Twenty-Five

[Rogue]

I didn't realise they had repository information going back that far in order to visualise it.

The first check-in in our log is by "kodiak" (Bob Burns) and is dated 29th of January, 1985 at half past twelve ;-)

[Rogue]

It's certainly a lot snappier than I expected. I guess a major problem would have been creating a more suitable touch-driven user interface for such a device. As nice as Workbench is, it's very much a desktop UI, to my mind.

I had actually started to work on a new file manager/program launcher type of application for the eLAP version, which ran on an AmigaOne and which was used to make screenshots form. It could use normal AmigaOS icons but presented them in a different way.

I stopped working on it when the project was canned.

AmigaOS was actually quite responsive on the device. It's a shame it never came to be.

[Rogue]

Is that what the "Scalability" picture on the old OS4 site showed (Wayback Machine page, image is gone)? Or was that just a mockup?

Thanks for sharing all this. It's great to see.

Yes, that's the one. It would load icons and just arrange them in a tabular manner. There was a cycle gadget that could select different directories. It was all very similar to what was running under Linux on the device.

Only that AmigaOS run faster ;-)

[Rogue]

Even in the state shown, I saw alot of potential. A shame, indeed.

It had everything that the normal version had except for an audio driver. Thom had written a driver for the touch screen and case buttons, and it had a LED that could actually output RGB values that was controlled via some resource. It even had the emulator running, and it ran WBSteroids and SuperBase - you were a bit restricted to the software we had on the image since the CF and Memory stick interface didn't work yet.

It's hard to convey how cool it was to boot from the thing the first time and suddenly see a "Please insert volume Workbench" requester pop up, or the boing ball with animated floppy disk

[Rogue]

Presumably, though, you still have it, right? Would be nice to see it in action.

The eLAP? No, unfortunately we don't have them anymore. They were returned after the work was finished.