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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#11

Post by pjmlp »

burlesona wrote: post #3

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 t…

Personally I prefer the plethora of OSes approach, and I never been a big UNIX fan to start with.

Yes it does have a couple of nice ideas, and it was much better to use than Windows 3.x + MS-DOS, but that is about it.

All the UNIX based OSes that I really appreciate, have moved beyond it, namely NeXTSTEP, Solaris/NeWS, Irix, Plan 9/Inferno.

Thankfully only BSD and GNU/Linux are stuck into being a continuum of UNIX clones without much to add, when you see their conferences it always boils down to kernel features or filesystems.

GNU/Linux has the ingredients to make an Amiga like desktop experience, with D-BUS, GNOME/KDE, but the fragmentation and love for POSIX CLI applications just doesn't make it worthwhile to try to make it work.

Look at iOS, macOS, Android, Windows (UWP), GenodeOS, Fuchsia, Haiku, Azure Sphere for the pursuit of modern ideas in OS research. The fact that some of those have a POSIX like kernel (or deeply customise Linux kernel) it is just an implementation detail of the overall architecture.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#13

Post by 7thaccount »

gdubs wrote: post #6

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 magazin…

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#14

Post by patterns »

Ekaros wrote: post #4
burlesona wrote: post #3

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 t…

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…

This reminds of Robert Pike's "Systems Research is Irrelevant" speech [1]. Now, 20 years after his speech, we are still stuck with the same notions (such as everything being a string). It's not that there are not plenty of alternatives around, however, expectations are so high that it's almost impossible to make a new computer system economically viable. On the other hand, the hacker and maker scene is very active, some of them building operating systems and hardware such as tiny Lisp-based machines [2] and OSes [3]. (My only gripe is that most of the new "avant-garde" systems are still text/file-based.)

I'd love to see a next wave in personal computing, starting with a clean slate, building on the research, insights and learning from the mistakes that have been made. I have no doubt that it will happen, the question is only when.

As for interoperability: Even on the same platform there are countless problems getting software to talk to each other, so I don't think that a new system will make the situation any worse.

[1] http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

[2] https://www.tindie.com/products/lutherjohnson/makerlisp-ez80...

[3] https://mezzanos.herokuapp.com/

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#16

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Ekaros wrote: post #4
burlesona wrote: post #3

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 t…

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…

Yes, it's not either/or. The web is a kind of meta-OS with a very minimal and simple API, and as far as the web is concerned everything in userland operates as a thin-client. The OS is only of interest locally.

By the mid-90s I was furious with both Microsoft and Apple for setting computing back by at least a decade.

You could - with extreme effort - make an Atari ST multitask. And of course with the Amiga it was built in.

So why did we throw that away and go backwards to DOS and then single-process Windows - which eventually reinvented multitasking nearly a decade later and sold it as if it was the most astounding development in the history of computing?

Of course there were technical challenges - protected memory, protected processes, and so on. But the earliest versions of Windows didn't have those either.

So it was a disappointing and frustrating time - an alienating difference of philosophy between consumer computing designed for creativity and exploration, and box-shifting commodity computing designed for form-filling and bureaucracy, which might allow you to have some fun after hours if you behaved yourself and the machine didn't crash.

Considering how smart the Amiga team were, it would have been very interesting to see what they could have done with ubiquitous fast networking, high-res graphics and video, and pocketability.

I suspect the result would have been far more open and inspiring than the corporate sand trap we have today.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#17

Post by mrob »

hvs wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#18

Post by richardjdare »

pjmlp wrote: post #5
hvs wrote: post #2

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

It does exist in Windows, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wic/-wic-lh https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions//dd443207... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/customi... and in macOS, https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Gr... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Mu... Although, yes I do concede it is more complex to implement, the w…

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#19

Post by BruceEel »

stutonk wrote: post #15
BruceEel wrote: post #12

Anno 2020, I still miss ASSIGN ... ADD.

export VAR="$VAR:whatever else"

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#20

Post by pjmlp »

swiley wrote: post #9
Ekaros wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Most of the "new" Linux ideas you will find them in the mainframes world.
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