both of us to cut the crap, so not wanting to piss her off since she signed the checks I shut up and let him drone on. As Christmas approached we were selling PC's 10 to 1 over Amiga's and his anxiety about not moving the Amiga's hit the roof. About a week prior to Christmas I came in one day and started building the PC's on order (about 30+ on order) and he was forced to help me with building them out. He was pissed, completely off his rocker angry, and started verbally hammering me beyond what I could take. I finally decided enough was enough. I turned to him and I said "I know one thing the PC can do that the Amiga can't do." And taking the bait like the fish he was, sez to me "Nothing can beat the Amiga". I sez, "There is defintely one thing it does better", and he SHOUTS "WHAT?" Sez me, "It makes money!" and then I turned to the stack of nearly 200 remaining Amiga's sitting in the shop shelves and pointed at them and laughed long and loud. He fired me on the spot. Not exactly on point for this article. But a great story in the timeline of "our thing". I should mention that I did own a Commodore 64 and the Amiga before I switched to the PC. I loved them both and if it wasn't for the C-64 assembler module I would not have built the companies I created years later. The 6502C was the best learning chip ever! 2 centavos...
• HacklesRaised 6y ago
  Well, it doesn't introduce anything novel but perhaps it is time for a new personal computer revolution. Raspberry PI 400 running Risc OS gives a taste of what the Archimedies was capable of, lots of problems too, but they are certainly addressable, and it is somewhat refreshing to see the performance of modest hardware using an OS that is designed for a single user, a taste of what a users experience was like in the Amiga era.