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.'
Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:5, Funny)
For a second there, it looked like I was reading a story about the Amiga OS in 2009. Ha ha ha! Silly clock radio.
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For a second there, it looked like I was reading a story about the Iphone being able to check a website in 2009. Ha ha ha! Silly clock radio.
For a second there, it looked like I was reading a comment from someone still poking fun at the Amiga in 2009. Ha ha ha! Silly clock radio.
Yep that's right - one Amiga article in a blue moon and the jokes start, yet Slashdot covers all manner of other platforms and systems, whether they're still cutting edge or not.
Hell, we still have stories about other old platforms
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Zilog's Z80 is still VERY relevant. I learned Z80 assembler to properly program my TI-83 and TI-84 calculators. The TI-89 and up use the Motorola 68k.
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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:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Yes, but the Amiga did this on an 8MHz 68K with 1MB of RAM. Can you imagine an Amiga with today's hardware specs?
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it would be "in development" until 2015, and then released to practically nobody, who would promptly sue.
I've ceased to be excited by the "potential" of any hardware platform. The history of technology is littered with a lot of potentially great things that failed to do anything remotely great.
If you wanted to sum up Apple's recent successes, it would be "they delivered." Apple didn't promise the world, they merely delivered a continent or two. Here's a product: you can do these things with it.
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And that's the lesson for any technology; hardware or software. The most successful hardware and software is often (maybe even usually) not the best, but simply the one that delivered on managed expectations. I know a lot of startups or companies on the ropes will promise the moon, but either what we get is only a shadow of what was promised, or we simply never get it at all.
The only way you can really play the hype game is if your huge like Microsoft, and have so much market traction that you can claim a
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:4, Insightful)
A big snag was that it, as well as the Atari ST and Apple IIGS which came out at the same time, were bridge products between the old style home computers and professional business oriented computers. The market for a "home" computer just was not very large at all, and that never really took off like mad until the web browser. The business market for small computers was solidly DOS based, and issues of colors, video, and sound were not important to them. So these computers grabbed a lot of niche markets instead: programmer hobbyists, video enthusiasts and professionals, musicians, gamers, etc. Remember at the time that the Mac was also very much a niche market as well, and a much more expensive product.
Of course, I think another huge reason PCs won, is that they had all the clones. IBM didn't lock things down very well, so just about everyone could make a copy and sell something just slightly cheaper than the next guy. If you just needed to print memos and work on spreadsheets, you went with the cheapest no-name option. The "expectations" for the typical PC user were extremely tiny.
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It did it all with outboard hardware, though, IIRC. Saying that the Amiga did all that stuff with such a slow processor is like saying that there's a new breed of humans that can move at 65+ MPH and conveniently omitting the words "in a car".
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.
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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 carefull
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All that extra hardware in an Amiga is now standard in PCs. The CPU doesn't do all the audio, graphics, and video anymore, DMA is normal and expected and not an extra frill, etc.
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:5, Informative)
You didn't video editing on an Amiga without serious add-on hardware.
Most folks using Amigas for video were doing analog video, too... digital was barely there at the end. You could use a Genlock for titling, other devices to overlay effects on video, etc. but it was still tape to tape. That wasn't for the feint of heart, and while it was revolutionary for a small number of video professionals, it was only a precursor to today's video revolution, which required digital capabilities.
An Amiga with today's hardware specs would be just like a Macintosh with today's hardware specs: it would be a PC. Guaranteed. Near the end, we were already moving toward using as many commodity parts are possible: PC power supplies, disc drives, etc. Future systems were going to use the PCI bus, and would most likely have been designed CPU-agnostic (look up the "PIOS One" for an example, if there's anything still online... that's the direction I was pushing things before C= failed).
There was a question, back in '93 or so, about the future of desktop CPUs. So we had proponents of the PowerPC, of the PA-RISC, of the Alpha. But by the time the whole Escom/Amiga Technologies adventure was over, things were changing. Shortly thereafter, Apple guaranteed the failure of the PowerPC on the desktop by cancelling Mac Cloning, and it was obviously clear to anyone who was paying proper attention that x86 was the only game in town for this class of computing.
And still the bozos at New Amiga or Hyperion Entertainment or whomever kept their sights on the PowerPC (I do not know specifically where the bozos were, but bozos there were, have no doubts). I know a few of these people, not all of them, but the collective functions as a group of wannabes without proper long term vision. I even tried to hit them in the head with a clue-by-four, even going back to the short tenure of this stuff at Gateway 2000, but there was no help.
The hardware didn't need saving... you need to reinvent computing hardware every five years or so, or it gets too complex to keep advancing. Had Commodore not failed, they would have eventually got out of the graphics chip business, just like Compaq and various other PC companies who once did their own graphics chips stopped. Graphics chips became GPUs, and any one systems company could no more make their own GPU than their own CPU. Everyone who tried either of these failed, in time, unless they built a very strong market well above the level of the personal computer. You could afford to spend $2000 on a CPU for a high-end server or whatever it if went a little faster than the next guy's... you couldn't do that for personal computers. Much less the reality that, without sufficient volume, you couldn't even keep up. The problem Apple so well illustrated with the PowerPC's rise and fall.
The software needed saving, or at least, it would have made things more interesting. There was real opportunity, if they had assembled a team of top notch OS people, like Be did... but that's not really what happened. So, after spending several times as long on AmigaOS 3.x -> 4.x as it took to get from nothing to 1.0 (or beyond), they now have what... a fairly small incremental improvement that runs on... pretty much nothing. We actually did a real engineering analysis of this upgrade in 1995-1996... moving from AmigaOS 3.x to a version, written for CPU-independence, targeted for the PowerPC, with a proper HAL, was about a two year project for the team Amiga Technologies had started assembling. Along the way, that included fixing many of the system's flaws.
When this didn't happen, and AT fell apart, we wound up doing much the same thing at Metabox AG, only this time building a modernized AmigaOS-like OS from scratch... AmigaOS enough that things like Voyager and MUI were easy ports. Took about two years.
The fact that nothing had come of this public Amiga silliness pretty much should drive home what a non-event this is. There's no much of value that can some from this, they're just too far behind.
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It simply wouldn't scale.
AmigaOS is a single user OS, so is massively vulnerable to viruses. Windows/Mac/Linux/BSD/Be/etc are all multi-user for security reasons as much as anything else.
There is no proper memory protection, even in OS4. OS4 protects some memory, but a single app can still crash the entire system.
Even with the last version of the "classic" OS, 3.9, you need a lot more than 1MB RAM to really get much out of it. Even basic stuff like the retargetable graphics engine (basically the graphics dr
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Hardware? (Score:2)
I can only see this being interesting of the source is released and ported to things.
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The SAM440ep [acube-systems.biz] exists.
Now that the legal troubles are out of the way, Hyperion are free to port the OS to whatever they like.
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You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.
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Ironically one of the developer tools Commodore shipped with the SDK was Enforcer - which used the otherwise unused MMU to detect improperly referenced pointers and invalid access to memory.
Still a pretty crappy way to save money on all those Amiga's with 'EC' 68k's.
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You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.
Yeah, fuck virtual memory!
Not all programmers are careful (Score:2)
You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.
So how do users defend themselves from uncareful programmers?
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You don't need an MMU, you need careful programmers.
So how do users defend themselves from uncareful programmers?
By not buying their programs.
Stores don't take returns.
It's a different world from now where machines can be attacked from the internet by worms, malware, viruses and the like.
My point is that Amiga has to sell into this world, not the old world.
Not quite (Score:2)
Having a lawsuit-free OS
Software patents have been abolished too? About time.
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Brutality (Score:5, Insightful)
There is little good in them coming out of their litigation.
Winding back the clock a little, Amiga Inc came out of the broken bones of the old Amiga organisation. They came up with some plans, most of which broke down.
What they did do, was ally themselves up in an evil triumverate, with two other companies.
Amiga Inc, Hyperion, and a third company, Eyetech.
These three cooked up a goofy plan to ship a half baked OS, on severely half baked PPC hardware, so broken it became an in joke. The worst lunatics in the 'community' bandwagoned this complete junk, and the vast majority of people who fell for it, paid a lot of money for over priced junk. The warranty was worthless. A great many people walked away during this time, and a great deal of friction arose because of these antics.
The fact that two of these were killing themselves through litigation led to a hope they might destroy themselves, if for no other reason than they be denied the ground to sell their next 'release' on the unwise, the ill educated, or the stupid.
Putting that aside, its hard to consider Amiga OS, and the hardware choices are appallingly bad (unless you like crippled and old PPC equipment tied to old junk from the PC world) - so unless this 'new' start comes up with very serious improvements in every area, including warranty and support, and merchantable quality in their goods and services, and decent, reasonably priced hardware, then there is no reason for them to even exist. And on past events, they don't deserve to.
We should be happy (Score:2)
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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 cre
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There were some ideas in the later Amiga OS designs which are only just now showing up in Vista. And, if I'm correct, they pulled it off without the same, disgusting overhead of Vista.
Like what?
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If the Amiga has been allowed to "die" back in the mid 90s I think it would probably be in a much better position than it is now.
Endless promises and outright lies over the years have slowly destroyed the community that was once so strong. If people had just accept that it was a retro system, much like the Archimedes and Atari ST guys I think more people would be interested in the Amiga today. I sold my last one (yes, the "Ami" part of my handle is short for Amiga) in 2004. I was just so fed up with the who
A little late? (Score:2)
I would think this would be a little "late to the party" situation here. Does Amiga even have the resources or funding to create ground breaking or even interesting new hardware? Can they seriously compete with Intel, Motorola, AMD, NVidia, and Texas Instruments at this point?
Do they have any IP or expertise to develop a new OS that can provide a reasonable alternative to Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows?
Resurrecting a brand name might be one thing, but I am somewhat skeptical that Amiga can begin producing ha
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I agree, it sounds so much out of the loop that the only way out might be to open-source the whole thing.
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There are a few niches where an OS that is dedicated for video and audio would be nice. When I mean dedicated, I mean with the facility for as low latency as possible, and full realtime capabilities.
Combine this with hardware that has multiple cores (not just the same type, but perhaps some cores that turn on for higher CPU tasks, while basic I/O loops are handled by low power cores, as well as cores for DSP use.)
Of course, ports are necessary. USB ports on different I/O channels (so the hard disk would b
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Some of that's actually going away, slowly. It certainly depends on your workflow.
I used to have MIDI, with Bars and Pipes, on the Amiga, which led me to Cakewalk on the PC, and one of those MOTU 8-port MIDI devices, all kinds of stuff. These days, while I could record on the computer, I'm more likely to record on my Fostex portastudio, then bring all the raw tracks in for mixing on the PC. If you're in a big studio, you're going to have external digital ADC/DAC and mixing, so the PC itself needs just some
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
Re:A little late? (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, they probably can't, but would they have to?
Apple realised they were no longer able to compete with their MacOS, or hardware, so now we have Macs that are PC hardware running an OS derived from Next.
Does anyone mind? On the contrary, Apple fans seem to love the new platform better than the old. They seem to be doing better than before, now they've made the switch.
can begin producing hardware and operating systems that are going to compete with current market players in any meaningful way.
But you're conflating things - just because they can't compete on hardware doesn't mean they can't compete. I don't see how it isn't "meaningful", when you can make money and sell computers doing it. The market's moved on - people don't make custom hardware anymore, not even Apple.
Coleco announces they have a Windows 7 killer in a brand new updated ColecoVision 2009?
More like Apple announces they have a Windows 7 killer in a brand new updated Mac.
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How do they even keep the doors open? (Score:3, Funny)
What are these companies running on besides fumes?
Belongs to... (Score:2)
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.
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In other news.... (Score:3, Funny)
...Ford reintroduces the Model T! All new for 2010!
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...Ford reintroduces the Model T! All new for 2010!
Maybe not Ford, but in about 30 seconds I found two places to buy new Model T / Model A parts. Not junkyard specials but newly manufactured for the classic enthusiast market.
http://www.superiorglassworks.com/Ford-Model-T.html [superiorglassworks.com]
http://www.rootlieb.com/html_files/ma_spd_kit/ma_spd_kt.html [rootlieb.com]
Personally I'm tired of cookie cutter cars, and would pay good money for a new model T, just to have something unique. That strategy worked for the "new VW bug".
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...Ford reintroduces the Model T! All new for 2010!
Maybe not Ford, but in about 30 seconds I found two places to buy new Model T / Model A parts.
Taking the car analogy further, there's not much fun in commuting every day at 45 mph, without a/a (be it to cool or heat), etc etc; if that's not what the funny GP post meant, I don't know what.
Personally I'm tired of cookie cutter cars, and would pay good money for a new model T, just to have something unique. That strategy worked for the "new VW bug".
Oh, the Model T is sure a cookie-cutter car (indeed the first to be churned out in an assembly line, and had very few design changes along its life); they just don't use that recipe anymore. The WV New Beetle only salutes Porsche's original shape to make it cute and likeable and youthful, but it was a new car: a mod
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And Apple introduce the Jphone! All new for 2010!
What I hate about Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What I hate about Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
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I know, it's annoying when on a news for nerds site, we learn about tech companies that you might not have read about in the mainstream news. Please take me back to the three stories a day, where we can learn about accessing websites or downloading apps on one particular make of phone, as if no one ever knew you could do that.
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I take it you have issues with the iPhone, given the number of "can access a website" posts you've made. Maybe you should just learn to relax.
Hyperion/SDK (Score:2)
Hyperion also provides AmigaOS SDKs for developers
If it contains anything like their Hyperion Intelligence Designer (IDE-wise), I'll pass. The API leaves much to be desired. If it's just a barebones toolchain, might not be so bad.
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.
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It also taught me that, plus that users cannot rely on proprietary software.
Sure, I wanted the Amiga to "win," but as a user, what was really important was not whether it won or not, but whether it continued to be maintained and developed. Even with a small marketshare, a platform can totally kick ass and make that minority wonder why they're a minority. But if you don't get a serious update since 1992, then the
Toooooo little waaaay tooooo late (Score:2)
word!
guys.. let it go (Score:2)
Every time I hear about the Amiga now I remember an NPR story that talked about how the clothing you wear in your 30s is usually slightly updated versions of the same things you wore in your 20s -- for the simple fact that you equate the clothing you wear with a more youthful and fun time and have a sub-concious comfort in persisting.
If you ask any 'hip' 20 year old, no matter how hip you were 10 years ago -- whatever you're wearing now is stupid and you're completely out of touch with whats cool now.
I can
Not the world as it is... (Score:3, Insightful)
...but the world as it could be. That has always been the nature of the Amiga.
I've always had a strange feeling that the Amiga was like something out of an episode of Sliders.
It was almost as if, with this system, instead of being something from our own world, at some point a brief window to a different and more positive reality was opened; a place where the priority systems of people was aligned with what truly worked, and said place's inhabitants cared more about creativity, and community, and real innovation, and less purely about the profit motive, than they do here...and that for the few seconds said window was open, an A500 fell through it, was found by someone here, reverse engineered, and then reproduced.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_1PjOEFPTk [youtube.com] - This is an example of what I'm talking about. A comparison with Linux on a very old machine. The Amiga always demonstrated the kind of performance which logically, just didn't seem as though it should be possible... ...and yet somehow, it was.
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Re:let the flames begin (Score:5, Funny)
is the Amiga platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989
Thats 20 years after Unix was released, right ?
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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, Insightful)
I've looked at that and similar systems for a while now, but honestly, I just can't justify that sort of price premium. In all reality if they had wanted to spur adoption, then they should have built it for plain-jane x86 hardware. No need to support everything under the sun - hell just approve a specific combination of hardware as a reference platform and go from there (for non-gaming applications there are several motherboards where the whole of everything a user would need is right there on the board, making testing easy).
I mean, honestly, $550+ for a motherboard/cpu that would have been fast-ish about 8 years ago (and is only good for an Amiga), versus ~$125 for an x86 motherboard/cpu that's several times faster and can be used for any other OS if I decide that AmigaOS isn't for me?
That's a pretty easy decision, and the results don't favor the Amiga.
Truthfully, if I wanted to play with a vaguely Amiga-inspired OS I'd try Syllable before going for the official AmigaOS these days.
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Wouldn't the appeal be to play the old games and software that runs on the original architecture?
Re:let the flames begin (Score:4, Informative)
You can do that with an Amiga 500 or 1200. There are dozens, hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of these sitting unused in attics and garages around the world. Post a want to buy and you can get one for less than $125, probably from someone in your town.
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I agree with you. It's far too expensive, and I doubt you'll find too many Amiga users who would disagree. It's a way of keeping the platform alive while the problems with Amiga Inc. were sorted out though.
The decision to go PPC was made way, way back when there was a lot of money around, and m68k -> PPC made the most sense with regard to endianness.
Since then, with the contract with Amiga Inc, and all the legal difficulties, Amiga OS has been effectively nailed to PPC.
I remember reading that the develop
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Could this possibly mean the release of OS4 for the Mac Mini? I, for one, would certainly hope so. Heading on over to AO and the rest to see the fireworks...
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The Amiga can be considered technically revolutionary in its day, but that day is passed imho - significant investment would be needed to rejuvinate the platform today.
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So it turns out you're an Apple user - I do find it funny when we get these arguments between users of niche platforms.
The Amiga can be considered technically revolutionary in its day, but that day is passed imho - significant investment would be needed to rejuvinate the platform today.
Same could be said of the Mac. Oh wait - to be fair, they already did that. MacOS and the hardware was ditched.
It wouldn't require significant investment - they could just go the Apple route, and release some PCs with an Amig
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Have you seen the state of AmigaOS these days? Its pretty pathetic, plus Amiga lost that 'cool' factor a decade ago - it has no base to build upon unlike Apple (the new style iMacs were released well before OSX, Apple basically rebuilt their styling with an existing customer base). Plus theres the application base and getting big names back onto the platform.
And no, this isn't a case of 'if you build it they will come'.
You also seemed to m
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Um, one of those "niches" is approaching double-digit market share in the US. By comparison, the Amiga is a "microniche". Which doesn't mean that the Amiga isn't worth talking about, of course. There was a time when Windows was a niche product, after all (I was there, I remember), and will be again some day.
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There was a time when Windows was a niche product, after all (I was there, I remember), and will be again some day.
Ze Windows Reich vill last for ein thousand years!!!1
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When was Windows a niche? The first year of Windows 3.0 sales they sold over 3 million copies of the OS which dwarfed all Mac hardware sales to that date (keep in mind the launch date for Win 3 was 1990 - so outselling 6 years of Mac sales in its first year is nothing to scoff at). I got that number from Cringely's Accidental Empires (decent book).
I can't find the sales figures for Windows 1.0 or 2.0, but they did go from 140 million in revenue in 1985 (Windows 1 launch date) to over a billion in 1990 (Wind
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Please reread the post you replied to and the post they were replying to. The very first post of this thread was asking how a 20-year old OS could be relevant. Then someone quipped that UNIX is 20 years older. Meaning that UNIX is much older but still relevant, so yes a 20-year old OS can be relevant. You then made your sarcastic rant about how nothing since UNIX could be "revolutionary", which is a far different thing from "relevant" and has nothing to do with what was said. For example, XP is far from rev
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The amiga was still a good system in 1994, but unfortunately C= went bust. I owned amiga computers from 1986 til 2002 and the only reason I sold the last of them was I emigrated and couldn't bring all my stuff with me.
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows,...
Of course, the pro-Windows arguments tend to be even sillier (including such classics as complaining about shortcomings that OS X or the hardware it runs on got rid of ages ago, I've encountered people IRL as recently as a few months ago who were utterly unconvinced that Macs supported mice with more than one mouse button, and that they actually ship with mice with more than one button (technically "no" buttons but that's just semantics) was unpossible).
/Mikael
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!"
Re: (Score:2)
Again, that's an invalid comparison.
You can download Opera free and try it out, see if you like it.. the cost is very small. It's a completely modern browser... in fact, it's added a number of innovations, such as tabs and bookmark synchronization, well before IE or Firefox had these (and in the latter case, only via plug-in).
Forget the whys... where should I send someone to buy either AmigaOS for the PC (native, not something from the early 1990s running in emulation), or a modern computer with AmigaOS pre
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
DERP
In one corner we've got a global powerhouse of a company that commands 10% US market share (shipments) of personal computers, with even better numbers if you look at laptops only, and a huge share of the smartphone market. That's about 6 million computers per year. Oh, and their OS has no problems dealing with Windows-centric networks and filesystems, and is POSIX-Certified. On top of that, major software houses produce software for the Mac OS, in addition to Apple's in-house software which (in some
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is that what made the Amiga so revolutionary was it's ability to get mid-90s quality media and performance from mid-80s hardware. While the OS doubtlessly played a role in this, the question of the relevancy of AmigaOS in 2009 goes back to that same issue: does Amiga have the potential to out-perform contemporary hardware to the same degree that it did back in 1985?
Given the people at the helm today and the rate of development of modern PC hardware, I would be kind of surprised if they could.
Re: (Score:2)
"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..."
...they have been through 20 years of intensive development in order to stay competitive in the market. The hardware platform has changed fundamentally - twice - and the original Mac OS has been torn up and replaced. Enough software developers have been kept sweet to ensure a substantial set of quality applications for the platform. Because Mac has a non-negligible market share, there is reasonable support from peripheral manufacturers.
Basically, Mac has been a going, evolving, concern with a significant u
Re: (Score:2)
"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?"
If someone came out with a modern Mac Quadra that ran all your old System 7 programs, then yes, it would be safe to say it's irrelevant.
The impression I got is that the modern Amiga is a hobbyist machine for nostalgic users, they're not really attempting to be "relevant" in the modern PC market.
Re:let the flames begin (Score:4, Insightful)
You ARE comparing Apples (sic) and oranges here.
The Mac platform was revolutionary... well, the software anyway (the hardware sucked from the get-go, despite the pretty plastic). 20 years later, they have actually fixed the OS (eg, went from a fairly poor low-level design to the Mach kernel and some other decent underpinnings), they have a growing user base, you can actually buy one in a store, there are many modern applications, and the company behind the Mac is making gobs of money. None of those things are true about anything related to the Amiga. And don't get on me for Amiga bashing -- I designed a bunch of them, I love the Amiga. I just hate what happened to it. It has gone nowhere significant since the mid 90s, and things were shakey even near the end, between Commodore's slow death and the year+ it took between that and the sincere attempt to bring things back at Amiga Technologies.
Sure, you may find a few things in AmigaOS that are still better than Windows. You can find that in just about any OS... Windows is an easy target. That doesn't make AmigaOS a useful choice for getting most kinds of real work done today. And it also doesn't remove the fact that the only real platform for AmigaOS today is software emulation of AmigaOS 3.x on a PC, under some other PC OS.
Telling the truth about something is not the same as bashing it; dreaming about what might have been doesn't change what is. But keep in mind... the AmigaOS has been in post Commodore, even post-Commodore/Amiga Technologies neglection longer than it had existed before this. That's a pretty harsh way of looking, but it's the truth. It was 10.5 years from the introduction of the Amiga 1000 (September 1985) to the functional end of Amiga Technologies (March 1986). It's largely been in the hands of lawyers and bozos ever since. Is there anyone really holding their breath for an AmigaOS re-introduction of any kind, much less one that invites a thriving user and developer community? I'd love to see that, but I don't believe in it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
Rightfully so, because it's an extremely idiotic thing to say.
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?
Because Amiga *isn't* relevant today. Since you have such a hard on for Apple, you probably know of at least 10 people who currently own and use a Mac, at least 50 who currently own and use an iPod or iPhone. How many people do you know that currently use an Amiga?
Media interest, market share, available hardware, available software, retail space (even *outside* of Apple's own stores), their own stores... In which of these categories is Amiga even
Re: (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.
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Certainly not. I clicked a menu on my PC back in '94, and it responded this last Saturday. Now that PCs have finally caught up, I can forget the amiga and move on.
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For a moment, I actually thought this was some sort of a joke.
It's sad that there's so much ignorance around here.
Personally I thought it was a joke when I saw the "Iphone can access a website" story.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the Amiga still had plenty of enthusiastic (read: Zealous) users as late as the early years of this millenium, really, I've been to demo parties where there were guys still running their A3000 towers with NetBSD and telling anyone who wanted to listen how awesome their rat's nest of a machine with soldered on components, G3-expansion cards and all that was. The Amiga scene seems to be pretty dead these days though (but the even older 8-bit scene has made a comeback since it somehow attained some sort
Re:Worth the legal fees? Who uses this OS? (Score:4, Informative)
As far as current guessing goes, there were around 1500 AmigaOne systems sold, and there's been around 300 SAM440ep boards sold. (Disclaimer: This is purely what I've read elsewhere.) Those systems run OS 4, so that's about 1800 users. (There's way more users of OS 3.x out there, though.)
I think Hyperion also do contract work outside of Amiga stuff. I'm not sure what though.
On the Amiga Inc. side, one of their main financiers, Pentti Kouri [wikipedia.org], died back in January. Whether this has "encouraged" the end of the legal action is open to speculation. Whatever's gone on in the background though, it's good for the platform that Hyperion have come out on top. Amiga Inc. have done almost nothing productive with it for the past 9 years. There's been a lot of weirdness going on on the Amiga Inc. side for a long time, but that's another thread entirely.
Why use Amiga OS in 2009? It makes me smile. It's fun. It really is as simple as that. I wouldn't run a business on it, but that's not what it's for. :)
Re: Who uses this OS? (Score:2)
Epic protection against malware!
"I betcha the malware jerks aren't writing for an OS they never even heard of!"
Bonus points if it resists MS's browser intrusions.