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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#171

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

pjmlp wrote: post #131
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything "has been done before" in computing. The difference is a matter of degree and attention to detail. And your comment about it having been a thing on mainframes underscores my point. The server story for Linux is evolving (and maturing) greatly, and very quickly. The Linux of today is not at all like the Linux from 2010. To say that Linux is stuck in some sort of legacy UNIX quagmire is just silly.

So what ideas are actually new, introduced by Linux crowd, instead of copied from either older UNIXes or mainframes?

Did you read my comment? There are no "new" ideas in computing. Everything has already been invented in the 1960's. It's the finesse of execution that matters, not ideas.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#172

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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"?

I've been running desktop Linux for 20 years, but this isn't a hill I'm gonna die on. Kernel and userland developers treat Linux as a server OS first and foremost, and that's where the funding goes.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#173

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

reaperducer wrote: post #133
ithkuil wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use. Complain to whom? 99.9999% of technology users have zero clue how to even begin to find out how to complain.

I complained to MS about a serious performance issue. Even finding out how took time. Nothing happened. I reported it slightly differently. Nothing happened. I spent several hours overall, all completely ignored. I no longer consider bug reports to MS to be worth anything.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#174

Post by Corrado »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #47

After Switching from Amiga to PC, I missed the RAM disk for a long time for some reason. It has been so long ago now that I cannot remember my workflows that well anymore. But I seem to remember that the RAM disk was a really natural part of my workflow. I also remember how us Amiga users got really used to that you could set the layering of Windows specifically.

I feel the same way. The RAM disk was so important for daily operations that I couldn't imagine not having it, yet I don't even think about it today.

Speaking of layering windows (screens?) I specifically remember having 3 different resolutions open at the same time: normal (Workbench), HiRes (DPaint), LowRes (terminal). It was kinda magical to do all of those things at once and switch between them. Ahhh, memories...

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#175

Post by HacklesRaised »

Well, it doesn't introduce anything novel but perhaps it is time for a new personal computer revolution. Raspberry PI 400 running Risc OS gives a taste of what the Archimedies was capable of, lots of problems too, but they are certainly addressable, and it is somewhat refreshing to see the performance of modest hardware using an OS that is designed for a single user, a taste of what a users experience was like in the Amiga era.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#176

Post by ithkuil »

reaperducer wrote: post #133
ithkuil wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use. Complain to whom? 99.9999% of technology users have zero clue how to even begin to find out how to complain.

my anecdata: when my family members complain about confusing things with computers the question "how do I know if there are more things down the page" is rarely the problem.

By far the most frequent issue is "where did that file I just saved go?" followed by "how do I forward this and that together?" and "it doesn't work! I didn't do anything. Yes, it asked me something and I clicked something but I don't remember, but I didn't do anything"

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#177

Post by nix23 »

pjmlp wrote: post #11
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…

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…

>NeXTSTEP, Solaris/NeWS, Irix, Plan 9/Inferno.

With the Exemption of Plan9 all the OS's you named are pure Unixes. As a example FreeBSD is nearly a mirror of Solaris. Nexstep was pure BSD with a Mach Kernel (OO development was the great seller on NextStep)...Irix? Well OpenGL and XFS is available under Linux.

>iOS, macOS, Android, Windows (UWP), GenodeOS, Fuchsia, Haiku, Azure Sphere for the pursuit of modern ideas in OS research

Haiku modern?? BeOS is 25 years old.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#178

Post by robsan »

mrwh wrote: post #121
socialdemocrat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Sure, I loved Amiga E, coded some utils (still up on aminet) and even some demoscene stuff (file packer, music-disk and slideshow for a friend's art).

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#179

Post by the_af »

blub wrote: post #170
the_af wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point of "Linux on the desktop" was not that it happens for you and the other commenter, but that Linux becomes mainstream. :) Never happened and unless something extraordinary occurs it likely never will. And Android doesn't count, obviously.

True. But it also has the connotation that Linux is "not good enough" for the desktop, and this is false. Popularity has a lot of factors, sadly. A user-friendly Linux like Ubuntu is indeed "good enough" and has been so for years.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#180

Post by pjmlp »

nix23 wrote: post #177
pjmlp wrote: post #11

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…

>NeXTSTEP, Solaris/NeWS, Irix, Plan 9/Inferno. With the Exemption of Plan9 all the OS's you named are pure Unixes. As a example FreeBSD is nearly a mirror of Solaris. Nexstep was pure BSD with a Mach Kernel (OO development was the great seller on NextStep)...Irix? Well OpenGL and XFS is available under Linux. >iOS, macOS, Android, Windows (UWP), GenodeOS, Fuchsia, Haiku, Azure Sphere for the pursuit of modern ideas i…

Narrowing your understanding to the kernel delivered with the UNIX variants that I mentioned, only reveals lack of understanding of what the user and developer experience feels like in such OSes.

Hint, it goes beyond doing CLI applications and daemons.

BeOS is 25 years older and 25 years younger than UNIX, yes modern.

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