3 ms·

We don't think enough about sustainability, about history. The Amiga uniquely exists as history by itself and lives on as a platform that eschews multi-gigabyte

We don't think enough about sustainability, about history. The Amiga uniquely exists as history by itself and lives on as a platform that eschews multi-gigabyte, multi-gigahertz requirements, yet can do amazingly modern things. The hardware is wonderfully documented and easy to repair. My Amiga has been running for a quarter of a century now. http://lilith.zia.io/ http://lilith.zia.io/

blippage 5y ago
So, it runs a pretty recent version of NetBSD? That's quite impressive. Isn't that sacrilege, though, not to be running AmigaOS? I did see a YouTube vid last year of an Amiga booting up what I presume to be an old version of Debian. It got there - EVENTUALLY - at least proving that AmigaOS was a vastly more efficient of OS (over Debian, at least).
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Given that AmigaOS team was actually inspired by UNIX and that was their original goal, maybe it isn't as much of sacriledge, although I think it was certainly good that in the end they did their own thing instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> The Amiga uniquely exists as history by itself and lives on as a platform that eschews multi-gigabyte, multi-gigahertz requirements, yet can do amazingly modern things. Hm? Don't 386s do this too? And BeagleBones? MSP430s?
- rvense 5y ago
  I've got a 1999 Powerbook G3 open that I'm making some music on right now. Some of the processes take a long time so I keep my X200 (13 years!) next to me as well to have something to do in between. 1999 isn't all of a quarter of a century, but there's a Quadra in the other room which will be 30 this year and also still sees some use. It's not that the new stuff isn't nice, but I still haven't managed to exhaust the potential of stuff from 20 years ago for my music at least. So I can just stay off the upgrade cycle, which feels quite good. For non-music, save for TLS, Hackernews could of course also work well on old hardware. Most websites you could also get the functionality, if not the exact experience. But alas, that's not the way the world went, and although a ten-year-old PC in 2022 is a lot more "current" than a 10-year-old PC was in 2012, it still seems like we will keep being dragged forwards by developers wanting more shiny things and hardware manufacturers who want to sell hardware.
neltnerb 5y ago
A lot of hardware had exceptional documentation in the past. I have extremely high end equipment from the 80s and almost all of it came with a booklet with a copy of a complete hand drawn schematic including part numbers, test points, procedures for repairing and disassembling... And then it all stopped, seemingly because building equipment became cheap enough to do that they started worrying about duplicates. Now you end up with errors that you'd never get if people were still able to learn how nice stuff works, by making it dangerous to publish the designs publicly now no one has detailed implementation references. Sure, things like the RPi and Arduino exist so you can find open hardware but it's nothing like when almost everything was open by default. I wish things had gone down differently but things made post 2000 I end up throwing out far more often than stuff from the 1980s. Some of that is selection bias but a lot of it is having access to detailed repair manuals.

blippage 5y ago

So, it runs a pretty recent version of NetBSD? That's quite impressive. Isn't that sacrilege, though, not to be running AmigaOS? I did see a YouTube vid last year of an Amiga booting up what I presume to be an old version of Debian. It got there - EVENTUALLY - at least proving that AmigaOS was a vastly more efficient of OS (over Debian, at least).

pjmlp 5y ago
Given that AmigaOS team was actually inspired by UNIX and that was their original goal, maybe it isn't as much of sacriledge, although I think it was certainly good that in the end they did their own thing instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

> The Amiga uniquely exists as history by itself and lives on as a platform that eschews multi-gigabyte, multi-gigahertz requirements, yet can do amazingly modern things. Hm? Don't 386s do this too? And BeagleBones? MSP430s?

rvense 5y ago
I've got a 1999 Powerbook G3 open that I'm making some music on right now. Some of the processes take a long time so I keep my X200 (13 years!) next to me as well to have something to do in between. 1999 isn't all of a quarter of a century, but there's a Quadra in the other room which will be 30 this year and also still sees some use. It's not that the new stuff isn't nice, but I still haven't managed to exhaust the potential of stuff from 20 years ago for my music at least. So I can just stay off the upgrade cycle, which feels quite good. For non-music, save for TLS, Hackernews could of course also work well on old hardware. Most websites you could also get the functionality, if not the exact experience. But alas, that's not the way the world went, and although a ten-year-old PC in 2022 is a lot more "current" than a 10-year-old PC was in 2012, it still seems like we will keep being dragged forwards by developers wanting more shiny things and hardware manufacturers who want to sell hardware.

neltnerb 5y ago

A lot of hardware had exceptional documentation in the past. I have extremely high end equipment from the 80s and almost all of it came with a booklet with a copy of a complete hand drawn schematic including part numbers, test points, procedures for repairing and disassembling... And then it all stopped, seemingly because building equipment became cheap enough to do that they started worrying about duplicates. Now you end up with errors that you'd never get if people were still able to learn how nice stuff works, by making it dangerous to publish the designs publicly now no one has detailed implementation references. Sure, things like the RPi and Arduino exist so you can find open hardware but it's nothing like when almost everything was open by default. I wish things had gone down differently but things made post 2000 I end up throwing out far more often than stuff from the 1980s. Some of that is selection bias but a lot of it is having access to detailed repair manuals.