Aaron Digulla established the Amiga Research Operating System or AROS in 1995. He discusses the early days and the development through the years of AROS.
Interview: AROS Founder Aaron Digulla
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Unfortunatelly I’ve never had a chance to used Amiga (was too expensive in ’90 for me in Poland, many people used to buy C64s and Ataris back then). I used to buy amiga magazines though – the whole amiga platform was fantastic – CPU, OS, API and applications. I’ve even seen applications which PCs probably wouldn’t even handle back then – as far as I remember Light Wave and some video & image editors. If only AROS had more developers … I don’t think it’s any threat for Amiga – people who would try AROS probably wouldn’t buy PPC hardware, anyway.
Ehhh, these were good old days
….
Edited 2006-12-08 08:21
If only AROS had more developers … I don’t think it’s any threat for Amiga – people who would try AROS probably wouldn’t buy PPC hardware, anyway.
AROS supports PowerPC hardware. There’s even a bounty to get AROS working on EFIKA.
Very interesting.
When ever i read about aros i feel like testing that livecd. I still have a a500 in the basement. For some reason i prefer the idea of external hardware add-on’s. All in all im tempted to build a x86 case in the style of the 500. And nothing would be more correct then running aros on it.
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you could probably fit a mini ITX board in an a500/600 case.
I’d love to mod an old Amiga or Apple IIc case with a mini-ITX board except there are two problems:
How do you get the original keyboard to work with a PS/2 or USB interface? Simply put, I don’t have the electronics know-how and think that these half-done mods where you use an external keyboard are silly.
How can you do it without damaging the case? These are vintage computers, and while it is cool to have the vintage look it ain’t cool to destroy a vintage computer for the sake of the mod. So it must be possible to restore the original machine.
AROS is an interesting project. I’m just waiting to see if anything comes of it. (And, for some reason, running the GNU toolchain has always struck me as very un-Amiga.)
“How do you get the original keyboard to work with a PS/2 or USB interface? Simply put, I don’t have the electronics know-how and think that these half-done mods where you use an external keyboard are silly.”
You only have to remove some parts of the original cover to fit a standard 102 key PC keyboard with PS/2 or USB connector into the case, then you connect the cable directly (by soldering) or internally (by plugging) to the desired keyboard interface.
Additionally, you could use a saw and some soldering stuff to remove four of the six keys in the 2×3 matrix above the cursor keys to have the original two keys there (DELETE stays DELETE and HELP is connected to, lets say, INSERT). And you remove F11 and F12 and re-group the function keys to two groups with 5 keys. Simply put.
“How can you do it without damaging the case? These are vintage computers, and while it is cool to have the vintage look it ain’t cool to destroy a vintage computer for the sake of the mod. So it must be possible to restore the original machine.”
You just have to make the PC keyboard fitting into the case by disassembling it carefully. In line 0 where the space bar is located, there’s enough space for CTRL and ALT. It’s not impossible. It’s even not very complicated if you use an older PS/2 keyboard where you can use your chainsaw to get it into handy pieces without destroying the connector matrix.
And if you like it “really” vintage, you could even apply the original Amiga keycaps to the PC keyboard!
Wow… what an idea… I just could… hmmm… where are my tools? The Amiga is in the box down there… No. I won’t do it at this moment. But maybe later…
“How do you get the original keyboard to work with a PS/2 or USB interface? Simply put, I don’t have the electronics know-how and think that these half-done mods where you use an external keyboard are silly.”
You can use the Keyrah keyboard interface:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?produc…
“the Keyrah makes keyboards of classic computers available to new computers. The board fits the case of Amiga 1200 or Amiga 600, and turns the computer into a USB keyboard”
There is also a version for C64, VIC-20, C128, C-16:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?produc…
Edited 2006-12-08 20:36
AROS is quite cool and I found the interview very interesting, especially regarding the history of AROS.
“I still have a a500 in the basement.”
Same here too: 2 x A500, 2 x A600 and 1 x A1200. I don’t like the idea of putting them into the dumpster because at one time, far far in the future, I’m sure I will use them for ATV (Amateur radio television) purposes.
“For some reason i prefer the idea of external hardware add-on’s.”
So it was done the time I was using the SGI Indy. Hardware changes were easy because you didn’t need to do anything on the computer itself, just unplug stuff.
“All in all im tempted to build a x86 case in the style of the 500. And nothing would be more correct then running aros on it.”
There were RISC machines build by Acorn using this design type.
For a ‘kind of’ Amiga feeling one could use AmigaWM – http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html
Does anyone here still use Video Toaster?