Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

datagubbe.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–27 of 27 posts

Re: Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

#21

Post by vidarh »

dansalvato wrote: post #15

The Amiga I grew up with only ever had AmigaOS 1.3, but I’ve heard a lot of praise surrounding ARexx, a scripting language that I believe shipped with 2.0 and later. From the AmigaOS wiki: > The ARexx programming language can act as a central hub through which applications - even those created by different companies - can exchange data and commands. For example, using ARexx you can instruct a telecommunications packa…

As a language Arexx was pretty awful, but the pervasiveness of Arexx ports and user expectation that "everything" should be accessible to script made it immensely useful anyway.

E.g dbus on Linux is comparatively underused because the threshold to using it is too high.

Re: Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

#22

Post by EvanAnderson »

vidarh wrote: post #21
dansalvato wrote: post #15

The Amiga I grew up with only ever had AmigaOS 1.3, but I’ve heard a lot of praise surrounding ARexx, a scripting language that I believe shipped with 2.0 and later. From the AmigaOS wiki: > The ARexx programming language can act as a central hub through which applications - even those created by different companies - can exchange data and commands. For example, using ARexx you can instruct a telecommunications packa…

As a language Arexx was pretty awful, but the pervasiveness of Arexx ports and user expectation that "everything" should be accessible to script made it immensely useful anyway. E.g dbus on Linux is comparatively underused because the threshold to using it is too high.

I think my unreasonable expectations for applications to be scriptable today comes from my experience with the Amiga.

I didn't know the words "interprocess communication" when I first encountered Arexx and Aress ports. I came from a mostly MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 background. I hadn't used much multitasking software up to that point.

Once I grokked why Arexx ports could be cool and useful I had a terrible time trying to explain them to non-"Amiga people". I remember a friend asking to be shown the "Arexx port" on my Amiga 1200 trying to explain it was a software construct and not a physical hardware device. I'm not sure if knowing the words "interprocess communication" would have helped, but it couldn't have hurt.

I feel like I've spent a significant part of my sysadmin career making dodgy hacks to bolt-on IPC functionality to applications that don't properly expose any. Fortunately it feels like it happens a lot less today than, say, 25 years ago.

Re: Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

#23

Post by johnklos »

mark_round wrote: post #4
doener wrote: post #2

The Amiga 500 and 1200 of my father were the first computers I got in touch with as a boy growing up in Germany in the 80s and early 90s. I think every generation feels more or less nostalgic about the things they grew up with. But oftentimes I get the impression that this is especially true for the Amiga community (in comparison to, let‘s say, people growing up with Ataris). If true, I wonder why this is.

I think it's the same reason I guess why people mourn e.g. BeOS. The Atari was a nice system, but it wasn't ground-breaking. The Amiga was decades ahead of it's time and could have been so much more if Commodore had any business-savvy. It's hard to overstate the impact of seeing an Amiga A500 in full flight, coming from the previous generation of 8-bit machines. It felt like it was straight from the future (and still…

This:

"Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head."

This is exactly what appeals so strongly to me about Amigas. This is so true that I run AmigaDOS on real Amiga hardware and also run NetBSD on Amiga hardware (the m68k instruction set is actually understandable to me).

There's something so real and tangible about being able to look at individual chips, know how they're connected to other things, know what they're doing, and imagine the work they're doing happening in real time. Modern computers, by comparison, are amazing collections of functional black boxes that mere humans can't directly touch (some can - but how many of us are working with the kinds of electronics that can interface with DDR5, or PCIe?), so they lack the approachability of hardware we can breadboard / wire wrap.

Re: Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

#24

Post by tadfisher »

richardjdare wrote: post #12
mark_round wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the same reason I guess why people mourn e.g. BeOS. The Atari was a nice system, but it wasn't ground-breaking. The Amiga was decades ahead of it's time and could have been so much more if Commodore had any business-savvy. It's hard to overstate the impact of seeing an Amiga A500 in full flight, coming from the previous generation of 8-bit machines. It felt like it was straight from the future (and still…

Yes, I grew up on the Amiga and think about this a lot myself. I think the Amiga occupied a sweet spot in the history of computing. You could kick out the operating system and hit the hardware directly like an 8-bit machine, but you also had a true multitasking OS, a lightweight GUI and a command line environment that approached Unix only on a much cheaper machine. And as you say, it was feasible to learn and master…

Our modern language runtimes want to be small and portable across platforms, so all the features someone might want in an accessible BASIC-prompt-like environment (drawing to the screen or playing a sound) are delegated to libraries. Libraries make the user engage in dependency management, so they have to create a project, learn Cargo or 'go dep' or npm, find out which packages to install that give them the APIs they need, learn those APIs through varying qualities of documentation, and finally figure out how to import and call those APIs in their program.

The best system for an all-inclusive programming environment like this, that one might feasibly already have on their system, is Emacs; this is because they've accumulated this stuff and made it available on every platform, so you truly can write a couple of lines of Emacs Lisp to draw an image or play a sound without getting into the arcaneries of dependency management. But even with Emacs you need to know the right incantation to get to a REPL or execute code from the *scratch* buffer, and your PC is never going to ship with a bootloader that jumps straight into Emacs.

Re: Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

#25

Post by ForOldHack »

jug wrote: post #9
wkjagt wrote: post #8

The Amiga was such an impressive computer for its time. I remember having an A500 when it was still fairly new, and compared to anything else out there it was way ahead in terms of graphics and sound. I had mine hooked up to an old amp and big speakers, and the sound that came out of this thing was amazing. Graphics were so colourful and fast scrolling too. It’s amazing to think that the Amiga series is only one gene…

Yes, it's so weird how that 7 MHz thing ran a perfectly usable graphical environment with a command line shell within the GUI and all. I had to wait another nine years for that to come to Windows in Windows 95. At least as impressive (now in hindsight that I understand the added effort that comes with this) was drivers were fairly plentyful and I could buy a random HP printer and just start printing documents. It jus…

It was a lot more than just a 7Hmz processor. The graphics and sound chip made it head and hands above anything Mac or PC, for years. I programmed on it, and when I read how easy it was to access everything, my friend who owned it, just went out and bought the programming manual. We used the word: "Superlative" a lot.

Re: Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

#26

Post by sillywalk »

jug wrote: post #9
wkjagt wrote: post #8

The Amiga was such an impressive computer for its time. I remember having an A500 when it was still fairly new, and compared to anything else out there it was way ahead in terms of graphics and sound. I had mine hooked up to an old amp and big speakers, and the sound that came out of this thing was amazing. Graphics were so colourful and fast scrolling too. It’s amazing to think that the Amiga series is only one gene…

Yes, it's so weird how that 7 MHz thing ran a perfectly usable graphical environment with a command line shell within the GUI and all. I had to wait another nine years for that to come to Windows in Windows 95. At least as impressive (now in hindsight that I understand the added effort that comes with this) was drivers were fairly plentyful and I could buy a random HP printer and just start printing documents. It jus…

The 'magic' chipset[0] helped a lot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Original_Chip_Set

Re: Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

#27

Post by vidarh »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #22
vidarh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a language Arexx was pretty awful, but the pervasiveness of Arexx ports and user expectation that "everything" should be accessible to script made it immensely useful anyway. E.g dbus on Linux is comparatively underused because the threshold to using it is too high.

I think my unreasonable expectations for applications to be scriptable today comes from my experience with the Amiga. I didn't know the words "interprocess communication" when I first encountered Arexx and Aress ports. I came from a mostly MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 background. I hadn't used much multitasking software up to that point. Once I grokked why Arexx ports could be cool and useful I had a terrible time trying t…

Yeah, on Linux even when there are dbus ports (systems and Gnome have plenty) they're relatively poorly known and/or not much less of a pain to use than a "proper" API.

If you need a schema or binding, it's not good enough. If you have to hunt for docs, it's not good enough.

Post reply on HN