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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#61

Post by pjc50 »

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

The Windows equivalent is/was COM and in particlar OLE ("object linking and embedding"). With appropriate DLLs you can make a new file format and drag-and-drop a file into Word and open it inside Word.

The peak of this was ActiveX; in Microsoft's world around 2000, they really wanted you to be able to embed controls and programs in web pages and then put those web pages everywhere, including on the desktop background ("active desktop").

The problem of running third-party code inside your application is not just security but it tends to crash bady and put the name of the hosting application on the crash. Eventually Microsoft got so fed up with that, especially in the kernel, they built a system where video drivers could crash and restart while the OS kept on trucking, and use of COM has faded.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#62

Post by toyg »

zozbot234 wrote: post #28

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. au…

> it would be quite useful for a number of things

Would it really, though? CDROM are basically dead, what are you going to ask: "please connect another internet cable?"

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#63

Post by toyg »

pjc50 wrote: post #61
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

The Windows equivalent is/was COM and in particlar OLE ("object linking and embedding"). With appropriate DLLs you can make a new file format and drag-and-drop a file into Word and open it inside Word. The peak of this was ActiveX; in Microsoft's world around 2000, they really wanted you to be able to embed controls and programs in web pages and then put those web pages everywhere, including on the desktop background…

> The Windows equivalent is/was COM and in particlar OLE [...] it tends to crash badly

The mistake was implementing this stuff in C++, which is way too fragile on its own. Had they built a separate VM to manage requests for these objects, it would have been no problem: VM crashes, host app just restarts it. But Java did not exist yet and VMs were not really a thing, resources were too scarce.

I do think the ideas behind COM/OLE were pretty good, unfortunately real development on desktop OSes basically stopped mid-'00s so we might never know what it could have been.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#64

Post by WillFlux »

29athrowaway wrote: post #40

The Amiga has a very impressive demoscene... Two Amiga demos that I like from The Black Lotus (TBL): - Eon (2019): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc (4:16 is my favorite part) - Starstruck (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM

Both great demos. I recommend watching Eon from the Revision 2019 Amiga compo stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwoyfH7TgEQ&feature=youtu.be...

Hearing the crowd react definitely adds to this one!

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#66

Post by reaperducer »

One little thing that I always liked about the Amiga was that it could show human dates.

I never owned one, but my friend had an Amiga 1000, and I remember the directory listing had dates like "Last Thursday," or "Christmas, 1990," or "An hour ago."

I don't know if that was part of the stock Amiga OS, or an add-on, but it was awfully cool.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#67

Post by vidarh »

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…

That seems limited to specific types of media, though. Datatypes is a general purpose framework for creating a hierarchy of parsers for file formats.

It can be images or sound, but also text, or anything else. E.g. here's a small sample of datatypes from Aminet, excluding anything sound and graphics related:

* Datatypes for transparent decompression

* Datatypes for syntax highlighting

* Datatypes for parsing document formats (word etc.)

* Assorted hypertext datatypes

* Assorted datatypes for showing debug information and structure of various binary formats, like executables.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#68

Post by mixmastamyk »

bhauer wrote: post #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 m…

It’s even weirder when you realize how much more resolution we have now.

A favorite implementation of mine was 4dwm on SGI. You could middle-click on the trough and it would go directly there, rather than the normal paging by left-click. Still try to use it everywhere and am disappointed.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#69

Post by vidarh »

zmix wrote: post #41
EvanAnderson wrote: post #27

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 a…

Oh, yes! Sys:> mount IMAP: or the no-brainer Ram Disk.

My favourite is FrexxEd (co-authored by the author of curl) - a text editor - that exposed all open buffers as files, so you could run script directly on the contents of the open buffer.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#70

Post by s4n1ty »

I had an Atari 800XL, then a 520STfm, then a Falcon 030.

Back in those days there was quite a bit of tribal rivalry between Atari and Amigas - but I have to admit that the Amiga's OS was way ahead of Atari's, which didn't even get true multitasking until the Falcon (which almost nobody bought).

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