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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#21

Post by stutonk »

BruceEel wrote: post #19
stutonk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like a union mount?

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#22

Post by njharman »

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.

People don't know or underestimate how much Unix has taken over. From cellphones to super computers. From consumer devices to industrial control. Unix servers made and continue to run the internet, aka everything.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#23

Post by BruceEel »

stutonk wrote: post #21
BruceEel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like a union mount?

No direct experience with union mounts (I'm on Mac) but it sounds like those would do the trick.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#24

Post by mhd »

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

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#26

Post by stutonk »

BruceEel wrote: post #23
stutonk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a union mount?

No direct experience with union mounts (I'm on Mac) but it sounds like those would do the trick.

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?

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#27

Post by EvanAnderson »

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#28

Post by zozbot234 »

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#29

Post by StanislavPetrov »

>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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#30

Post by adamnemecek »

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.

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