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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#161

Post by antod »

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…

I have vague memories of named pipes between GUI programs that also went along with datatypes.

eg in the file dialog of GUI app 1 saving a file to something (I forget the details) like PIPE:foo, then in GUI app 2 opening that data from PIPE:foo without it having to go to disk (I suppose when you're dealing only with floppies that is a bigger deal than now).

Am I hallucinating? ;)

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#162

Post by madhadron »

an_opabinia wrote: post #45
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…

Prior to the iPhone we were “standardized” on resistive touch screens, which sucked compared to the iPhone’s capacitive screen. Not because a stylus was a good way to use a portable device, and not because capacitive touch screen technology was unknown - it was invented long ago. It’s because of cost. You’re just conflating standardization with cost cutting. If there was a cheap and easy to install OS in that era the…

> Not because a stylus was a good way to use a portable device

I personally love using a stylus, have have back to my old Palm Pilot days.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#163

Post by moron4hire »

madhadron wrote: post #162
an_opabinia wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to the iPhone we were “standardized” on resistive touch screens, which sucked compared to the iPhone’s capacitive screen. Not because a stylus was a good way to use a portable device, and not because capacitive touch screen technology was unknown - it was invented long ago. It’s because of cost. You’re just conflating standardization with cost cutting. If there was a cheap and easy to install OS in that era the…

> Not because a stylus was a good way to use a portable device I personally love using a stylus, have have back to my old Palm Pilot days.

Resistive digitizers also didn't freak and and refuse to function at all if your fingers were sightly damp. Hence why you'll see a lot of point-of-sale systems in bars using resistive digitizers for their displays.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#164

Post by [deleted] »

cutitout wrote: post #93

I love how the circuit diagrams were part of the manuals. Admittedly, an Amiga 500 was vastly less complex than a modern computer, but still: what today companies like Apple want to keep under wraps, so not everybody can just repair anything easily, everyone got whether they wanted/needed it or not. Amiga nostalgia isn't just nostalgia, the Amiga was great. From age 10 to 14 most of my life revolved around my Amiga 5…

[deleted]

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#165

Post by tasogare »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #16
Ekaros wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm personally bit horrified with is that "Unix" is the end all of OS design and so on. With some fundamental designs going back to 70s... Like everything being text. Which seems quite a mess in current world with multimedia and increased networking. Yes we have spend decades hacking to get it to work... But maybe more options and different designs would enrich us lot better. And really we do have layer that can…

Yes, it's not either/or. The web is a kind of meta-OS with a very minimal and simple API, and as far as the web is concerned everything in userland operates as a thin-client. The OS is only of interest locally. By the mid-90s I was furious with both Microsoft and Apple for setting computing back by at least a decade. You could - with extreme effort - make an Atari ST multitask. And of course with the Amiga it was bui…

> The web is a kind of meta-OS with a very minimal and simple API

You may have missed the last 20 years of Web evolution, because the Web is now a very messy and hard to implement platform. Even Microsoft gave up on implementing a browser and switched to Chromium.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#166

Post by tasogare »

jl6 wrote: post #114
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.

The idea that English (in this case Spanish and Mandarin as well) will kill all other languages is debious and forget a very important fact: through most of history and in a lot of places bilingualism is the norm. Current examples are some African countries where languages local are spoken and French is used as vehicular language; Standard Chinese while people speak another Sinitic language. What is likely to happen is more people being proficient in a second or even third languages (like it is in Hong Kong).

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#167

Post by pvg »

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…

The incompatibilities just moved to different places, where the focus of development and competition is. Taken collectively, the various core services of mobile devices, desktop OS's and browsers interoperate very poorly across vendors. Think about stuff like identity, auth, sync; even very basic cases - e.g. user using a couple of Apple devices one of which is a macOS laptop where they run Chrome - are an incomprehensible mess of incompatibility to most non-nerd users.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#168

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #164
cutitout wrote: post #93

I love how the circuit diagrams were part of the manuals. Admittedly, an Amiga 500 was vastly less complex than a modern computer, but still: what today companies like Apple want to keep under wraps, so not everybody can just repair anything easily, everyone got whether they wanted/needed it or not. Amiga nostalgia isn't just nostalgia, the Amiga was great. From age 10 to 14 most of my life revolved around my Amiga 5…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#169

Post by pjmlp »

jzwinck wrote: post #149
pjmlp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How about recvmmsg? I never saw that before Linux, and haven't been able to find a reference to anything similar on say AIX or Solaris.

Really?

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/re...

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#170

Post by blub »

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.

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.
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