Amiga and Hyperion Settle Ownership of AmigaOS 227
HKcastaway writes "Amiga Inc and Hyperion Entertainment announced a settlement over ownership and licensing over AmigaOS 4.0 and future versions. Since the bankruptcy of Commodore, Amiga's history has been littered with lawsuits that have affected the development of Amiga hardware and software. Having a lawsuit-free OS probably will help a great deal to the continuity and recovery of the Amiga heritage. Hyperion also provides AmigaOS SDKs for developers.'
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Decades too late... (Score:3, Interesting)
Introducing a completely new OS was barely possible in 1985. If the OS had developed with unbroken continuity it might have gotten somewhere, but by the mid '90s the writing was on the wall. OS/2, BeOS, consumer QNX... if an OS didn't already have a committed user and application base, if it wasn't UNIX or Windows, it was doomed... and even then it wasn't anything like certain.
The operating system is like the roads. Most people don't care how the roads are built, and they're not going to buy a new car just to go down your driveway.
What I hate about Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:let the flames begin (Score:3, Interesting)
AmigaKit.com (and a few other resellers I forget the name of) sells OS 4.1 + ACube Systems' 733MHz SAM440ep.
Yeah, it's not fast, and it's very expensive, but considering that the platform has been through lawsuit/scammer/hoaxer hell for the last 15 years, it's pretty amazing that anything exists at all.
There's a lot of love for the Amiga out there.
Re:let the flames begin (Score:5, Interesting)
"I know I'll be flamed, but in all honesty, is the Mac platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989, but 20 years later, is it really something all that different?"
See, if I posted that to every Mac story, I'd get modded down in an instant. Please, mod the parent down, as it's no different a troll. Why must every Amiga story (it's not like we get them often, unlike the three Apple stories a day) be bogged down with these flames?
In answer to your question - go to an Apple versus Windows debate, note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows, and therefore note they can be applied here in favour of the Amiga too. E.g., you don't have to worry about viruses, DRM, bloatware. Or perhaps borrow from Iphone arguments - e.g., "it doesn't matter that it gets features later, it just does them better. Amiga are a market leader, because other companies looked to them in the past. If it lacks certain features like Flash or Java, that's obviously a good thing, as they're obviously bloated".
See? I used to have trouble arguing for the Amiga in the late 90s, but now supporting a non-Windows platform here on Slashdot is easy :) A shame the anti-Amiga trolls are still around though - why not moan about the platforms we hear more often about?
A decade a head of it time 20 years ago. (Score:2, Interesting)
The Amega OS was almost 10 years ahead of its time in features, however that was 20 years ago. Because of the rather stagnate growth in Amega it is now basically 10 years behind the times. While that is a far way it isn't as bad as it seems.
Because of Vista failures most people are still using XP (Windows 7 hasn't gone out yet) so right now Microsoft is about 8 year behind the time... However because of Windows 7 and the fact they they learned from vista. They are expected to be caught up real soon.
Linux in terms of graphics and User Interface it is about the same now as XP... With some more modern elements so I will be nice and say Linux is about 5 years behind the time, in GUI. Some of the internals are state of the art the other are 30 years old and probably should be re-looked at but probably won't in fear of breaking compatibility.
OS X is mostly pretty modern. However some parts like Linux are 30 years old tech that are left behind. (Having to reformat my drive because of bad iNodes remind me of that)
So Amiga has a chance to get caught up. And I think there is a hungry market for an other OS.
Sure Most people use Windows however people want a good choices.
OS X will only work with Mac Hardware... Although Mac Hardware isn't more expensive then PC for the same specs you really have a limited choices for models and specs.
Linux for desktop and UI still isn't that great. And there is a lot of idealism that the average joe just doesn't care about... Why can't linux support this driver? Well because the manufacuture won't make it open source so We will not put it in our pure distribution. So what I want my hardware to work for the OS! And if you get people who are above grandma and below Tech Geek. You get a lot of questions on how you do a lot of rather basic (advanced) things.
Re:We should be happy (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone who learned programming on the Amiga checking in.
For me, it was the most awesome platform ever to learn on. Full hardware docs, very cleverly constructed hardware where a lot of stuff could be bypassed etc. Taught me about multithreading, message passing, modularity, the beauty of micro-kernels and similar architectures, and the flexibility afforded by those. Moving on to Windows and various Unix-derivatives/plagiarisms was, and still is, painful, and you run into too much stuff that's obviously created for short-term benefit, but in the long term is just pure trash.
Considering how, on a global scale, few developers come from the Amiga scene, there's a disproportionate number of us in the top end of many fields, like HPC(Developing Infiniband and similar drivers for example), embedded stuff(software for jet fighters, radar systems etc), graphics and video(Given the niche the Amiga had, this is the least surprising field, especially since the Amiga, with the Video Toaster, kicked off the Small Computer Based Editing Studio before anyone else, even though Apple-tards try to claim differently)
Re:Hardware? (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.
Re:let the flames begin (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm an old Amiga user/programmer but you have a good point. For one, all the bankruptcies and bad hardware/software has run enough people off from it to even be able to make a real profit or become relevant again.
The best thing that could come of this would be to open source the operating system and let the hackers convert some of that goodness over to something usable with Linux or BSD.
Re:let the flames begin (Score:4, Interesting)
Well indeed, in general it's true that most "pro-" comments are simply poking criticisms (usually in an unfair manner) at other platforms. But for certain products, like the Amiga, it gets held to some unreasonable standard of "But you must tell us what this can do, that no other platform can do, otherwise what's the point!"
I see it with other products too - e.g., Opera. Internet Explorer is disliked, Firefox is loved. But when there's an Opera story, despite it also being a decent alternative to IE, that was around long before Firefox, it still draws out legions of "But tell me why I should switch to Opera when I'm happy on Firefox!"
Amiga comeback (Score:4, Interesting)
I'mma gonna let you finish but OS/2 came out with the greatest OS that's going to take over the world. I always hear about these OSes like OS/2 and Amiga OS, BeOS, and Linux that are going to take over everything. I had an Amiga. It was a great machine and it took a long time for the PCs and the Macs to catch up(Long after it was dead). What Amiga taught me most was that you would not win in the computer market by being better. I also learned to let go of past technology.
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:5, Interesting)
The Amiga offered one helluva lot of bang for your bucks back in the day. The OS was relatively slick from both the user and developer perspectives. The graphics and sound hardware was pretty decent, too. A good quantity of third-party software and games. Genlock abilities and TV-standard screen modes made for great video-captioning abilities, etc.
But come on. Even a mid-spec'ed Windows PC can handle genuine video editing, multi-track virtual recording studios with awesome soft synths and effects plug-ins, 24-bit colour to massive resolutions. All without having to work too hard in order to play nice with other apps and the OS itself.
Great in the day, but only interesting in a historical context. The same could be said of the Atari ST or Acorn Archimedes.
(Ex-Amiga 500+ owner and developer.)
Re:We should be happy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:4, Interesting)
Everything a stock Amiga did was done with careful programming and a small amount of well designed hardware assistance. In fact, most of what it did outside of the games arena is entirely due to careful programming.
The original Amiga 1000 shipped with 256KB of RAM and 256KB of (quasi) ROM. With that you got a fully preemptive multitasking OS. You could open smaller programs in dozens of windows. Multiple command line shells, a paint program. That is the kind of efficiency you get when you hand code a simple kernel in assembly language, and have much of your software written by people who are used to working in extremely constrained environments.
Virtual memory is nice, but it really slows things down. It makes programmers lazy. Most modern machines (and Linux machines in particular, no matter how much RAM they have) aren't as "snappy" as an Apple II with 64K of RAM. Virtual memory is the primary culprit. Walk away from your machine for a while, or run an I/O intensive task and everything ends up paged out to disk, and the system sputters to a start in a few seconds once you start poking at it again.
And then there is X - terminal independence is nice, but is there any real doubt that X kept the world of affordable Unix graphics about a decade behind systems (like the Amiga) that just used a simple frame buffer? Even today, native X is pretty much useless anywhere off the local LAN. It wasn't designed to succeed in its native element, i.e. as a terminal.
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:3, Interesting)
Not all that much of the OS was assembler - the biggest piece was FFS (which subsumed OFS), and honestly probably shouldn't have been in ASM - but space was *tight*. Sure, quite a few of the drivers were in assembler, and performance-critical parts of Exec were in ASM, but that was almost required at the time for low-level HW interfacing. Much of the OS was in C. (I was responsible for removing the majority of the BCPL code (look it up on Wikipedia) used in AmigaDOS for OS 2.0.)
It was all fairly carefully designed, and a lot of work went into making it bulletproof and snappy. While there are huge benefits to memory protection nowadays, most Amiga programs and certainly the OS were quite resilient to pressures, such as allocation failures, which would crush almost all apps today. Error paths were much more likely to get tested, and the path wasn't the library calling exit(1) for you when an allocation failed.
That said: it's 15 years behind the times now. No major improvements have been made (some, yes, but nothing major). Dave is basically right - and we were in the last year trying to break with the old hardware design, though there was one last big step left in it that actually got to the early prototype stage (AAA). We hadn't planned out where software would go, but if you look at what Apple did you probably get a hint of what we might have done. It would have been tough, though, since we didn't have the resources to throw at emulation at the time that Apple did. In the last year, the SW group (which I ended up running a good part of) was down to a handful of people ( 10 I think). I think the "OS" group was down to maybe 3 or so. The writing was mostly on the wall by around a year before *poof*, and much of the team left in '92-93 to places like Scala (where many still are, and where I went after bankruptcy), 3DO (which had a strong ex-Amiga and ex-Commodore influence from the start), etc.
I wish it had been open-sourced back in '95 or so. It may not have survived intact, but it might have formed the core for a strong competitor to Linux/etc and at least pushed them to improve their responsiveness much earlier on.