A-EON Interview about Amiga's future - Distrita

[OlafS3]

The market is dead, else there would be tens if not hundreds of thousand of users out there, and growing by the day to be considered a minimal market.   There will be no reigniting any old markets, that dye has been caste a very long time ago.  

A paradigm shift is an absolute must as a new market has to be created as quickly as possible.  That means it has to compete with the current successful OSs and thrive.  In order not only compete with those successful OSs and also thrive, it has to be modern, different, and uniting the Amiga base in short order.  It will take a person with alot of capital and connections to make that happen.

Do you know such a person?

[OlafS3]

Current market (desktop for middle aged men who want to remember their youth) is a failure.  Target needs to be shifted to the larger (and new to us as a community) market with the goal of obtaining 1% market share.  I think we all can agree there is something special about the Amiga, or at least it's spirit that we have yet to find outside of our communities. It's that spark that we need to present to the rest of the world at their level at competitive pricing.  That spark needs to be not only aimed at middle age men who remember their younger years playing on a A500/A1200, but also the 30s and under crowd that haven't touched anything other then Windows, Android/Linux, or iOS machines.

as Thomas already wrote all amiga successors are very unsecure regarding Internet. The only protection right now is obscurity. If you want to attract a broader audience you must offer security and for that you would need memory protection what requires heavy changes at the OS. A modernized OS would have not much to do anymore with the existing platforms and the software would need to be rewritten for it. And you need software and services that are unique and had to be developed as well.

Much more important in my view right now would be modern development tools.

Regarding "middle aged man", I am one of those too

There were millions of Amigas sold in germany so I assume there are a lot of middle aged man who can remember of Amiga. If we manage to convince only parts of these the platform would already be in a much better state. To reach the group of below 30 (the smartphone/tablet generation) you would need something completely different including completely new software so I think that is by far out of reach.

[OlafS3]

You ARE living in a fantasy, aren't you?
Your '030 is pathetic compared to any cpu used in a NG system.
And comparing my ten years old 2.7 GHz G5 system to your processors is pointless, the 68K series even ramped up to 2 or 3 times it current clock speeds would still benchmark at a small fraction of the performance.

And I was a big supporter of the 68K family when it was relevant.
Of course, that was back in the '80's and '90's when I was working for a company that sold systems based on those processors.

You can continue to live in your dream world, but don't expect to make statements you can't support in public without being challenged.

Do not be too proud on your PPC

When running 68k in UAE on modern hardware most of the systems are outperformed already (not G5 or X1000 of course, at least not yet)

[OlafS3]

With 'writing something better' I mean a completely new OS that's entirely incompatible with AOS. Not a single part would be kept. It would be more of a proof of concept than anything else, because there would be no software to run on it, of course.

I would also do it in 68k assembly language. Completely. Some people will probably tell you that that's a very bad idea

To develop a new OS just as "proof of concept" with no software for it instead of f.e. helping on Aros 68k to improve it sounds rather weird to me but go for it if you want