Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. They were amazing in their day and age, but there are still people out there developing dead-serious stuff for them. What am I missing here? Should I get one and find out for myself?

Disclaimer: I sell AmigaOS 4, and Sam440 boards as a registered ACube distributor for Australia.
The fasterest I sell at the moment is 733MHz PowerPC and Quake III is just barely playable.
I did sell one to a huge defence contractor and they are using it on a Navy project running Linux on it.

The O/S had some fun points like you could extend apps by adding extensions to the intuition layer.
Mostly it is mystique and its not the same ol' WinTel...

It was fun and had a games demo-scene hackerfest culture around it and it is not entirely lame yet.
Some aspects of coding for it is fun but mostly its just sooo not work related.


R.

i was never attracted to Amiga until Byte had that article about the out that ran 'Unix'. By that time you could get SLS 10 floppy distribution of linux. Prior to that i invested (that is such a misnomer) in AtariST and Radio Shack Color Computer OS/9 stuff for home, had all the time on PDP-10 systems at work the idea of doing anything with Amiga was senseless.

SLS distribution of Linux was 50 floppies, if i recall... and I never recall SLS for 68k.

R.

In their early day, the cool thing was the hardware. With the Amiga custom chipset, they had impressive graphics. They had the ability to genlock to an external video source from day one (even the Amiga 1000 had an available genlock device that would over lay computer graphics on live video. Newtek used that and the new "video" slot on the a2000 to create the toaster, and bring video editing and 3d to budget users.

Unfortunately the performance of the hardware was eclipsed pretty quickly, and what was left was an OS that had preemptive multitasking from day one, and was very extensible, and very light weight (no memory protection.). Once you got to OS3.1 it was pretty nice, and the user/developer community was very self sufficient, which was pretty cool--Commodore went belly-up in the early 90's (I'm remembering 1992, but I could be off) but you can still get new Amiga stuff--someone recently implemented the entire amiga chipsets in FPGA, and built a 2" square a500 compatible device.

Mostly, these days, the only people that will find the new Amiga stuff interesting is ex-amiga cultists like me.

Geof

ratfink wrote: In their early day, the cool thing was the hardware. With the Amiga custom chipset, they had impressive graphics. They had the ability to genlock to an external video source from day one (even the Amiga 1000 had an available genlock device that would over lay computer graphics on live video. Newtek used that and the new "video" slot on the a2000 to create the toaster, and bring video editing and 3d to budget users.

... and they ware still around with LightWave on the PC.

ratfink wrote: Unfortunately the performance of the hardware was eclipsed pretty quickly, and what was left was an OS that had preemptive multitasking from day one, and was very extensible, and very light weight (no memory protection.). Once you got to OS3.1 it was pretty nice, and the user/developer community was very self sufficient, which was pretty cool--Commodore went belly-up in the early 90's (I'm remembering 1992, but I could be off) but you can still get new Amiga stuff--someone recently implemented the entire amiga chipsets in FPGA, and built a 2" square a500 compatible device.

Early to mid 1990s I think it died and was resuscitated a few times so the pedantic can argue about calilng time of death of the company.

The FPGA is called a minimig and I sell those too.

ratfink wrote: Mostly, these days, the only people that will find the new Amiga stuff interesting is ex-amiga cultists like me.

When I have held stalls at computer fairs all the old cultists come out of the woodwork to tell me about how cool the 500 was back in the day.

R.

PymbleSoftware wrote: SLS distribution of Linux was 50 floppies, if i recall... and I never recall SLS for 68k.

R.

SLS had a core distribution of 10 floppies. you needed more floppy for the system to do more, like compiler, Kernel, X11, etc... but 10 was a bootable useful system. i am not wrong. i did not mean to imply SLS was for the Amiga. just pure dumbass 386/387.

MisterDNA wrote: I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. They were amazing in their day and age, but there are still people out there developing dead-serious stuff for them. What am I missing here? Should I get one and find out for myself?

Well, you're on a website dedicated to a dead and outdated HW/SW platform... so you have the answer to your own question

The Amiga 1000 was revolutionary, being more powerful and cheaper than it's competitors, by the time of A500 and A2000, things where even out and the following machines where outdated from the go.

The high end line lived as a poor's man video station, being Amiga hardware so easy to genlock.

A500 was a incredible gaming machine disguised as a computer, I know I never did anything productive with mine.

A1200 was only a shadow of the A500, by the time it got around, almost everyone already shifted to PCs.

There is of course the Amiga X1000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne_X1000

I saw one running at the Vintage Computer Fair last year at Bletchley Park. It was at a distance though. I couldn't get that close due to the massive crowd of Amiga heads drooling over it. They had a whole tent that was almost exclusively Amigas.

Nice looking machine.

I also liked the look of....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimig

Based on what I saw at the fest, there is still lots of people who love the Amiga.

Personally, I was an Atari ST man.


!m!

What am I missing here?

I have no clue, but whatever it is, I'm missing it too.

The fasterest I sell at the moment is 733MHz PowerPC and Quake III is just barely playable.

This.

That's totally what I don't understand. It's underwhelming hardware (no offence) running a proprietary operating system. Most of the gear is online order only and exceptionally expensive to boot. I suppose there's always AROS running on x86, but I could never understand the appeal of it (that, and the UI is pretty fugly).

On a totally unrelated side note, I did have the pleasure of working with an ATW800 once. Now that was a cool machine, way back when Transputers were the shit. I think the system had something like 12 individual processors in it, and was running a seriously offbeat version of Unix along with some whacky 3D package (I think it was called Sabre? Can't remember). As I recall, this was around the time that the first Pixar Image Computer was making noise and Jobs was off working on something at NeXT.

I sorta miss those times, when men were men and actually invented computer architectures in their spare time on the weekends... I guess maybe that's the appeal of Amiga these days- one of the last few refugees still standing, refusing to cave in to the evil Intel empire and go x86...

-DN

I was in the middle of the late 80's Amiga/ST war.... my friends and I had one or the other.

I always liked the ST (having an ST 512 then ST 1024) and some of the games were classic, but then came along the Sega megadrive and all of a sudden we got some RELLY cool games and I lost interest in the ST (although I always kept it to play Blood Money and Outrun...).

I guess the Amiga was better spec and I remember in 1993 my friend getting a CD DRIVE (!??) for his Amiga... sure my memory is correct but did they have CD drives back then????

for my gaggle of atariST's i had Modula-3, FORTRAN, C, and a multitasking kernel that crashed all the time MicroRTX i think. plus the B&W screens.it got so frustrating at times, that i just blew everything away and loaded Minix instead. that was a little better but such backwards process control.

except for the the lower resolution screen, the COCO3 was light years ahead of that mess.

these days the escape key on my iMac is light years ahead of all that.

edikat wrote: I remember in 1993 my friend getting a CD DRIVE (!??) for his Amiga... sure my memory is correct but did they have CD drives back then????

Certainly. In fact, a CD-ROM based Amiga (Commodore CDTV) was released in 1991. In 1993 Commodore released the Amiga CD32 which was also a CD-ROM based system, but targeted as a games console.

The Amiga A570 (released in 1992) was the official CD-ROM add-on for the Amiga 500.

In 1993 Commodore released the Amiga CD32 which was also a CD-ROM based system, but targeted as a games console.

Many thanks. Yes, this was it, and at the time it sounded pretty impressive. Looking at wikipedia I see it could be "upgraded" to an Amiga 1200 like machine.

Seems the Amiga was ahead of its time in many respects. I always thought that my friends A500 was somewhat better built than my STe, and he had Minix (a UNIX clone) running on it at some stage... and this was before Linux was invented!