4 ms·

They'll still be reinventing the Amiga when I'm in my 80s I'm sure. I remember back in 1998 a friend had a bastardised A1200 in a PC case with bits of sticky ta

by batou 11y ago

They'll still be reinventing the Amiga when I'm in my 80s I'm sure. I remember back in 1998 a friend had a bastardised A1200 in a PC case with bits of sticky tape holding it together. I was constantly lending him my soldering iron. 17 years later... I have nothing against this for ref, just that it appears to be an eternally unsolved problem.

chx 11y ago
There is something then the current computers do not provide. Whatever it is, there seems to be a business niche for someone who deciphers what it is.
- to3m 11y ago
  What current computers don't do is remind ex Amiga users of what it was like when they were in their teens and/or twenties. Difficult problem to solve...
  - vidarh 11y ago
    While nostalgia is part of it, the Amiga had a special feel to it that is still not met to me by mainstream OSs. I'm occasionally involved in AROS in the hope of getting something that gets finished enough to let me use it. Things like Datatypes (gaining instant ability to read any image format into any viewer or editor by dropping a library into the right directory), XPK (gaining instant support for any compression library everywhere), pervasive AREXX support (Linux is slowly getting something similar with dbus, but in comparison to AREXX ports dbus is overcomplicated), screens (sort of like virtual desktops/spaces, but could be private or public and named), responsiveness (e.g. by default widgets and input handling were running in different tasks/threads to the applications, and so would remain responsive even when your app was doing stupid stuff), or the device/filesystem model which was frequently exploited (e.g. the editor FrexxEd exports the open buffers in a custom filesystem, so that on limited memory systems you could process the content of the buffers with external programs - like your compiler - without having to save it to T: (the equivalent of /tmp), which was usually assigned to the ramdisk), or assigns - creating dynamic drive/volume labels (less important now, but I could e.g. "list music0:" and get prompted specifically for the disk with the label "music0"), or "joining" multiple paths together under a single name. E.g. LIBS:xpk.library would find xpk.library in whichever path it was as long as that path had been added to the LIBS: assign. There are many little things. None of them sufficient for me to be willing to use AmigaOS now, but many of them things I still miss.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      Is there a good book on the design of AmigaOS that explains these things? It sounds like a lot of them are side effects of being a multitasking but not multi-user or memory-protected OS, so you could teleport data into other programs without concern. It would be interesting to try and forward-port these aspects of AmigaOS to an ARM system.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        There were the developer manuals, but you will need to find someone willing to get rid of them.
        pjc50 11y ago
        They seem to be online, along with people selling devkit CDs: http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node0003.html http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui... / http://www.vesalia.de/e_developer2.htm http://www.vesalia.de/e_developer2.htm But I was hoping for something with a little more of the design rationale. Maybe this is what I'm looking for. http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262017202 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/026...
      - vidarh 11y ago
        I don't know of any good books that specifically contrasts the advantages of the AmigaOS design with modern designs, unfortunately. A lot of these things won't have been spelled out in books at the time because it seemed obvious once you'd used an Amiga for a while. Some of them certainly expect single-user. I think Linux etc. loses out quite a bit by not differentiating between single user (in terms of "person in front of the machine is most important, regardless of uid) and multi-user systems. Some of it could be emulated by tweaking priorities. But others require a large change in how you think about applications. E.g. the widget ("gadget" in Amiga-speak) responsiveness largely comes from the OS threads carrying out updates of them. To do the same in an X app for example, you'd need your app to explicitly start a separate thread to forward events to your main thread, and have a mechanism for giving it higher priority. It's not that hard to do, but without libraries providing wrappers for it, it won't happen often. Other things, like the assigns could be implemented easily enough with a filesystem driver. Coupled with namespaces you certainly can do this transparently in a multi-user system. Memory protection helped reducing the cost of context switches, and certainly there has been a variety of sins carried out as a result of it being possible to pass data all over the place without paying much attention to it. But it's not that integral to the things that make AmigaOS unique. With respect to ARM systems, AROS runs on ARM (and x86, PPC, m68k) and AROS is relatively close to parity with the lastest AmigaOS releases (including features from the 4.x series for PPC). I think at least one AROS distribution has images for Raspberry Pi for example. If nothing else it's a good place to get a feel for how some of it works.
  - pekk 11y ago
    You could have said the same thing about Apple's PC business (with its small, hardcore audience) before it got a new lease on life with phones. Not only does brand matter, but people have reasons to prefer certain design characteristics.
btbuilder 11y ago
The Amiga was a reliable well-polished machine when it was released. This, like most "vintage" computing projects can't be for more than the love of the machine.
- batou 11y ago
  I owned one for a bit (A500 and A1500). AS I was in the UK, this was wiped out by the Acorn Archimedes coming on the scene. I can't say I ever "loved" it nor found it reliable. By 1998 it looked quaint compared to NT4 etc.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  >Amiga was a reliable well-polished machine Stop deluding yourself, Commodore had a ton of reliability problems. Amigas came from factory with electrolytic capacitors soldered backwards! (and afaik they were also backwards on the factory diagram).
  - btbuilder 11y ago
    shrug - I can't say I am deluding myself when I am unaware of reliability problems with my somewhat limited exposure. None of my friends who owned Amigas at the time complained about them (A1200/A600 era).
- rbanffy 11y ago
  > The Amiga was a reliable Stop right there. Multitasking without memory protection and reliability do not go well together. It was a fun machine, but reliable it was not.

by batou 11y ago

chx 11y ago

There is something then the current computers do not provide. Whatever it is, there seems to be a business niche for someone who deciphers what it is.

to3m 11y ago
What current computers don't do is remind ex Amiga users of what it was like when they were in their teens and/or twenties. Difficult problem to solve...
- vidarh 11y ago
  While nostalgia is part of it, the Amiga had a special feel to it that is still not met to me by mainstream OSs. I'm occasionally involved in AROS in the hope of getting something that gets finished enough to let me use it. Things like Datatypes (gaining instant ability to read any image format into any viewer or editor by dropping a library into the right directory), XPK (gaining instant support for any compression library everywhere), pervasive AREXX support (Linux is slowly getting something similar with dbus, but in comparison to AREXX ports dbus is overcomplicated), screens (sort of like virtual desktops/spaces, but could be private or public and named), responsiveness (e.g. by default widgets and input handling were running in different tasks/threads to the applications, and so would remain responsive even when your app was doing stupid stuff), or the device/filesystem model which was frequently exploited (e.g. the editor FrexxEd exports the open buffers in a custom filesystem, so that on limited memory systems you could process the content of the buffers with external programs - like your compiler - without having to save it to T: (the equivalent of /tmp), which was usually assigned to the ramdisk), or assigns - creating dynamic drive/volume labels (less important now, but I could e.g. "list music0:" and get prompted specifically for the disk with the label "music0"), or "joining" multiple paths together under a single name. E.g. LIBS:xpk.library would find xpk.library in whichever path it was as long as that path had been added to the LIBS: assign. There are many little things. None of them sufficient for me to be willing to use AmigaOS now, but many of them things I still miss.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Is there a good book on the design of AmigaOS that explains these things? It sounds like a lot of them are side effects of being a multitasking but not multi-user or memory-protected OS, so you could teleport data into other programs without concern. It would be interesting to try and forward-port these aspects of AmigaOS to an ARM system.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      There were the developer manuals, but you will need to find someone willing to get rid of them.
      - pjc50 11y ago
        They seem to be online, along with people selling devkit CDs: http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node0003.html http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui... / http://www.vesalia.de/e_developer2.htm http://www.vesalia.de/e_developer2.htm But I was hoping for something with a little more of the design rationale. Maybe this is what I'm looking for. http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262017202 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/026...
    - vidarh 11y ago
      I don't know of any good books that specifically contrasts the advantages of the AmigaOS design with modern designs, unfortunately. A lot of these things won't have been spelled out in books at the time because it seemed obvious once you'd used an Amiga for a while. Some of them certainly expect single-user. I think Linux etc. loses out quite a bit by not differentiating between single user (in terms of "person in front of the machine is most important, regardless of uid) and multi-user systems. Some of it could be emulated by tweaking priorities. But others require a large change in how you think about applications. E.g. the widget ("gadget" in Amiga-speak) responsiveness largely comes from the OS threads carrying out updates of them. To do the same in an X app for example, you'd need your app to explicitly start a separate thread to forward events to your main thread, and have a mechanism for giving it higher priority. It's not that hard to do, but without libraries providing wrappers for it, it won't happen often. Other things, like the assigns could be implemented easily enough with a filesystem driver. Coupled with namespaces you certainly can do this transparently in a multi-user system. Memory protection helped reducing the cost of context switches, and certainly there has been a variety of sins carried out as a result of it being possible to pass data all over the place without paying much attention to it. But it's not that integral to the things that make AmigaOS unique. With respect to ARM systems, AROS runs on ARM (and x86, PPC, m68k) and AROS is relatively close to parity with the lastest AmigaOS releases (including features from the 4.x series for PPC). I think at least one AROS distribution has images for Raspberry Pi for example. If nothing else it's a good place to get a feel for how some of it works.
- pekk 11y ago
  You could have said the same thing about Apple's PC business (with its small, hardcore audience) before it got a new lease on life with phones. Not only does brand matter, but people have reasons to prefer certain design characteristics.

btbuilder 11y ago

The Amiga was a reliable well-polished machine when it was released. This, like most "vintage" computing projects can't be for more than the love of the machine.

batou 11y ago
I owned one for a bit (A500 and A1500). AS I was in the UK, this was wiped out by the Acorn Archimedes coming on the scene. I can't say I ever "loved" it nor found it reliable. By 1998 it looked quaint compared to NT4 etc.
rasz_pl 11y ago
>Amiga was a reliable well-polished machine Stop deluding yourself, Commodore had a ton of reliability problems. Amigas came from factory with electrolytic capacitors soldered backwards! (and afaik they were also backwards on the factory diagram).
- btbuilder 11y ago
  shrug - I can't say I am deluding myself when I am unaware of reliability problems with my somewhat limited exposure. None of my friends who owned Amigas at the time complained about them (A1200/A600 era).
rbanffy 11y ago
> The Amiga was a reliable Stop right there. Multitasking without memory protection and reliability do not go well together. It was a fun machine, but reliable it was not.