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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#31

Post by LeoPanthera »

adamnemecek wrote: post #30

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 fe…

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#32

Post by LeoPanthera »

7thaccount wrote: post #13
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.

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#34

Post by sime2009 »

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?

Yes, a lot like a union mount except that it was read only and easy to modify.

Assigns were often used for things that we today would stuff into an environment variable to represent an array of paths. Instead of an environment variable for setting the search path for shared libraries, on the Amiga you would just setup `LIBS:` and an application could find its libraries by opening `LIBS:MyFoo.library`. Similar story for $PATH. Amiga has `PATH:` which "contained" all of the executables in your path. Unlike unix style environment variables, assigns were system wide. (Amiga was a single user system.)

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#35

Post by rektide »

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#36

Post by BruceEel »

stutonk wrote: post #26
BruceEel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hol…

Yes, it was indeed implemented at OS-level, you could point at the assigned name/alias from, say, a paint program and find the files/dirs you'd expect to see. Changes to files/dirs too worked as expected as far as I can recall (disclaimer: most recent Amiga experience -> 1994). It was also possible to create assigns programmatically with calls to the Amiga DOS library, see "dos.library/AssignPath" in http://amiga.nvg.org/amiga/reference/Includes_and_Autodocs_2...

    NAME
     AssignPath -- Creates an assignment to a specified path (V36)
    
       SYNOPSIS
     success = AssignPath(name,path)
     D0                    D1   D2
    
     BOOL AssignPath(STRPTR,STRPTR)
    
       FUNCTION
     Sets up a assignment that is expanded upon EACH reference to the name.
     This is implemented through a new device list type (DLT_ASSIGNPATH, or
     some such).  The path (a string) would be attached to the node.  When
     the name is referenced (Open("FOO:xyzzy"...), the string will be used
     to determine where to do the open.  No permanent lock will be part of
     it.  For example, you could AssignPath() c2: to df2:c, and references
     to c2: would go to df2:c, even if you change disks.
    
     The other major advantage is assigning things to unmounted volumes,
     which will be requested upon access (useful in startup sequences).
    
       INPUTS
     name - Name of device to be assigned (without trailing ':')
     path - Name of late assignment to be resolved at each reference
    
       RESULT
     success - Success/failure indicator of the operation
    
       SEE ALSO
     AssignAdd(), AssignLock(), AssignLate(), Open()

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#37

Post by antiterra »

Yuioup wrote: post #33

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?

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#38

Post by ithkuil »

njharman wrote: post #22
swiley wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This! Also, we take now many unix abstractions so much for granted that when they occur in different places we assume it's just convergent evolution.
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