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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#111

Post by pjmlp »

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…

For those not following up with Windows development, all major new Windows APIS since XP are ActiveX aka COM aka WinRT aka UWP.

COM is pretty much alive and was modernised with .NET type system.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#112

Post by ddingus »

mattmcknight wrote: post #7
burlesona wrote: post #3

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…

Whatever got us the Internet was worth it. To generalize, it's fine to have a variety of components, as long as the interface between them is roughly standardized, and the innovation can come in the components. That we can have a Playstation and an iPhone use the same network is a good thing, and they can do whatever they want with the rest of the stack. A computer pre-internet felt a lot more like an island. I had a…

I was in a similar scenario during those times. I did end up with internet gateway access in the very late 80s, which helped a lot.

Speaking of islands though, check out this FujiNet thing!

https://fujinet.online/

Turns out, Atari 8-bit computers have device independent I/O.

Suddenly, all those little islands are connected, and people are writing games in basic, playing together online.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#113

Post by 7thaccount »

tsm_sf wrote: post #82
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

The older I get, the more our devotion to the CLI feels like gatekeeping.

I don't see it that way. My first computer used Win95 and I didn't get into CLI until college and then seriously at work. I'm not a Unix expert, but am blown away by how much more powerful it is than Windows in many uses. I even push files to a Linux server for analysis at times as I can tear through a file with grep/cut/awk/sort/uniq and some pipes very quickly and efficiently. There are many other technologies I know, yet the simple terminal is still the best approach for many of my uses. The design has stood the test of time for a reason and the compositional approach is nice. Nobody is gatekeeping here.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#114

Post by jl6 »

burlesona wrote: post #3

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…

This is the way of the world in microcosm. When globalization has smeared all cultures together, and the only languages left are English, Spanish, and Mandarin, the world will be far more interoperable - but at the cost of every other independent niche society. I’m not actually saying it’s not worth it.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#115

Post by zmix »

vidarh wrote: post #69
zmix wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's pretty cool and innovative! I didn't know that (though, I remember hearing about FrexxEd). I was a GoldED guy ;-)

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#116

Post by the_af »

pjmlp wrote: post #101
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gatekeeping from what? Linux is a server OS.

Finally given up on "Year of Desktop Linux"?

The year of Desktop Linux arrived for me about a decade ago. Now I work, game, watch movies, edit graphics and photos, all on Linux.

I like and want the powerful combination of the CLI and GUI applications.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#117

Post by LeoPanthera »

smcl wrote: post #65

I just can’t get over how those original Amiga screenshots always look stretched vertically. That would have driven me insane.

It's because the default screen resolutions are PAL (or NTSC), so they have double-height pixels to avoid interlacing.

Regular progressive screen modes are also available (some may require the installation of a graphics card), and if you're using a much higher resolution, increasing the workbench font size also makes all the widgets bigger.

High-DPI before high-DPI.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#118

Post by justforyou »

masswerk wrote: post #107
mixmastamyk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Option + click on Mac…

Command + click.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#119

Post by LeoPanthera »

timbit42 wrote: post #85
29athrowaway wrote: post #39

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

Can you create a RAD: device and reboot instantly from it, like the Amiga could?

Only by cheating, you can save the contents of a tmpfs to disk on shutdown, and then restore it on boot. This can be done with a systemd unit or an init script.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#120

Post by twic »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #68
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.

In Cinnamon on Linux, the scrollbars in Firefox, Terminal, and Xreader are all proportional, and jump directly on left-click. Shift-click moves one page.
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