Submitted by “Icaros Desktop is an effort to build a modern Amiga-compatible operating system for standard x86 hardware. It’s a distribution built atop AROS, which is an open source effort to create a system compatible at the API level with the AmigaOS 3.x series. I recently had a chat to the creator of Icaros, Paolo Besser, about the creation of the OS and why Amiga continues to inspire people today.”
On Windows the equivalent to ASSIGN is SUBST.
ASSIGN also works with floppy disk names, allowing AmigaOS to prompt for you to insert the correct floppy when it’s needed.
Not sure that’s still a feature in high demand these days though. The early Amiga’s tended not to have a hard disk and one of the first things people bought was an extra disk drive.
I doubt it. Also, as far as personal anecdotes go, I’ve never even seen an external Amiga disk drive – and we both know majority of Amigas were basically just gaming machines, built-in floppy being fine for that.
Extra joystick OTOH…
All the Amiga people I knew played games, but also did serious stuff.
Don’t forget that an extra disk drive makes copying games much more convenient. Insert the original and a blank, press a button. Also more and more multi disk games started appearing.
So they all bought an extra drive and the 512 KB memory upgrade which also featured a battery powered clock.
Actually I don’t think anyone bought an extra joystick, we all had joysticks for our Commodore 64/128 and the Amiga used the same connector. More likely they bought a splitter cable so you didn’t have to take out your mouse each time you wanted to play a two player game.
As I pointed out, personal anecdotes only go so far …might be also a difference between places, how one just got copied games at ~shops here, and the usually very economically unattractive add-ons (while those with Amigas had them specifically because they were inexpensive).
But Amigas being used mostly for games is a fairly reliable info. And most importantly, when you look at auction sites today, Amiga sets including external disk drives or memory expansions are much rarer than “plain” configs…
PS. And when getting Amiga, one typically got rid of C64 set – also to aid in Amiga purchase. Plus the joysticks of old days seemed to have relatively short lifespans… (I did prevail with only one set, but mostly thanks to my repair abilities which first manifested themselves like that)
Edited 2012-06-20 10:05 UTC
Amiga’s being used for games is probably a fact, but an extra floppy drive is an logical assumption. Try using an Amiga without an extra drive, you spend more time swapping disks than using it. Perhaps these extra drives easily got lost when people moved their Amiga’s in to the attic for storage. I must admit I’m not sure where my extra drives are.
The most popular joystick was the Arcade, which I never had fail on me, unlike others. Buy I also have these crappy Atari 2600 joysticks and they keep working too. I guess I have a gentle touch.
Not really. Each Amiga had a floppy drive already built in, which worked perfectly fine. And most of their users were very price-concious, often kids.
Similar ~social dynamics of Amigans can be seen with quite poor uptake of A1200 or “big” Amigas – yes, they were better, but to most not worth it, not when vast libraries of software worked fine with “plain” models; very limited funds could go elsewhere.
Sure, an extra drive afforded some convenience now and then – but games, if multi-floppy, were mostly structured to be “linearly” sectioned onto disks (plus you yourself pointed out recently that RPGs had small uptake).
That is an unfounded hyperbole. I did use an Amiga without an extra drive, as did virtually all around (as I said, I’ve never even seen one). And it was still great (at least large part of games, maybe most, being single-floppy, anyway)
And that is a very convenient conjecture, indeed – almost all those floppy drives just lost like that…
But at the least, memory expansions definitely wouldn’t share their fate – and they’re also virtually absent from auction sites, while you implied their wide, and comparable to disk drives, uptake.
Edited 2012-06-20 10:52 UTC
I was a poor kid and I had an extra drive. It really was worth the money.
Not only RPGs came on multiple disks, others did too. And as I mentioned gamers also used their Amiga for serious stuff, if only for copying game disks or making a database of their games collection.
I’m sure if you did have an extra drive and it broke down you’d be very sad. Okay, if you only played single disk games you wouldn’t need an extra drive.
Well, that’s easy: they are build in. IIRC only the Amiga 500 “needed” this expansion, later Amiga’s had more memory and a build in battery powered clock. As they were installed over 20 years ago most people probably don’t even know they have them.
I can find my Amiga’s, but I don’t know where my extras are like the external drives, mice, hard disk, faster CPU add-on, sound sampler and a “hacking” cartridge.
But we’re wondering here about overall dynamics, right?… you manoeuvre around addressing the relative rarity (not absolute lack – you don’t have to say “oh, but I had one / serious stuff”) of extras on 2nd hand market.
Here disks were mostly shared BTW.
That’s also something I didn’t say – but great many (perhaps most) games simply were single-disk…
Oh, now you’re moving goalposts (so, what, previously “all bought […] the 512 KB memory upgrade which also featured a battery powered clock” but now suddenly most didn’t need those?) and you’re not entirely right (600 didn’t have RTC, 500+ was short-lived)
I’m just wondering how you could live without an extra disk drive. It seems just like me that Sauron also only knew Amiga users with an extra disk drive.
Buying one was the most obvious thing one would do.
Here we copied them, using an extra disk drive.
I’ll change it to: If someone only played single disk games someone wouldn’t need an extra drive.
[/q]
You were wondering why memory expansions didn’t get lost. I explained that they, unlike external drives, are mounted inside the Amiga. This is done once and it was done over 20 years ago. So it’s not likely (a it gets lost (b people still know it’s there.
Nobody bought the Amiga 600. The Amiga 1200 was the natural upgrade for the Amiga 500 and the Amiga 1200 didn’t need an extra card with memory and a clock.
You could hardly even get one in many places… I said few times already I had never even seen one, live – well, OK, maybe apart from the CDTV of my buddy, but that’s only because this model didn’t have internal floppy in the first place
– and IIRC that drive was quite expensive (rich bastard, gloating such things ;p ), comparable to the entire 500 or 600 set.
That usually high prices of any add-ons contributing to the situation (virtually nobody had any C64 FDD for the same reason) – and while you say “I was a poor kid and I had an extra drive. It really was worth the money” you might quite possibly not appreciate that you weren’t poor at all – not in comparison to kids in areas much less affluent than the Netherlands.
It might be also responsible, I guess, for that copying vs sharing thing – even blank floppies would be quite expensive, might as well spread the costs.
And, again, it was far from “the most obvious thing one would do” – if you rationalise it specifically like that, it makes your view… suspect. Again (apart from the above cost considerations) – Amigas worked, generally, perfectly fine with only their built-in drive.
That still misses the point. Closer would be: many (most?) great Amiga games were single-floppy anyway, so 2nd drive would just gather dust large part (most?) of the time …while significantly exhausting your pocket money.
No I didn’t. I wondered why they are absent to a similar degree, why they evidently did get lost (they shouldn’t – as you say, losing them is much harder)
That is
1) extrapolation of your local bubble without 2nd thought (~half or even most people had 600 here, for example; we’re talking about quite high numbers… with my <30 people class, ~4 people had them – and quickly checking now with few ex-Amigan IM buddies scattered across the country, they report similar rates; 600 flopped in “original” Amiga markets, not offering anything above 500, but was quite popular where Amiga craze started and died much later; anyway, it did better than 500+)
2) red herring – sure, “1200 was the natural upgrade” but it flopped – people largely just stayed with “baseline” Amigas.
As was the case, I suspect, with 2nd drives – in large scale dynamics (vs “one of the first things people bought was an extra disk drive” suggesting it was basically universal)
Edited 2012-06-20 12:44 UTC
I think the difference in our experiences is that you live in a place where things were very different than they were here.
Here every C64 user had a disk drive. Early adopters didn’t have one at first, but after a while everyone had at least one, because it was the natural thing to do. Just like an extra disk drive, which everybody Sauron and I knew had. Just like the 512 kB upgrade as more and more games demanded 1 MB of RAM.
For doing serious stuff, copying disks and multi-disk games an extra disk drive made a lot of difference. If you didn’t you would often get in to a situation where the Amiga would ask you to swap disks multiple times before something happened.
Still, you should at least also acknowledge such places, non-trivial numerically and with many differences, before making broad definite statements (like those implying everybody had 2nd drive or memory expansion)
Overall, really, it was fine; discotheque being acceptably rare (plus, seriously, “copying game disks or making a database of their games collection” serious stuff? ;p ).
You might be also not entirely correct about 1541… From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
Yes, that is “just” Wiki – well, still, one of data points and presumably expressing the view of C64 enthusiasts.
Also, I remember some other source discussing in more definite terms the dominance of cassettes in Europe (though perhaps it also included the Spectrum, and former Soviet Union)
Plus, I believe there was some long-running Netherlands-originating (but spreading also to Germany for example) radio show, transmitting games and programs for 8bit micros? (so for cassettes obviously, implying their wide popularity at the very least beside 1541; like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilator_202#Broadcasting_Computer_S… )
Do you recall something like that / remember the name?
Edited 2012-06-20 13:38 UTC
Everybody had them, expect people living in trivial places.
It’s hardly stuff you’d do just for fun!
In The Netherlands people moved to disk drives, so my guess would be that so did that Germans as they were positively active in the home computer scene.
Interestingly I talked to someone on Monday about this. We did have this radio show about computers and stuff that “broadcast” software. I never did record any software, I didn’t even listen to this program.
It depends who was the intended public. ZX Spectrum users were more likely to use cassettes than C64 ones. Amiga or Atari ST users couldn’t even load from tape. The Phillips P2000 used micro cassettes. We also had a number of MSX users.
Also, you couldn’t record these software broadcasts on anything else but tape so it doesn’t say anything about the number of tape/disk users. Then it depends on why they did this. Because it was fun, new, cool? I doubt they did it because large masses were screaming for it. I for one didn’t know anyone who actually made use of this. People talked about it though.
“Trivial places”? …is that the Apple’s ~”lesser people should be barred from ~computers advancements” bleeding in? (Apple openly states the aim to target only the most profitable people; they also openly act to block any supposed innovation they bring from being used by other manufacturers – not license or such; bringing those two to their logical synthesis…)
Or do you really long for the times when barely anybody could afford them? (but you could, most importantly…)
Clarify; some people do S&M for fun ;p
The parts divided by “[…]” are a bit mutually exclusive… (but, yes, in the 2nd part you’re going into good direction finally, with likelihoods)
BTW, with “people living in trivial places” and “positively active in the home computer scene” – hardly anybody can beat the Russian scene, they did some insane things with Spectrum clones.
Such radio shows (even more their spread) do imply continuing popularity of cassettes “at the very least beside 1541″ numbers – I didn’t say anything more about them.
But I think we already established that not everybody had 2nd drive or expansion, so “I for one didn’t know anyone who actually made use of this” might be also not quite representative
(no ideas about the title of the show?)
This seems to be it:
http://commodore-gg.hobby.nl/basicode.htm
Sadly (for you) it’s in Dutch. If I read it quickly it appears the software they broadcast was BASIC code. I assume they were very small and generic programs that could run on many home computers with no or little modification. The newspaper article mentions a number of computer systems.
Strange enough they mention that the screen was cleared on a C64 using the CLR command while others used CLS. The C64 doesn’t have a CLR command, it clears the screen with PRINT CHR$(147) or embedding the shift + clr key stroke in a PRINT statement.
The radio show was called Hobbyscoop. A few links link to German sites (Duits).
Although I was never interested at the time it does seem like a very cool way to transfer computer data.
Ah, thanks. GTranslate seems to work bearably, for the most part…
Though, there’s obviously http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE – appears to be decently exhaustive (plus more links; also, check out longer DE variant; and why the NL one is so short?! ;p …but it links to recording from a recent, 2012, mention on Dutch radio – can’t make out anything out of this one obviously).
Generally, the whole thing appears to be even better, a sort of universal VM (at least in later revisions) for 8bit micros.
And from one of the links: http://lennartb.home.xs4all.nl/basicode.html “They even made an audio CD “Best of Basicode” with the stuff” …possibly first CD-ROM, using ~datasette storage standard, WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?!
Then there’s… datavinyl!
“a book was published which included a vinyl record with Bascoders for all computers common in the GDR” – reminded me about one picture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FloppyRom_Magazine.jpg
…imagine how EPIC it would be be if this had become a widely used standard
Overall, it appears BASICODE was often used like later disk mags. They also sold tapes with it, so there had to be some uptake & continuing usage of cassettes.
Edited 2012-06-20 15:49 UTC
I can translate Dutch stuff, if it’s not too long.
To be honest, this BASICODE stuff is new to me. I assumed they transmitted code aimed at a certain computer, not some generic stuff that would be translated by software on the receiving computer.
I know some people used radio transmitters as some kind of modem, it was called packet radio, to communicate with other users.
It’s the http://soundcloud.com/rolandroland/basicode – quite short, but probably not really worth it; I’m assuming just some vague “did you know? / those were the days”
Then there are scans on http://commodore-gg.hobby.nl/basicode.htm that you originally linked to …a bit too long. I might just get some OCR and then GTranslate.
From what I understand it isn’t exactly translated, “just” a) using a common subset of all BASICs b) over time built on top of common library.
And packet radio is a bit distinct – that’s essentially a full-blown amateur “radio internet” (or maybe closer to Fidonet; or Usenet before its integration into Internet of sorts)
Would be interesting if it evolved into independent network, connecting municipal ones (well, maybe not only via radio, perhaps also optical RONJA for example… hmm, nah, long-range “very directed” WiFi setups would be probably much better; either way, certainly more plausible than dreams about independent sat network, that came out some time ago from German CCC, IIRC)
“Een stukje historische radio. in de jaren 80 zond de Tros computerprogramma’s de ether in. Zie voor meer info http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basicode. Fragment uitgezonden door de NCRV in Lunch! 07-03-2012 op Radio1″
A little piece of historic radio. In the 80’s the TROS broadcast computer programs. For more info see http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basicode. Fragment broadcast by the NCRV in Lunch! March 7th 2012 on Radio 1.
The first scan is about a disagreement between the broadcasting company and the book publisher. Then some info about how it works. In the middle section it is mentioned that after a BASICODE 3 test they received so many positive reactions that they were going to continue it.
The second scan mentions that people, who missed the radio transmission, can now also use a modem to download stuff. Later also is mentioned that they’re also going to offer a Packet Radio service so people can download stuff via that route.
In The Netherlands we used to have (well, still have I guess) a lot of groups of people, different beliefs, classes. They all had their own schools, clubs and societies. But also their own radio/tv stations. So TROS and NCRV are 2 of those, but there are a number more. They all share radio/tv stations. The NOS is kind of a neutral government backed club, a bit like the BBC. It’s all mixed these days, but during the 80’s each broadcasting faction would occupy the whole evening for you. Some days this would be the Christians, which made for less exciting tv.
Now we also have commercial companies, but they have their own radio and tv stations/channels.
Thanks (though I meant more the audio of that radio show, webpage text is easy with GTranslate :p – but, I imagine, just basic info and nothing beyond Wiki)
…and you know, “communist” state TV – every day – wasn’t always that exciting, either
(BTW, I always find this similarity quite curious, together with the generally akin insistence on “family values” of ~communist regimes; almost as if they were just sides of the same coin …when you look at the map, there is a curious overlap between places where old Christianity & feudalism were strong, and those which had ~problems with “communism” …also, most Party members were closet Christians anyway, & there’s no phenomena of unbaptised generation).
Though OTOH educational, popular science and “high culture” programming was thriving; not like the pitiful state it is in today…
nah, some had extra drives, but not most. I think most purchased th 512KB expansion. disk copy programs would read the entire disk to memory before swapping. I did buy the HD though. The Amigas were more or less crushed by PCs when the A1200 became available.
A hard disk beats any number of disk drives.
I played Ultima VI on disk first, walk in any direction 8 steps and the disk would load. When I played from hard disk the activity light would blink for an instant and that was it.
Ah, Ultima VI. I had it on the Atari ST. I upgraded my Mega STe to 4MB of ram, and the first thing I did was create a ramdisk and put the 2MB of Ultima VI into it and played it from RAM. It was AWESOME! No load times, and when I wanted to save it, I’d just move it back to the hard drive.
Why oh why can’t I do that with modern games? Oh yeah, that’s because even though I have 8GB of ram, the games are in the 10-40GB range, and the OS takes at least 2GB of the ram.
Yeah, and modern games didn’t expand only in storage taken… OS is also much more pleasant.
Plus they don’t lose whole state at power failure or some such.
That reminds me… while 2nd drives seemed generally ignored, there was some movement (small minority, but still) of getting a 2.5″ to 3.5″ converter and hunting down a surplus inexpensive drive (typically old one, but which would still be plentiful for Amiga). Seems more rewarding and sensible than 2nd floppy
(well, with the small downside on not quite fitting in a 600 – or 1200, but those were much rarer)
What you on about? I knew a LOT of people with Amiga’s back in the day and every one of them had a extra external floppy drive, me included! I still use Amiga’s now and have hard drives fitted, but I still have external floppy’s.
And most importantly, when you look at auction sites today, Amiga sets including external disk drives or memory expansions are much rarer than “plain” configs..
You don’t see Amiga’s sold with external floppy drives because they fetch more when sold separate, same as accelerators, genlocks, squirrel SCSI interfaces and anything else hardware based! Your arguing over something you obviously know nothing about!
And one didn’t and doesn’t use a external floppy to copy shop bought games, (although you could/can with a cyclone lead between your Amiga and external floppy). Quite a few games required a blank floppy disk to use as a save game disk and a extra drive removed the hassle of disk swaps all the time, plus productivity software was/is much more usable with a external floppy and is much easier to make backups of said software. (Copying a disk with just the internal drive if you didn’t have a memory expansion was slow and painful)!
Maybe a few got rid of there previous setup, but you’d be surprised how many didn’t! I didn’t either and still have my Atari 600XL and 800XL and all peripherals and software with them, (not been used for a while though).
Oh! And this is not a personal anecdote either!
Maybe in the UK – Amiga also had a very long life as a budget machine in less affluent places (but, yeah, let’s just extrapolate local bubbles without 2nd thought; obviously those who wonder about wider picture, plus point out what can be seen in surplus channels, “argue” about something they know nothing about). And…
…doesn’t address why those drives are comparably rare (that could be a good reason why something always fetches quite high prices), either way.
I very specifically wrote “personal anecdotes only go so far …might be also a difference between places, how one just got copied games at ~shops here” – I’ve never even seen an original Amiga game, ever.
~Shops sold “pirated” games – but, really, the copyright didn’t even apply to software until 1994 or so (and afterwards, the enforcement was lax for a few years)
Not rare at all. just look on Ebay and Amibay, plenty of em there.
“comparably rare”… (and, if aiming at generalised conclusion, don’t forget to check out few more country-specific ebays, other auction sites; OTOH, a -bay of Amiga fans might be not quite representative…)
I don’t think eBay is a reliable source for statistics because, on the whole, computers fetch more when broken down and sold as parts rather than sold as a whole. Thus it’s not beyond reason that most Amiga’s are sold without attachments so the attachments can be sold separately – thus maximizing the potential for profit.
That all said, you’re observations might still be accurate – I just wouldn’t cite ebay as evidence.
From a personal perspective, most of the people I know jumped from C64 to Win3.x compatable PC (oh the shame) – so I don’t even have much in the way of anecdotal evidence
[edit]
I think the joystick life space (or lack of) can be credited to those highly addictive sporting games (eg Olympics) where the controls consisted of jamming the joystick from side to side as rapidly as physically possible!
Edited 2012-06-20 12:42 UTC
That’s also with them available separately – I just glanced on my local “ebay” and there are only three drives, four memory expansions, for 30+ Amigas (2 expanded, none with 2nd drive). Why such large discrepancies? (OK, we can presume than in more affluent places this was perhaps half, but the implied ~all? …and even if, the less affluent places offset this by themselves)
But yeah, hard to tell anything about many such aspects of the past. I can say that Amiga lived here much longer – PCs are a thing of Win98 and Celerons, onwards.
And also that I was never into games meant for computer’s satisfaction
(but seriously, many inexpensive joysticks were just fragile; and perhaps the concept was flawed – joypads are a marked improvement, me thinks; perhaps they even make those old games better, under emus)
Edited 2012-06-20 13:05 UTC
Using those figures, you could also draw the conclusion that people who are willing to spend money buying addons and accessories for their Amigas are more likely to have an emotional attachment to their computer and thus less likely to sell it. Where as people who couldn’t justify the upgrade costs are more likely to sell it once it becomes obsolete.
My point is this: your statistics are interesting, but meaningless. So using them as evidence or trying to draw correlations to prove a point will inevitably produce flawed results.
So while I appreciate that you’re trying to substantiate your anecdotal evidence, ebay is not right place to source your figures. Better statistics would be sales figures from the era.
Yes, but the point is the same applies even more to personal anecdotes
(for example, some people here being more “into” their Amigas back in the day, hanging out & in closer contact mostly with like-minded people, or in atypical neighbourhoods)
There must be something better we can base conclusions on; auction sites, a relatively large concentrations of surplus Amiga equipment, do seem a bit better (meaningless is too strong word, unless you’re willing to argue it even more against “everybody I knew had upgrades”)
And anyway, most “indifferent owner” Amigas are possibly at best forgotten in attics, cellars, or garages…
But, yeah, sales figures – unfortunately, IIRC, various Commodore country branches barely kept those about their computers (in few stats I’ve seen, it was about “probable ranges” more or less), much less accessories…
Edited 2012-06-20 18:12 UTC
I know it does, i never argued otherwise.
Yes, sales figures. I’d already suggested this
Just because one subset of data is more worthless than another, it doesn’t mean that the lesser of the two evils is any good.
Using ebay as statistical reference will produce biased and extremely misleading results as there are a whole plethora of variables unaccounted for. Thus, in this instance, the results are meaningless.
I really do appreciate that you’re putting a little research into this and trying to find a more scientific answer than personal anecdotal evidence – and the figures you gave are certainly interesting. But we have to remain objective here and understand that the source figures are flawed and thus the results are little better than anecdotal.
That’s a great shame.
Using less flawed data – sometimes that’s all you get, just in the better direction – might still be enough to dispel really flawed conclusions. What I’m primarily trying to do here, I suppose (and it’s not like this is about something beyond historical curiosity, or that I’m misrepresenting the sources)
One can argue that most of taught paleobiology, prehistory, or history is based just on such data…
Yup… and actually, I just recalled one page with such stats: http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/sales.html
Now, the details in the tables are really irrelevant – the most telling part is “These only show official figures, the number of Amigas world-wide has been estimated to be 4 times as much.”
Greedy bastards.
Traitors!!!
Morons.
Well, that’s enough large groups of people I have just insulted.
lol you must have played those sports games before?
I didn’t! But friends did. My brother told me it would kill the joystick. As those games didn’t seem much fun anyway I never played them.
Summer Games was a joystick killer, but I don’t even watch the real Olympics on television.
You know what would be fun? Recording people playing such game, carefully finding most suitable shots/framing, and then applying some copious amounts of unnecessary censorship
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZpATBJnZM the mosaic one; too bad decent video recording equipment was much harder to come by back then, and even worse with video editing… yeah, Amiga was one of the first to have some form of it; but it wasn’t NLE, not much of actual editing)
I had a 500 and never owned an external hard disk or floppy. I have a second floppy now, but that was given to me by a friend clearing out his old gear.
The first purchase I made for my A500 was an external disk drive and 512K ram. I didn’t know any Amiga users that didn’t have at least that.
It’s similar, but not quite the same or as flexible. For a start there are things like deferring an assign until the media it points to is available (be it floppy, hard drive, USB drive, whatever), and then there’s the possibility to assign to volumes or devices, meaning you can assign to a folder which may reside on a CD or hard drive for example. And then you can add assigns together, so you can assign a drive to multiple folders which will be searched in order for any file accesses requested. It’s something which I miss regularly on all other operating systems I use regularly…
subst WINDOWS: d:\WINDOWS
?
Ohh… does it support names, or just idiotic one-letters?
And how about multiple folders?
Edited 2012-06-20 16:29 UTC
Using my miraculous memory of neverforgetting wisdom storage:
> SUBST K: C:\LONG\PATH\TO\KLOTZ
The SUBST command assigns an idiotic drive letter to a directory. By changing to the K: drive, you will actually end up in the C:\LONG\PATH\TO\KLOTZ directory.
> JOIN A: C:\FLOPPY
The JOIN command makes the system refer to a disk drive (though a drive letter) when accessing a directory. Here any operation within C:\FLOPPY will result in an operation on the A: drive.
> ASSIGN R:=A:
The ASSIGN command changes the reference to one drive letter to another one (in this case, refering to R: will delegate access to A:).
Maybe it’s possible to use a combination of SUBST and JOIN (creating something like a mount command), maybe involving ASSIGN…
Enough history lessons now, my brain hurts!
Since drives on Windows have only one letter, it obviously only support one letter.
I recommend IcAros as the first AROS distribution that people try! It really is the simplest way to try AROS
all apps and the os sharing the same address space, doing object orientation by building messages and parsing them back instead of direct method calls, no separation of user code and kernel code,
best practices
lmao
AmigaOS is a single-user system without preemptive multitasking… having single address space isn’t the end of the world.
AmigaOS 4 for example uses grim reaper to address application’s hangs and from a practical point of view the system isn’t so unstable at all.
And even if the system hangs, It boots so quickly and so clean that it’s really a non issue (you can do a soft reset too, and It takes less than 1 second to do it, literally speaking).
Taking into account that AmigaOS 4 flies even using very under-powered hardware… hey maybe their ideas aren’t so wrong!
I think AmigaOS and Amiga-like systems have a totally different philosophy than mainstream OSes… you can’t judge AmigaOS from a Unix/orthodox point of view. It’s a waste of time.
look how wrong you are, be prepared for hordes of your fellow amigaos fans to tear you a new one
yeah as long as none of your apps ever manipulate any sensitive piece of information
oops the only real app you have is a web browser, sorry for your passwords/credit card numbers/bank account logins
only if the app didn’t dereference some bad pointer and shit all over the memory but amiga developers all use assembly and C so welp
I remember my standards to call an os “not so unstable” back when I was a dumb developer on amiga os and well lol
nevermind losing all the state of your apps, great usability
oh wait you have no useful apps anyway
“the hardware to run amigaos 4 is orders of magnitudes more expensive as an off-the-shelf PC while being also orders of magnitude slower, but amiga os 4 (an inept OS with no useful applications) flies on it”
amiga user logic
“yeah it’s expensive as hell and I can’t do anything useful with it but look how fast it boots and opens workbench windows”
*looks down on winblow$/linux/maco$ users and do a smug, satisfied little smile*
Edited 2012-06-20 22:05 UTC
Haters gonna hate… BTW AmigaOS 4 is not for everyone, but It’s a really nice OS, It’s fun to use, fun to develop for and It’s really different to the bloated software that We’re used to use.
Just a silly example but… I can run Quake 3, Quake 2 and Heretic using different resolutions at the same time and switch instantly between them in my 733mhz SAM with 512MB… I can’t do anything similar in my 10 or 20 times more powerful Macbook Pro with 8gb of RAM… OS X is slow even to switch between desktop spaces! (and Linux is the same or worse, dunno ’bout Windows pbly even worse than Linux)
AmigaOS gives us a lesson: modern hardware is ruined by layers and layers and layers of complexity and bloated software.
While I myself have never tried AmigaOS 4, even certain things on my A4000 with AmigaOS 3.9 and a Radeon 9250 just seem faster than doing things under Linux / Windows. One of those is using magic menu to right click and have all of the applications menus wherever I am on the screen. I agree that most operating systems (in this case I refer to Linux’s Desktop Environments as separate operating systems i.e. KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, etc)
Actually under Gnome-shell and KDE, switching between workspaces is extremely fast, and frighteningly fast under E17 (which, even though it’s not finished) reminds me a lot of the Amiga, and really is not bloated in the way a lot of DEs and OSs are.)
Windows doesn’t even have workspaces, you have to use some third party add-ons, and they never work quite right.
Agreed, agreed and agreed. Many times I tell people that the operating system should be solely written in Assembly, C, or C++. Can you imagine if the entire UI, kernel, and main applications were all written in assembly how sickeningly fast it would be?
Instead we get people writing things in Java, which has to be one of the worse offenders in making it far too easy to make bloated code.
My only complaint about AmigaOS 4 is the lack of available hardware to run it on, and due to that lack, it’s extremely expensive. The only real way to ‘bring Amiga back’ is to release something like a Raspberry Pi / Beagle Board / Panda Board type setup that is cheap, but PPC / 68k compatible, then release AmigaOS4 on it.
Maybe those netbooks that are supposed to come out will help a lot though (I’ll probably buy one if they are cheap enough)
Wow, that’s certainly a compelling use case. I find myself needing to do this every day.
You are running ancient games using very little video memory on a machine that probably have a ton of the thing compared to the era when these games were the state of the art.
It’s well documented that video memory size increases at a much faster rate than the bandwidth between the system memory and the video memory.
If you could run modern games that use 512mb or more video memory on amiga os, switching between multiple instances of them would be as slow as on anything else because you’d have to reupload all that stuff to video memory just the same as any other os.
On the other hand nobody cares because running multiple games on the same machine is pointless.
Switching desktop spaces in linux is instanteous save from transition effects and it’s very likely the same on macos, I have no idea what you’re on about.
No, the lesson is actually: “if you don’t support any hardware or any modern feature that makes useful things possible, you end up with simpler and faster code”. Who would have thought?
Edited 2012-06-21 08:25 UTC
The thing is… We really need an enormous multi-user OS to perform simple everyday tasks?
For a lot of tasks I prefer the quickness of AmigaOS.
And the market is saying something similar: iOS is the way to go.
Not Mac OS X nor Windows. People wants simpler TV-like embebedd OSs… and me too.
Yeah great job, let’s compare mobile OS and desktop OS even though they run on completely different platforms designed for completely different needs.
The hilarious part here is that phones, things you keep in your pockets, are more powerful than any amiga hardware in existence and their OSes (which are either macos or Linux based) are for all intent and purpose almost as “enormous” compared to amigaos as their desktop counterparts.
Windows 7 is usually as fast as Linux for most things. This is the days of Windows XP.
There’s a reason hardly any serious work is being done on Amiga, and for a long time.
Even if MORB is a bit too harsh in this case, goes too far with criticism of AROS – at least AROS is sane in that it mostly knows its place, knows what it is, a nostalgic toy pet project.
I really doubt you ever had to seriously develop for AmigaOS, and not only because you’d be more likely cursing it instead of calling it fun* – what can you know about Amiga dev if you make such basic mistake like “AmigaOS is a […] system without preemptive multitasking”?
* yeah, fun fight to have something barely enough for required function that doesn’t nuke the OS while running… (ohh, but wasting time on that suddenly places you among the few leet coders)
Plus, such code is unmaintainable; you can see that in how progress ground almost to a halt.
…and then you wonder why people move to other platforms. It had millions of users, now there are estimated few thousand; a per mil left.
Amiga is just old and does very little. Win98 or 2k are also snappy – while being much ahead in software sophistication.
And yay, you can play few FPS games at the same time, how great that the OS and its GFX stack are optimised for such pointless usage…
…games which are ports from the PC; there is a very good reason for that / seriously, you’re using a decade+ old PC software as examples of what Amiga can offer? Most of the new useful software are ports from the PC, just lagging behind and with pains of porting to a stable state.
Just cut the middle crap, you ARE making it into a PC anyway (also WRT hardware, just insisting on some non-standard CPU architecture for some reason)
Edited 2012-06-28 00:19 UTC
I have to ask – what are you talking about here?
1. AmigaOS has always had preemptive multitasking. That was one of the features that truly set it apart from the competition for years.
2. Having a single address space is the single biggest design weakpoint of the system, from a stability and security perspective. (It was forced by the economic realities of the time, of course.)
I thought It used cooperative multitasking like OS 9 had.
But no, It’s true preemptive multitasking as you said. Sorry.
I been mucking about with this in a VM, and it is a nice little system.