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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#91

Post by kitotik »

toyg wrote: post #62
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…

> it would be quite useful for a number of things Would it really, though? CDROM are basically dead, what are you going to ask: "please connect another internet cable?"

Prompting to connect to a remote server, insert a thumb drive, enter an encryption key, attach a backup drive would all be useful.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#92

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

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

I think you're right about the touchpad, it's my understanding they removed scrollbar visibility because of that input style, however ATM I'm using windows and and I have a trackball with a scroll wheel and I very regularly look at the scrollbars when I'm doing C#, or looking at browsing in palemoon, my two main activities. It tells me where I am (heavily looked at in vis stdio), which us part of the reason some people (not me) like minimaps.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#93

Post by cutitout »

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 500 and then Amiga 4000, and while it was great then, too, I feel doubly blessed in hindsight, considering what tech has become and where it's heading, to have been allowed to catch a brief glimpse of what could have been. And the music. All that music.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#94

Post by monocasa »

pjmlp wrote: post #51
anthk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SystemD is like Solaris service manager, but far worse. And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but much, much, MUCH better.

It is called LPAR.

It's called WPAR. LPARs are hypervisor level partitioning.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#95

Post by jacobush »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #50
7thaccount wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty crazy to think that Babylon 5 had better special effects than TNG (in my opinion) and did it for cheap on the Amiga compared to Industrial Lights and Magic that TNG used.

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.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#96

Post by monocasa »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #76
LeoPanthera wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird comparison. Babylon 5's special effects were very early CGI, but TNG has almost no computer graphics at all. (Nearly) everything was done practically, and with models. Personally I think TNG stands up better, and the fact that it was done practically and shot on film now allows a high-definition version to exist, which can never happen for B5.

B5 was done mostly in HD, they lost a few shots IIRC.

Their effects weren't, which is the point the parent was making I think.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#97

Post by alexisread »

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…

I think there have been many missed opportunities in computing, however I'd suggest that the Internet and GPL (open source licencing in general) would have come regardless of the diversity of operating systems. Both these two innovations have really bound the software world together - compatability these days is really at the TCP level (eg. docker and APIs) and allows for a massive diversity of architectures (kafka, istio, materialize.io, IFTTT, Macrometa etc) - the bar has moved in a way.

Having said that, some of the missed opportunities of note are:

MINT: Gem and Tos weren't really developed much by Atari, but they did buy in MINT which has preemptive multi tasking and memory protection. With the Aes being retargetable (graphic cards), gdos vector fonts and postscript printing, tcp and lan networking stacks, shell, global shortcut system, posix compatibility and multi-user capabilities, it managed to evolve Tos to effectively a unix with usable desktop aka a standard OSX or linux-on-the-desktop well before now.

Secondly, choosing A2 instead of Android would have been huge. A compiled multithreaded, multitasking self-hosted OS with GC, zooming UI, 3x faster than Linux and small enough for one person to understand (250k kernel).

https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20....

One other benefit here would have been no Google-Oracle lawsuit to mess with API copyright :)

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#98

Post by 7thaccount »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #50
7thaccount wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty crazy to think that Babylon 5 had better special effects than TNG (in my opinion) and did it for cheap on the Amiga compared to Industrial Lights and Magic that TNG used.

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).

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#99

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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.

Gatekeeping from what? Linux is a server OS.
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