81–90 of 198 posts
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cl…
Looks like you missed the whole systemd and cgroups thing. The two are huge and novel developments in OS design, and much more significant than the GUI flimflam you pine for. (Yeah, Linux is a server OS, not news.)
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…
Yeah that is my impression too. Always got the impression that PCs, Macs and Nintendo was bigger in the US. Growing up in Norway in the 80s I remember the Commodore 64 and Amiga really dominated the home computer scene. We used to read computer magazines from Sweden, so it must have been big there too. Pretty much nobody used Macs. Schools used a home grown Norwegian computer system called Tiki, with these odd keyboa…
In contrast, Commodore systems were huge in Canada, where I live. All the schools here had 8-bit Commodore systems from the PET to the C64 era. This meant a lot of homes had the VIC-20 and C64. I only knew 1 person in my school with an Apple II and one with an Atari 800XL. Many of the Commodore owners upgraded to Amigas, especially once the Amiga 500 came out. Of course, Canada had 1/10th the population so there weren't as many Amigas as in the US, but a higher percentage of the population had them.
You can create a ramdisk in Linux by using "tmpfs" as the file system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs Sometimes you can mount /tmp as tmpfs to have an extremely fast /tmp partition. You can make the change permanent via /etc/fstab
You can create a ramdisk in Linux by using "tmpfs" as the file system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs Sometimes you can mount /tmp as tmpfs to have an extremely fast /tmp partition. You can make the change permanent via /etc/fstab
Yeah, that's why it was great.
For me, ARexx and Datatypes still stand out. A standard scripting language with standard interfaces into all your desktop software is a magnificent tool, and one that common desktop OSes still don't have.
Datatypes meant that every program could open relevant data; again, something you can't rely on even 30 years later on your desktop OS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eerily similar to openvms logical name search lists
Netware had named volumes as well, aka SYS: Felt like a good compromise between DOS drive letters and Unix single root.
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…
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…
> revealing them only on interaction but you can't interact with them except by bringing the mouse over the right side, and you can't see them so you literally have lost a visual cue of the very thing you want to interact with. It's just amazing.
Touchpads with two finger scroll and mouse with scroll wheels have turned scrolling into a gesture that doesn't necessarily require UI element, in pretty much the same way that a physical keyboard is just there for you to type on and doesn't pop up in existence when you have a focused input field