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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#51
post #49
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemd is nothing new, Linux copying comercial UNIXes and Windows/VMS, with the community dumping hate left and right on the authors. cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.

SystemD is like Solaris service manager, but far worse. And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but much, much, MUCH better.

It is called LPAR.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#52
I sold my very first piece of software (aged 13) leveraging the Amiga RAD disk.

It was called ‘RADBench’ and essentially installed a mini version of Workbench into the recoverable RAM disk, so you could work better with floppy-based files by having key executables in memory.

It’s still out there somewhere on the Internets.

Ah happy memories dear old Amiga.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#53
post #49
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemd is nothing new, Linux copying comercial UNIXes and Windows/VMS, with the community dumping hate left and right on the authors. cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.

SystemD is like Solaris service manager, but far worse. And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but much, much, MUCH better.

What made Solaris sm better? Curious as I never used that one.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#54
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Unity among a much smaller group is easier and more likely than a larger group

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#55
post #20
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.

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

I think this is largely a factor of PCs getting more powerful and the lag to libre implementations. Trying to build container infrastructure during the pentium 90 days wouldn’t have succeeded.

See “the innovators dilemma” for the process.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#56
> Any command that evaluates to a valid path will automatically change the current working directory to that path

You can get similar behaviour on Unix shells with options like:

• zsh: `setopt auto_cd`

• bash: `shopt -s autocd`

• tcsh: `set implicitcd`

I think fish has it by default but only for paths prefixed with tilde, ., /, etc.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#57
post #4

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…

Good enough, cheap, source code available wins in the long term. Also worse is better. But even worse was a lot better than DOS.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#59

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…

I think the issue is that, from a user perspective, the implementation details of the kernel and base OS doesn’t matter. As long as it’s sanely implemented and doesn’t impose onerous limitations, it should just get out of the way. The vendor can implement it however they like, with whatever technologies they like, and as long as it supports featureful applications users shouldn’t need to care.

The reason Unix was so successful was precisely because it was simple and portable a d designed to get out of the way. It was as unremarkable as possible, by design. All the interesting stuff is left to application developers. You want to implement a relational file system, go ahead. You want to develop your own GUI layer, fine. Compared to the other major OSes of the day like VMS, Pick, PrimeOS, etc it’s as unoppinionated as possible. Likewise with C, which is intended to be as low level and paradigmless as they could. Just an abstraction over assembler just as Unix is a thin abstraction over the hardware.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#60
A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time.

I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's "mobile first" UX regime, we now have many desktop experiences that hide the scrollbars entirely—revealing them only on interaction—wholly removing any at-a-glance utility we enjoyed from proportional bars.

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