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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#121

Post by mrwh »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #46
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…

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…

AMOS! I swapped my copy of Easy AMOS with a school friend's copy of AMOS Professional. It set me on a path to becoming a professional software engineer. (Later, I swapped AMOS for Amiga E. Anyone remember that?)

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#122

Post by abrowne »

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.

Chromium does this on Linux (at least I assume a three finger trackpad tap is middle click). IIRC, Qt apps show a menu with a "scroll to here" option.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#123

Post by josteink »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #119
timbit42 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then it’s not a RAD disk but just a HDD boot which preloads things into RAM.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#124

Post by smallstepforman »

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

BeOS (and by extension Haiku) has Translators: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheTranslationKi... Supports image, text, sound, streaming, etc.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#125

Post by pjmlp »

the_af wrote: post #116
pjmlp wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Finally met one of the happy 1% from Steam surveys.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#126

Post by CyberDildonics »

jacobush wrote: post #95
CyberDildonics wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to go watch that stuff again before you make your mind up. It is still impressive however that some of these amiga + lightwave effects were done with 12MB of RAM.

But for the time it looked OK, especially on the typical bedroom 14" CRT.

He wasn't stating how it looked for the time, he was comparing it to star trek: the next generation, which used models and was shot on film while even high budget CG was still in its infancy.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#127

Post by EvanAnderson »

ithkuil wrote: post #90
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use. 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

Few people complain about them because there are so many new-to-computers users who don't have enough experience to appreciate the value of default-visible, proportionally-sized scrollbar thumbs. We're in some kind of awful eternal-September of user interfaces world where experienced users get to suffer through new developers, eager to leave their mark by making "modern" user interfaces re-learn all the old lessons.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#128

Post by Jedd »

ithkuil wrote: post #90
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use. 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

> Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains ...

I'm curious where you're getting your numbers for that claim.

In Microsoft Word, f.e, there's a lot of questions around how to disable the auto-hiding, and I believe the only remedy is to disable auto-hiding of all scrollbars within Windows 10 itself (it's under the accessibility setting hierarchy, weirdly).

There's myriad native & web applications that choose to hide these, and they're an endless source of frustration for people that would like them present, but find they are not, and subsequently find there's no convenient way to disable the auto-hide, and then lose interest in filing yet another bug / feature request.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#129

Post by floatboth »

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

Usually it's not really about speed, you usually want tmpfs on /tmp /var/tmp /var/run etc. to just specifically avoid persistence.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#130

Post by CyberDildonics »

7thaccount wrote: post #98
CyberDildonics wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to go watch that stuff again before you make your mind up. It is still impressive however that some of these amiga + lightwave effects were done with 12MB of RAM.

I rewatch B5 every few years. It still looks great with some exceptions (Vorlon planet killer looks like it didn't get much time).

Originally you made a comparison to Star Trek.
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