Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: EDanaII on May 18, 2008, 10:42:25 PM
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You know, I don't, ordinarily, get into these kind of threads, let alone start one, but recent events got me to thinking -- always a bad start. ;)
My main machine has, at present, 3 OSes installed on it. I ultimately intend to install a few more (like AROS) just for giggles and fun. Recently, that machine died and I had to replace it. The new machine came with Windows already installed, but, of course, I had to figure out how to get those two additional OSes on it. Naturally, I shrunk XP down to a specific size to make room. Then created the correct partitions for the two other OSes and copied images of them into place. But, ironically, they wouldn't boot anymore. As best I could figure, the partition information had changed, and, therefore, the OSes were trying to run off their old partition IDs. I placed them on the drive, in the exact same order, but, somehow, they were not the same.
So, that got me thinking about the Amiga's RDB, which stores logical information about the drive. Had something like that been in place, I doubt anything would have gotten screwed up. At least, in that way.
This, of course, got me to thinking about the good ol' assign command, which also allows you to move applications effortlessly from one drive to another. No reinstall, just a quick couple of keystrokes, and you're back in business.
Also, as I understand it, not 100% necessary, as the Amiga also (someone correct me if I'm wrong) stores directory IDs rather than names, so that if I rename a directory, the system stills knows what to point to if it changes.
All of these made the machine so much easier to use, with less hair-pulling over all.
But that's not why I started this thread. I'm starting it to see what other things made the system a bliss to use that appear to be unmatched by other operating systems today. Please feel free to state, and argue, :) your thoughts on the subject. I'd like to hear all thoughts.
Ed.
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So, that got me thinking about the Amiga's RDB, which stores logical information about the drive. Had something like that been in place, I doubt anything would have gotten screwed up. At least, in that way.
I love the RDB. It's brilliantly simple. Create a partition, name it, set a boot priority. Done. Every time I need to screw around with partitions on a PC I want to tear my hair out. I can't wait for the day that computer experts realize that the MBR standard is complete crap.
This, of course, got me to thinking about the good ol' assign command, which also allows you to move applications effortlessly from one drive to another. No reinstall, just a quick couple of keystrokes, and you're back in business.
I suppose assigns are handy for IPC Rexx scripts, but I'd much rather programs used PROGDIR: to reference their own directories. Then you don't even need to change anything when moving. Unless the program dumped files into Libs:...
Not sure if 68K and OS4 do this as well, but MorphOS queries a zillion different directories if looking for a .library: Libs:, PROGDIR:, PROGDIR:Libs, etc. It's brilliant. That way, if a program uses extremelyspecificonlyusedbythisoneprogram.library, you can dump it in the program's own directory instead of cluttering up Libs:. It makes system maintenance much easier.
Also, as I understand it, not 100% necessary, as the Amiga also (someone correct me if I'm wrong) stores directory IDs rather than names, so that if I rename a directory, the system stills knows what to point to if it changes.
Sort of. If I've got MyProgram: assigned to dh0:apps/myprogram/ and then rename myprogram/ to myprogram.old/, the MyProgram: assign will continue to work for that session. If you reboot, the assignment in user-startup will fail because the myprogram/ directory no longer exists.
My own personal favorite feature is Save, Use, Cancel. I'm not aware of any other system that lets you experiment with changes in settings without making them permanent. Ubuntu doesn't even have a Cancel option for many settings - everything gets changed on the fly, so too bad if you screwed something up by mistake.
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Datatypes was a good idea imo.
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It silly to compare an '80s OS with an '00 OS. OS's today have different demands and run on far more powerful equipment. We're all here because we like the retro look and feel, it's fun. The Amiga lost the superior title a decade or more ago.
It's a hobby, it makes me happy because it takes me back to my Uni days, before I had the weight of running an IT department, raising a family of my own, mortgage, car payments etc, etc. It's a simpler time in my life.
I turn on my Amiga and I'm back at Uni and those two Japanese girls I met at Uni are, well, ummm, well that's another story....lost in memories here.....
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You can't really say that Amiga is superior today, because it has 15 years of development lag.
But good ideas are timeless. The Amiga still have some that I think are really good. For example:
-It is small and fast. I always remember that when check the amount of disk space and RAM required by Windows...
Compare the speed of alt+tab with Amiga+M. It hurts me to see screens being drawn.
-Multiple screens and screen dragging. It is still cool and useful
-Screens bigger than your monitor. I always need space to put my windows :-)
-Datatypes :-)
-Directory organization is clear. No mess in windows\system
-There is no registry. I hate that !!! It is the perfect tool to hide adwares and to slow down your machine
-There are no extensions. File type is built in.
-Preferences. Everything is there. There are no hidden controls.
-Autoconfig. They did an amazing job in plug and play, but from times to times you face the "where is the driver" problem.
-Big Icons
-Two joysticks :-)
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You guys covered most of it. I would add the Ram disk: and RAD:.
I especially appreciate how the Amiga is not "modern". Some (in previous forums) have argued that Amiga is outdated because it lacks this or that feature of modern OSes. In my mind, Amiga is the sole occupant of it's own branch of the evolutionary tree. That branch is not outdated because much of it was never improved upon, nor are the concepts inferior simply because most of the world was sold a different choice. I feel marketing forces moved computing to a different branch and have largely determined what a modern computer is.
Anyone can buy and use a modern computer (I have them, too), there are only a few thousand Amiga users in the world. We lucky few. "..other computer users hold their manhoods cheap.."
Oops, I got radical again (sorta reads like Henry V, grin).
EDIT: The only modern features I would add to my Amiga experience are: CSS, USB, a broader selection of video codecs, and DVDs. Some of this can had by simply upgrading my hardware.
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My Amiga makes me happy.
My PC makes me angry.
So the Amiga is superior because it is a better friend than a PC.
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Would be quite hard to implement on the open hardware of the PC platform but I always thought SysInfo was an excellent program to compare yourself to your friends and bully them how much faster your A1200 with 030 is faster than there A500 :-D although it was never a part of the Amiga bundle.
I also think that the built-in PCMCIA slot was a risk at the time but has paid off alot now with users using them to network and so on... the slow RAM idea was good in theory but doesn't hold up today (unfortunately MS still seem to think excessive VM is a lifesaver)
One thing that Amiga got wRONG in my opinion is the media. They stuck with DD long after HD disks were the main media in the market. If they released the A1200 with a HD disk drive and put the software on HD disks then it would have made a big difference in the amount of disk swapping and so on (less disks) and also they should have released the A4000 with optional CD-ROM drive and the A1200 CD add-on, nevermind :-(
OK, back to the positive stuff. I think another great thing about the Amiga was the OS in general - it was slim, light, fast, something that Windows will NEVER be because MS's whole ethos on developing is completely wrong. Bloated software then wait for hardware to catch up (repeat until infinity) :-P
And I've said it before and I'll say it again, the wedge design is awesome 8-)
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Luckily AmigaOS is now in a much better situation that it was 15 year ago: reworked to run on newer hardware, native USB support, large hard drives support, new and faster memory handling, support for easier ports of software from Linux, improved GUI etc. It still lacks in certain areas though, like printing, virtual memory, Java support etc.
What I find in AmigaOS unmatched in other OSes is its ease of use: system files are easily recognizable, the OS doesn't hide its elements to the user like in Windows, yet they aren't as cryptic and messy as in Linux.
Varthall
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I would have to say the windows management, seems much easier, i hate clicking once on a window and it comes to the front, the way hard disks are handled, ram disk being visible as an icon, libs, devs, storage, the way how u can add drivers into the devs and take them out, the system still feels modern in the way it operates. draggable screens are still a wonder to me and i get frustrated when working on the mac or pc when i can`t do it. the amiga is still modern in many ways, amazing really for such an old os.
btw anyone still interested in free yourname@amigalife.com email addresses there are a few available still 8-)
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I'd also say that the size and speed of the OS is one of the big advantages. You can turn the A1200 in the sig on and any PC that we have and it will cut swathes through the boot time of the PC. Mind you though, installing SquirrelSCSI has slowed things down quite a bit recently.
However (Sorry about this being negative), but one thing that is frustrating is the lack/expensive nature of the hardware. Yeah, all of us suffer from this problem, but it just occurred to me the other day when upgrading the XP machine. Just plug in a few more IDE drives and the odd PCI card. Done. As for the A1200, I also like the wedge design, but both the case size and the provisions on the mainboard make adding extra hardware difficult. I've often wondered whether to add extra external HDD's and 5.25" drives to the A1200, but this means extra power and space requirements, and this goes in contradiction to one of the main reasons for using the A1200 in the first place - No bulky tower or desktop machine. Yet, a tower or desktop machine is the best option for piling additional H/W into.
Heh, just one of life's little dilemmas. :-D
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What still makes Amiga superior today? -> It can run "Sanity's ARTE" natively.
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Most Amiga users are tech-savvy, and it takes a lot more effort to hide sneak-ware that makes the computer do things the user doesn't want their computer doing. This is also true of Linux, but there it is just the same.
Simplicity can be a feature can't it? Come to think of it, I sorta miss my TRS-80.
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Cammy wrote:
My Amiga makes me happy.
My PC makes me angry.
So the Amiga is superior because it is a better friend than a PC.
totally agree
My friend loaned me his AmigaOne so I could use it to make demonstations for our Amiga Group. I needed to communicate with other Amiga users so i installed WookieChat and it WORKED immediately. I tried installing Wet (just to try it) and it Worked Immediately. I didn't have to worry about messing anything up like I do with wiindows. I repeated this with several other programs......
the system is fast, repsonsive and FUN!!! just too darn Fun!
and that will never stop being true!
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Very simply: it doesn't take several minutes to boot up and shut down!
And it still seems just as fast as my PC for everyday tasks, despite it being about 1/100th as powerful.
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persia wrote:
It silly to compare an '80s OS with an '00 OS. OS's today have different demands and run on far more powerful equipment. We're all here because we like the retro look and feel, it's fun. The Amiga lost the superior title a decade or more ago.
The "demands of an OS" are as simple today as they were 15 years ago: to enable the user to issue commands to the hardware to make it do the things the user wants to do". The stuff that an Amiga can't do is a limitation of the CPU speed (mainly because playback of digital media relies on decompressing heavily compressed files) lack of support for 3D graphics hardware, and non-development of applications software eg web browser. But this has nothing to do with the OS.
Autoconfig- what plug-and-play should be. Shove a card in the trap door: INSTANT speed-up, no IRQ, No drivers.
Separate screens makes for clean, clutter-free work environment, not fixated on screen dragging though.
Arexx- ability to automate software and add functionality to programs by accessing functions of other programs.
Faster CPU actually means a lot faster system operation, rather than Windows where double your cpu clock and you barely notice.
Multitasking: nothing like the amiga's version of it, especially with Executive ( this is the best value piece of shareware you can get. The guy who wrote this charged 10 pounds for software that does things that Linux developers are still trying to figure out how to do, on their quadcore 3 ghz 4 gig ram monsters)
Most of all: simplicity
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Autoconfig- what plug-and-play should be. Shove a card in the trap door: INSTANT speed-up, no IRQ, No drivers.
Without drivers, add-on cards like CyberGraphics would be useless.
IRQ is not an issue in modern X86 PC hardware and OS.
Faster CPU actually means a lot faster system operation, rather than Windows where double your cpu clock and you barely notice.
Modern X86 CPUs are already running significantly faster than the rest the computer e.g. CPU clock speed vs main memory vs harddisk.
There are other areas that reduces the performance in the PC e.g. harddisk and main memory.
In X86 PC land, increasing main memory capacity and installing faster hard disk benefits more than installing faster CPU.
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Despite the in-fighting and animosity, i'd say one of the very few things that make the amiga "superior" is its userbase.
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Without drivers, add-on cards like CyberGraphics would be useless.
Yeah, but Windows doesn't know the hardware is installed until the driver is available. Actually, Windows knows "something" is there. It just doesn't know what it is until it has a driver. Autoconfig lets the system be fully aware of the hardware without requiring additional software to enable it.
Application software will almost always be necessary regardless of the OS. App software and drivers are two different things.
IRQ is not an issue in modern X86 PC hardware and OS.
It shouldn't be, and usually isn't a problem. Depending on certain factors, though, IRQs can still cause problems.
In X86 PC land, increasing main memory capacity and installing faster hard disk benefits more than installing faster CPU.
For good or bad, Amigas don't exhibit this behavior. Increasing memory by itself won't make the applications run any faster. It just reduces that particular system's limitations.
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Despite the in-fighting and animosity, i'd say one of the very few things that make the amiga "superior" is its userbase.
I don't remember ever talking directly to the actual author of software I use on Windows. They hide pretty well behind "Customer Support." For the most part, Amiga programmers are much more accessible.
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Actually, what makes Amiga fun for me is that it's so much more fun to program. Especially games, because the hardware stays still so I get the most out of it; PCs are boringly devoid of definite limitations, trying to get the most out of PC hardware is like chasing a carrot on a stick. And it's not all APIs and abstraction layers on the Amiga either - proper, raw ASM and direct hardware access is where all the fun is.
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EDanaII wrote:
You know, I don't, ordinarily, get into these kind of threads, let alone start one, but recent events got me to thinking -- always a bad start. ;)
My main machine has, at present, 3 OSes installed on it. I ultimately intend to install a few more (like AROS) just for giggles and fun. Recently, that machine died and I had to replace it. The new machine came with Windows already installed, but, of course, I had to figure out how to get those two additional OSes on it. Naturally, I shrunk XP down to a specific size to make room. Then created the correct partitions for the two other OSes and copied images of them into place. But, ironically, they wouldn't boot anymore. As best I could figure, the partition information had changed, and, therefore, the OSes were trying to run off their old partition IDs. I placed them on the drive, in the exact same order, but, somehow, they were not the same.
So, that got me thinking about the Amiga's RDB, which stores logical information about the drive. Had something like that been in place, I doubt anything would have gotten screwed up. At least, in that way.
This, of course, got me to thinking about the good ol' assign command, which also allows you to move applications effortlessly from one drive to another. No reinstall, just a quick couple of keystrokes, and you're back in business.
Also, as I understand it, not 100% necessary, as the Amiga also (someone correct me if I'm wrong) stores directory IDs rather than names, so that if I rename a directory, the system stills knows what to point to if it changes.
All of these made the machine so much easier to use, with less hair-pulling over all.
But that's not why I started this thread. I'm starting it to see what other things made the system a bliss to use that appear to be unmatched by other operating systems today. Please feel free to state, and argue, :) your thoughts on the subject. I'd like to hear all thoughts.
Ed.
One think that, I like is you can type on the Amiga and, it does not do that grammar underline thing, you know the one where it tells you that you used, too many commas. I sense a kindred spirit, here.
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My PC has, as yet, never told me I used too many commas... ;)
Excellent, thanks for the responses everyone.
With regards to partitioning: It's a funny thing, but that singularly Amiga practice has helped my PC data survive today. Initially, when I first adopted a PC over my Amiga, I used their partitioning scheme 'C:' and as a result, I lost lots of data whenever the partition failed. But in later years, I started deliberately partitioning my drives similar to the Amiga (System:, Work: and adding Applications:). Using this scheme, whenever a partition failed, I still had my other partitions survive and was able to recover a lot quicker.
If only other systems had such a forward looking philosophy.
@ Those picking a nit over "superiority" :)
I did not mean that the Amiga was superior anymore, I only pointed to those things that are superior _still_ to other OSes today.
Ed.
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Terse wrote:
One think that, I like is you can type on the Amiga and, it does not do that grammar underline thing, you know the one where it tells you that you used, too many commas. I sense a kindred spirit, here.
But Terse, you do, use, to many, commas in your, text, it, makes it very difficult to, read, or, even under,stand! ;-)
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bloodline wrote:
Terse wrote:
One think that, I like is you can type on the Amiga and, it does not do that grammar underline thing, you know the one where it tells you that you used, too many commas. I sense a kindred spirit, here.
But Terse, you do, use, to many, commas in your, text, it, makes it very difficult to, read, or, even under,stand! ;-)
I kn,ow, and, I th,i,nk I,m getting, worse,!,
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What makes the Amiga superior today is US! The users of the Amiga, past and present make it superior.
There is no other OS that has the creative, intelligent, dedicated, passionate and absolutely loyal users as the AmigaOS. :-D
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What still makes Amiga superior today?
Ehm, for not being a bloated, hacked together pile of crap?
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What still makes Amiga superior today?
The ability to run native Amiga software and games better than the emulators. I think that pretty much sums it up. Everything else can be done faster and cheaper on PC and possibly a Mac too.
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I don't know if I can say superior, but one of the things I've noticed it that old computers, like old cars, have character and are worth the time and effort you put into them to keep them running.
New computers, like new cars, are in most cases an appliance to get a task done. When they are used up a few years down the road, then they are just discarded and no one cares. (I've never seen anyone that wanted to restore an early '90s 386 computer or a Toyota Corolla from the same era.)
-JM
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I like how fast and responsive is my Amiga 1260. I use a Compact Flash as a hardrive to store my programms, docs, saves etc. but everything else is done in Ramdisk, so it's very fast.
I remember 10 years ago, as a student, I was working on a project with Macromedia Director (on Mac) at the university, and I needed an intro scene for my project, so I decided to use Lightwave on my Amiga to make a CG intro, and I was amazed by the efficiency of the OS multitasking.
It was totally crazy, each frames were saved in the Ramdisk, then, while Lightwave was processing an other frame, I was making an image conversion on ImageFX (from 24 bit IFF to 256 colors GIF) and saving on a SCSI (the Blizzard 1260 SCSI module) Iomega ZIP 100 the frames once converted. All this during almost 20 hours without any crash, everything ran flawlessly ! :-)
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I do miss the power of the Mac command line when using an Amiga. I miss Xcode tools where the wole operating system is there for me to use. But I think you are right the Amiga has such hardware limitations that you have to be clever to make things work and there's no Xcode, you have to figure out how to do things without help.
The Amiga is like a Volvo, you need to get real friendly with it because you don't know when it will break and you have to fix it yourself because the only repairman is in another town and you would have to mortgage your house just to speak with him.
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The lightning fast user interface, instant menus, instant
screen switchin and instant OFF.
No other OS can do this, Mac UI is about 100 times slower and Winblows UI is about 1000+ Slower..
Wol.
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Simply put, Amigas are fun.
At work I use a pc with Windows XP Professional on a giant corporate network.
At home, I usually use my Amiga, even though we have a laptop and 2 other pc's with XP. I think the Amiga is just more fun to use.
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redfox
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EDanaII: :lol: :-D
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Well there are many , many reasons..
Here is a nice simple one..Longevity and still very usable today. Cant
say that about a PC of the same era
My Amigas are still GOING, with little to no effort on my part.
Boot up in like 5secs..and your up and running.
Rich
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Egg-Chen wrote:
It was totally crazy, each frames were saved in the Ramdisk, then, while Lightwave was processing an other frame, I was making an image conversion on ImageFX (from 24 bit IFF to 256 colors GIF) and saving on a SCSI (the Blizzard 1260 SCSI module) Iomega ZIP 100 the frames once converted. All this during almost 20 hours without any crash, everything ran flawlessly ! :-)
When my A1200 was brand new I used to run a MOD Player (can't remember wich one), render that Camaro model with Imagine, format a disk and write some stuff in Memacs just to impress my PC user friends with "oh, yeah, this is just a 14MHz machine with 2Mb"...
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(sorry, I coudn't resist... Commas are so nice :-D )
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Egg-Chen: Very cool... Wonder if AREXX or something could be used to automate the process :-? Myself, I used Rend24 running alongside Lightwave to convert the frames as they were generated, save to a DCTV ANIM, and then delete the original frames when done.
OK, the Amiga isn't perfect.. but it's actually the little things that I like. Using LShift-Backspace to delete everything to the left of the cursor, LShift-Del for the right. Being able to type foreign characters easily (How do you do it on a US Windows machine, anyway?) Or, maybe my first attempt at a big .anim in Lightwave, I had only 32MB RAM ATT, I watched as my RAM was being eaten up... My Amiga finally crashed when I was down to about 880K Chip and 32K Fast RAM. Wow, my miggy really struggled to keep going. :-)
I like that I can sort of see what's going on, between progs. like SnoopDos, PriMan, Dopus, and while DOpus is available for PC's, I like the simplicity of DOpus 4 on the Amiga, besides it's free!
IFF standards for files, sure, not perfect by a long shot, but for me anyway, I think it helps with imaginative uses on the Amiga. I have a horrid graphics program for the PC called 'PhotoImpressions', seems real nice, layers, special F/X, etc... unitl you save a picture, it insists on saving in its' own proprietary format...you have to specify file-type everytime you save/modify a picture.. that's in addition to the 'File XX already exists, do you want to overwrite' and all of the dozen or more 'idiot' requesters... (you wanna quit, are you sure, are you sure that you are sure???)
Ack, I just gave away my prefence for Amiga's... I said 'requesters', of course they are called 'dialog boxes' on a PC.... :lol:
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persia wrote:
I do miss the power of the Mac command line when using an Amiga. I miss Xcode tools where the wole operating system is there for me to use. But I think you are right the Amiga has such hardware limitations that you have to be clever to make things work and there's no Xcode, you have to figure out how to do things without help.
The Amiga is like a Volvo, you need to get real friendly with it because you don't know when it will break and you have to fix it yourself because the only repairman is in another town and you would have to mortgage your house just to speak with him.
I am really puzzled with the reply above. Is it me, or do others see something strange with it?
To start with, the All Amiga OSes I know of have a command line interface to get to the heart of the system. I guess he is saying that the Mac command line is so different and perhaps better than the Amiga command line interface. I don't know as I don't use the command line when using my Mac.
I can understand the part about not having Xcode tools.
Again I don't understand him saying that "you would have to mortgage your house just to speak with him (an Amiga repairman). The Amiga community is the best at helping their own to diagnose problems and help get things working again. If it is a hardware problem that requires expert repair, then I agree it is very difficult to find and probably a bit expensive.
I think getting a Mac repaired is just as expensive, if not more than my Amigas.
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double post
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The Mac command line is, well, not a Mac command line - it's just a unix shell, which, imho, leaves the Mac with two interfaces, one that is useless (at most tasks) for being too simple, and one that is (relatively) useless for being beyond the scope of what a 'power user' ought to need to know to do Mac-ish tasks.
Don't get me wrong - I love unix's power, but if I want it, I'll run netbsd, solaris, or linux (and in that order of preference, too). The Mac operating system used to have quite a bit of grace and simplicity, but these days I find myself wondering things such as: "Why does this os keep mount points around long after the gui has removed them?" or "Why is my Library directory filled up with every version of everything that's ever been installed or updated?".
I liked System 7.0.1 (w/ update) and it's been downhill since then. I was happy having an OS I could strip down to run in a couple of hundred kB. I have a perfectly good G4 Mac Mini sitting unused because I can't be bothered with OSX anymore. I'd love to run something else on this machine that my fiancee would actually find friendly enough to use. She actually remembers using an Amiga back in the day, so if only I could run something like it on hardware that I have lying around _before_ it's an antique!
And for what it's worth, having been an apple tech, I can tell you that parts cost aside, it would have cost you far more (even back when you could buy amigas from commodore) to have paid me for the labor on a mac than it would to pay some reasonable soul to do work for you on an amiga now, given the ridiculous apple designs. The original iMacs took upwards of two hours just to get at _anything_ much less put it back so the case fit together again. I put a scsi controller in my A1200 in 3 minutes the other day, without instructions, lol. Try not having the Apple service guides and see how far you get!
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Without drivers, add-on cards like CyberGraphics would be useless.
true but CGX and P96 are third party add-ons
Faster CPU actually means a lot faster system operation, rather than Windows where double your cpu clock and you barely notice.
Modern X86 CPUs are already running significantly faster than the rest the computer e.g. CPU clock speed vs main memory vs harddisk.
There are other areas that reduces the performance in the PC e.g. harddisk and main memory.
In X86 PC land, increasing main memory capacity and installing faster hard disk benefits more than installing faster CPU.
true but the RAM and Hard disk systems -what with new buses- are probably 10-50 times faster than what you have on an Amiga. Its just that the OS needs gargantuan amounts of data to be loaded back and forth to do the simplest of things that slows it down. This what I mean by the immediate speed increase that you get with an Amiga that you don't with a PC. The OS doesn't suck up you resources in proprtion to how big or fast those resources are.
Have a look at Vista: what does it need to install (recommend) 12G of hard drive space. I have most of the text and pictures of the Encylclopeadia Brittanica and it fits on one 650 Mb CD. How can it take possibly take more information than whats in an encyclopedia to make a hard drive arrange its data in order, suck information of it or a DVD, put the info into memory so that the CPU can do something to it, show some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen or print it out?
Whenever I read the hardware spec on a modern PC and then use one it makes me want to cry, because it should be SO MUCH faster, but isn't.
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You forgot to mention AppleScript...pretty much a lot of the power of ARexx and it has a nice visual way to build macros....for tha apps that support it.
Finder is beautiful in it's simplicity...I just switched back to Windows for my main work machine and I loathe it...miss all the little shortcuts and the simple things the MacUI does that you take for granted :-/
..but yeah bash/whatever is no use to most people...
...and I'm sorry but System 7 was horrible...it might have been a huge step forward for the Mac but ugh! :D
First iMacs were fun to service....an hours worth of assembly and disassembly to do virtually anything...our techs had a nightmare but Apple paid well$$$ :D
Amiga has Nothing on a modern OS....except maybe a little nostalgic fun....which could be Everything too :D
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stefcep2 wrote:
Without drivers, add-on cards like CyberGraphics would be useless.
true but CGX and P96 are third party add-ons
Not anymore, P96 has been integrated into the system.
Varthall
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We do!
Side-effects, no virus/adware. Lightning fast (OS4). I can pay a bill and check the e-mail and power off at the same time the pc is still booting & loading the virus programs which cost quite a lot too!
Second answer:
Hyperion and the new forthcomming update (DVI,Amigainput?+ "surprises" etc.) !
Oh yeah and the retro-games...
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just a quick question.
Is Amiga still the only true multitasking computer?
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foleyjo wrote:
just a quick question.
Is Amiga still the only true multitasking computer?
No... But it is the only one that seems to be :-D
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foleyjo wrote:
just a quick question.
Is Amiga still the only true multitasking computer?
I assume you mean pre-emptive multitasking when you say "true".
It never was the only, or first true multitasking computer, but probably was the first personal computer for the masses that had true multitasking. I believe that Windows started using pre-emptive multitasking with WindowsNT, or 2000 and don't know when the Mac got it, but I am sure has it now and for a while.
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amigadave wrote:
I assume you mean pre-emptive multitasking when you say "true".
Not sure if thats what I mean.
What I was told once is that with the Amiga its hardware can work independently from each other allowing multitasking. So two tasks would actually be performed at the same time. Even disk access
With other computers the tasks seem to be performed at the same time when actually they are just taking turns but the processor is so fast it looks like they are being performed at the same time.
Was this a lie?
it could be I believe anything I don't understand :lol:
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The hardware had DMA and co-processors, meaning that the sound chip,and the graphics chip could act independently of the CPU. I am sure this has a lot to do with how smooth Amiga multitasking is and why it was so hard for Windows to do it in "less than 4 meg" (W.Gates)
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l like the fact u just switch the amiga of no shutdown a very small thing but really cool.
l like the fact all files are seen and u can work out what they do.
i have tryed mac dont like them bland and sterile and not having a second mouse button make u feel like one hand is tied behind you back aghhhhh .
windows just does the job just like a boring car or motorbike
but where the fun.
which leaves me sad because l dont see a future computer that l think wow thats cool l like this .
pity though :-)
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amigadave wrote:
foleyjo wrote:
just a quick question.
Is Amiga still the only true multitasking computer?
I assume you mean pre-emptive multitasking when you say "true".
It never was the only, or first true multitasking computer, but probably was the first personal computer for the masses that had true multitasking. I believe that Windows started using pre-emptive multitasking with WindowsNT, or 2000 and don't know when the Mac got it, but I am sure has it now and for a while.
AFAIK Windows got it with Windows 95 and NT 4.0, and the Mac got it with MacOSX (while the AppleIIGS also had preemptive multitasking back in 1986)
And the Amiga was the first homecomputer with preemptive multitasking. I think the "true" stands indeed for preemptive multitasking. Others also advertised with multitasking while this was merely cooperative multitasking, which isn't really multitasking. Preemptive multitasking let multiple programs run, while cooperative runs one program and 'suspends' other programs (though interrupts are shared, so a real time clock can keep on ticking)
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Yeah, but Windows doesn't know the hardware is installed until the driver is available. Actually, Windows knows "something" is there.
Not just "something" is there i.e. Windows (2K/XP in this case) knows the following
1. vendor id.
2. device id.
3. subsys id.
In http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/aralves/WindowsLiveWriter/Finddriversforanunknowndevice_E3DB/image_2.png
Windows XP already know this device type i.e. multimedia audio controller.
In http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/s845wd1-e/sb/cs-007297.htm
Windows XP already know this device type i.e. ethernet controller.
It just doesn't know what it is until it has a driver. Autoconfig lets the system be fully aware of the hardware without requiring additional software to enable it.
What happens if I wipe out P96 drivers? Can you still use the graphics device?
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Have a look at Vista: what does it need to install (recommend) 12G of hard drive space. I have most of the text and pictures of the Encylclopeadia Brittanica and it fits on one 650 Mb CD. How can it take possibly take more information than whats in an encyclopedia to make a hard drive arrange its data in order, suck information of it or a DVD, put the info into memory so that the CPU can do something to it, show some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen or print it out?
Windows provides more than just showing some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen.
Windows Print Spooler supports multi-user objects and network printing.
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stefcep2 wrote:
The hardware had DMA
X86 PC also has DMA i.e. recall why AmigaOne’s was labelled "incompetent" compared to modern PC Northbridges.
Should I restart;
1. NVIDIA nForce 2 chipset(1) vs any Amiga chipset debate
2. Intel 965 Express chipset(2) vs any Amiga chipset debate
(1) Independent (from CPU) pre-fech cache engine in Northbridge.
(2) Incorporates Intel's Fast Memory Access engine (out-of-order processing).
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/q965_q963/demo/demo.html
and co-processors,
But a modern PC has another CPU core. My Radeon HD 3870 runs Fold@Home GPU2 client just fine.
meaning that the sound chip,and the graphics chip could act independently of the CPU. I am sure this has a lot to do with how smooth Amiga multitasking is and why it was so hard for Windows to do it in "less than 4 meg" (W.Gates)
Install AROS X86 build on X86 PC.
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More to the question, what doesn't?
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Hammer wrote:
Windows provides more than just showing some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen.
Windows Print Spooler supports multi-user objects and network printing.
Programs shouldn't use that much. I mean, like Clive Sinclair said, you're able to control an entire nuclear facility with a ZX Spectrum (48 kilobytes of mem).
Factory computers (PLC's) have normally just a couple of megabytes on which it's programs are stored and run on.
The problem with PC's nowadays is the bad usage of object oriented programming. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for object oriented programming, but one has to be very careful with including libraries in their code. It's very easy to make bloatware (and considering programmers often have to program in a very short term, they don't have the luxury but doing the 'easy' way).
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Tiny point about multitasking:
Windows got multitasking of a kind with '95 but it wasn't pre-emptive. Before that it was just task swapping. NT was pre-emptive I think.
MacOS got it with MacOS X... I don't think even MacOS 9 had pre-emptive multi-tasking.
Workbench 1.0 was multitasking in 1984. :)
However, the Sinclair QL was multitasking at that time too (1985ish)...
... and before even that the 6809-based micros such as the Dragon 64 and CoCo IIIs (I think) were running OS-9 which had pre-emptive multi-tasking.
In other words, the Amiga was the first mainstream computer to have multitasking, but not the first home computer. Windows, of course, was waaay behind, followed only by Macintoshes.
Here endeth the lesson. :)
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Cars don't need automatic transmission, air conditioning or heat, power steering, disk brakes, etc.
(http://www.lightheartphoto.com/gallery/gallery3/old%20car.jpg)
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What happens if I wipe out P96 drivers? Can you still use the graphics device?
Well, the FF/SD would be able to function without drivers. It wouldn't be completely dead in the water without drivers if that counts. But, admittedly, that's due to the video slot, rather than having anything to do with Autoconfig.
I'd think a better example would be a SCSI controller, like the A4091. Full SCSI access with no drivers. Haven't tried SCSI on a PC yet, but the IDE cards I've connected require some form of driver to be installed. Sometimes Windows could find the drivers on its own, sometimes it needed a little help. But it did need them before the cards would function.
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spirantho wrote:
Tiny point about multitasking:
Windows got multitasking of a kind with '95 but it wasn't pre-emptive. Before that it was just task swapping. NT was pre-emptive I think.
I thought Win'95 also had pre-emptive multi-tasking, e.g. the programs did not have to use special statements to allow task switching. But the drivers and the shell could lock up the machine quite often as they were not clearly divided from the user (as is actually the case on Amiga). This improved much in NT, mostly by forcing the use of updated drivers.
Also a lot of games on amiga just disabled the multi-tasking but this does not mean the OS did not support pre-emptive multitasking.
greets,
Staf.
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JKD wrote:
Finder is beautiful in it's simplicity...I just switched back to Windows for my main work machine and I loathe it...miss all the little shortcuts and the simple things the MacUI does that you take for granted :-/
Bah. That's like saying a Ford is a good car because it's not a Yugo. The transmissions still fail regularly. :)
...and I'm sorry but System 7 was horrible...it might have been a huge step forward for the Mac but ugh! :D
Well, the _stock_ system 7 was no good, I'll agree with you there. But if you had the time to take it apart with macsbug and resedit, and then put it back together, it was actually decent.
First iMacs were fun to service....an hours worth of assembly and disassembly to do virtually anything...our techs had a nightmare but Apple paid well$$$ :D
Indeed. Apple equipment is just not designed for service. (Ever open up a laserwriter? the original one I mean! YUCK!)
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I just remind something nice:
Locale !
It might sound silly, but a friend of mine bought a HP notebook for his wife in Italy and wanted to change Vista to Portuguese, because she doesn´t speak Italian.
Guess what? It is impossible !! He can either buy a new Portuguese license or upgrade to Ultimate and download a LIP to half translate the system. Quite modern...
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spirantho wrote:
Tiny point about multitasking:
Windows got multitasking of a kind with '95 but it wasn't pre-emptive. Before that it was just task swapping. NT was pre-emptive I think.
It could do preemptive multitasking, but it wasn't good at it, because of backwards compatibility (and bad programming).
Windows 3.1 was 'task-switching', which is called 'cooperative multitasking' (or abusively shortened to 'multitasking').
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I'd think a better example would be a SCSI controller, like the A4091. Full SCSI access with no drivers. Haven't tried SCSI on a PC yet, but the IDE cards I've connected require some form of driver to be installed. Sometimes Windows could find the drivers on its own, sometimes it needed a little help. But it did need them before the cards would function.
Exactly. Good ol' Amiga ROM tags. A hypothetical graphics card could store an RTG system in Flash and be ready for use at power-on (you'd just need something in Devs:Monitors, same as you do for the full NTSC or PAL screenmode database). If I'm not mistaken, P96 and CGX in their current forms aren't ROMable because they rely on some functions only available from disk, but OS4 is moving in the direction of making it possible by converting P96 components into Kickstart modules.
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persia wrote:
Cars don't need automatic transmission, air conditioning or heat, power steering, disk brakes, etc.
Agree :-D
My cars does have disk brakes and heat though..
automatic transmission, air conditioning and power steering are for rich people :lol:
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>by Tenacious on 2008/5/18 21:38:08
>I especially appreciate how the Amiga is not "modern". Some >(in previous forums) have argued that Amiga is outdated >because it lacks this or that feature of modern OSes. In my >mind, Amiga is the sole occupant of it's own branch of the >evolutionary tree. That branch is not outdated because much >of it was never improved upon, nor are the concepts inferior >simply because most of the world was sold a different choice.
I would agree with that. Amiga is a different species. It was targetted for games, real-time audio/video effects (which arcade-type games require), fast game port interface, etc. PCs gaming is like a delayed (after-thought) superficial imposition on the computer-- slower game port, effects have to be done through slower APIs rather than hardware standard (and not all hardware supports all API calls), lack of display memory pointers, lack of real-time multi-channel sound, etc. These features made it better at doing them in a pre-emptive multitasking fashion and for NTSC/PAL video stuff. Plus the OS is simple to use or bypass to make time critical stuff easier to do and analyze. I mean how many machines are there where you can compute the exact color clock where the register will be modified to a defined value (only Atari 800 maybe).
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>It could do preemptive multitasking, but it wasn't good at it, because of backwards compatibility (and bad programming).
I don't think Windows 3.x, '95/'98/'98SE/ME do pre-emptive multitasking. Only NT and Windows 2000/XP which are based on NT do the pre-emptive multitasking. You could manually set it up via the WM_TIMER message on the older windows but they are mostly DOS TSR-type tasks. [TSR = terminate and stay resident programs used in DOS.] Just click on the DRAG bar of a Window in the older windows and see all the tasks freeze-- bad programming by Microsoft if they are pre-emptive OSes.
And if you are going to set up the pre-emption manually with the WM_TIMER message, you mine as well declare all other computers that have timer-based events to be pre-emptive multitaskers. I think if IBM had it's way and the PC world stuck to hardware based standards, the PCs and OSes would be much more efficient.
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The Amiga does have a lot of features that made it ahead of it's time.. I did Amiga development with graphics video etc on classic Amigas..
However, even comparing the AmigaOne to the stuff I show off as demos at www.donburnett.com or half the stuff I can do in XAML with a fully 3d UI today (mapping 2D controls onto 3d surfaces, etc..) Then I'll start taking notice of the Amiga..
Now with shaders built into the latest .NET Service Pack 3.5 sp1 (WPF 3.5.x)the nail is in the coffin there...
XAML rules and it's portable to the web and mobile devices and non-windows platforms (like nokia phones) via Silverlight..
If Amiga could do half of what I did this with this page (in real-time) I'd be incredibly happy..
http://www.donburnett.com/WpfSamples/WPF/WPF3dSample.xbap
I like the Amiga, but superiority is difficult, as most people even Apple folks feel they have past it's capabilities by long ago.. Pre-emptive multitasking wasn't useful with an Desktop that working inside of one task or thread. It wasn't till Windows NT that a pre-emptive scheduler was even present or exploited..
I just installed the Visual Studio 2008 CTP for supporting parallel processing with multi-core systems. This improves performance for programs compiled to support it.
Adding parallelism also is something Amiga would have to do for the future as well..
The reality is we have a lot of old school pc developers here and people who really don't develop for current and new platforms and don't have a clue.. If they did they'd see how slick things like XAML, for WPF and Silverlight are and see all the things that they could do in 15 minutes that would still take years of C or C++ code to do..
Posting incorrect information that is technically not feasible and based on marketing or opinion that is not fact doesn't do the Amiga's case any good with people that are in the know.. We need to be more factual with our posts that way they will garner more respect for the community.
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I am sure that you are a highly skilled and talented programmer and the PC world is very lucky to have you, but the die-hard amiga user asks, "how will a 3d GUI improve the core functionality of a program", it won't, it just looks pretty and wastes processor and GPU time.
The Amiga should give users what they need, rather than gimmicks to sell "improved" versions of software they may already have.
You have painted yourself into a corner here as I tried to look at your samples, but Firefox would not display it, obviously I don't have some vital plug-in, relying on microsoft products may result in lack of choice of third party products, but I don't want to worry about that I want an operating system that just does what I want without quibble, maybe that's not AmigaOS now, but it could be, in the future, if skilled and talented programmers were to donate some of their spare time to it.
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I'm with Don on this pretty much.
I've been thinking on the topic all day... had It been asked 5 years ago I might have thought of something that was still there - something substantial and useful that hadn't been adopted in some way or another, and I can't think of one.
It was cutting edge in it's day - but that day has passed and the sun has set.
I have a very good friend who's huge into flying planes - real planes. He ran into some very good fortune and was able to realize a lifelong dream of owning his own - he chose to buy and restore an Tiger Moth.
I scratched my head over it - told him he could buy 3 conventional small aircraft for the cost of having parts machined, built, restored, and of course having it pass as airworthy... and he just laughed and said 'I know'
His plane isn't as good, efficient, cost effective, powerful, fast, or even SAFE as a modern plane... but I know for a fact you won't get that feeling you get when you fly in if you were putting safely in a piper cub.
That's how I feel about my machine...
All that being said - I find if funny that the staunch followers of what was a groundbreaking home computer are now luddites.
*shrug*
Don't get that at all.
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Remember, the point of this post was to _identify those things that are still superior today._ To identify those things that the industry _should have adopted._ It is not to say that the Amiga, as a whole, is superior.
Wouldn't it have been nice, for example, if Windows had something as modest as an assign command? How much simpler would it be to move software then? How much easier would it be to move partitions, if they'd adopted an RDB?
This little things are still superior to their corresponding functions on many modern OSes.
Ed.
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If the Amiga had a fast CPU, a graphics card and a (slightly) updated operating sytem with a browser, we would all be prepared to ignore any additional speed a multicore PC may have.
In practice the PC user will still have to wait longer to start using his PC than the Amiga user would, and if the Amiga feels faster, then for all intents and purposes, it is faster.
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What an entertaining thread this has become. Don't be so harsh with Don, much of what he wrote, I agree with, but he is afflicted with the disease of having to work on and with Windows and/or Microsoft products because they are all that is available right now to do what he needs to do. Amiga is not superior hardware or software anymore. That is why I wrote it is the people that decide to still use them that are what is superior, the devotion and continued dedication to improving something long after it has been surpassed elsewhere.
I have the luxury of enjoying the use of the Amiga and can still make money with it (I am getting to that point anyway with the creation of my video studio), but that is not its primary purpose. I could spend money for better video hardware (if I had any money), but choose to use what I enjoy and get the best from it, even if its best results are not considered close to what the best available can provide. It can still do amazing things in the right hands and I plan on those hands being mine some day.
I enjoy that the Amiga community and few developers is still alive and fairly well considering what we have all gone through. What other computers have new hardware being released 15 years after the parent company has gone bankrupt? What other computer has so many users still waiting and hoping for a new OS for their antique machines after years of development?
I like that there are still improvements being made to the 3.1-3.9 versions of the OS, the classic Amigas still keep on, keeping on, some people have created AROS, OS4 and MorphOS in the spirit of the classic Amiga OSes, inventive people create projects like the MiniMig, NatAmi and Clone-A, that make us wonder just what may come next along those directions.
The Amiga is a fantastic experience that we have been privileged to be part of. I for one have been very enriched in the process and I am grateful. I only wish that something as inspiring would come along again. Something completely new and revolutionary that would wipe all the Windows, Linux, MacOS and the rest away. A fresh start that is not crippled by the past and can take full advantage of the incredible power that is available today, but in a way that leads to future development like nothing that has ever been before. In other words, something worth getting all excited about, something that will make me sit back and say "maybe this is the way things might have been if the Amiga had won the battle and Windows had died at version 3.1".
Until that day comes, I will use my MacBook for most things, including running WindowsXP only when necessary, emulating an Amiga to escape and save my sanity, and enjoying my collection of Classic Amiga computers every chance I get.
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Yeah, I can drag an app out of the Applications Folder on a Mac and put it in say iTunes music folder and it will work, but why in the name of the bugbladder beast of trall would I?
My Mac happily users all eight of it's processors (2 quadcore xeons) and will happily use my wife and son's processors as well.
The Amiga takes me back to my youth, that's all it does that my Mac doesn't. Really unless you've taken up residence in 1989 that's about the only thing that you can say.
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@ persia
Yeah, I can drag an app out of the Applications Folder on a Mac and put it in say iTunes music folder and it will work, but why in the name of the bugbladder beast of trall would I?
If the applications folder gets too cluttered, conceivably someone might want to branch things off into video, image, office, or scientific subdirectories (or drives). Easy to do with the Mac or Amiga, a complete nightmare under Windows or Linux.
Remember, we're talking about nifty design features in the Amiga's hard/software that (still) aren't available elsewhere. Any modern machine runs rings around the Amiga in terms of performance and application capability, but there are concepts in which the Amiga still has an edge.
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Actually thats one of the things I didn't have problems with under Linux.
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A6000 wrote:
If the Amiga had a fast CPU, a graphics card and a (slightly) updated operating sytem with a browser, we would all be prepared to ignore any additional speed a multicore PC may have.
In practice the PC user will still have to wait longer to start using his PC than the Amiga user would, and if the Amiga feels faster, then for all intents and purposes, it is faster.
You're talking about the AmigaOne!
Varthall
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Matt_H wrote:
I'd think a better example would be a SCSI controller, like the A4091. Full SCSI access with no drivers. Haven't tried SCSI on a PC yet, but the IDE cards I've connected require some form of driver to be installed. Sometimes Windows could find the drivers on its own, sometimes it needed a little help. But it did need them before the cards would function.
Exactly. Good ol' Amiga ROM tags. A hypothetical graphics card could store an RTG system in Flash and be ready for use at power-on (you'd just need something in Devs:Monitors, same as you do for the full NTSC or PAL screenmode database). If I'm not mistaken, P96 and CGX in their current forms aren't ROMable because they rely on some functions only available from disk, but OS4 is moving in the direction of making it possible by converting P96 components into Kickstart modules.
Well, my laptop is fitted with 1GB of Intel's Turbo Memory (Flash Memory).
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I would agree with that. Amiga is a different species. It was targetted for games, real-time audio/video effects (which arcade-type games require), fast game port interface, etc. PCs gaming is like a delayed (after-thought) superficial imposition on the computer-- slower game port, effects have to be done through slower APIs rather than hardware standard (and not all hardware supports all API calls),
PC GPUs changes its micro-architecture nearly every generation. It’s like changing from PPC-to-X86-to-ARM-to-(yet another processing core) nearly every year.
For example
NV Geforce FX 5x00 VILW based architecture.
NV Geforce 6x00/7x00 SIMD/MIMD based architecture.
NV Geforce 8x00 (CUDA) Scalar based architecture.
AMD Radeon X1xxx SIMD/MIMD based architecture.
AMD Radeon HD 3xx0(CTM/CAL) VILW based architecture.
If the game was designed to “hit-the-metal” the hardware would become a “boat anchor” for any architecture changes.
I can’t run Fold@Home GPU2 (written on AMD's CAL) on NV CUDA hardware.
Note why you don’t see any commercial PC games being designed directly on NV's CUDA or AMD's CTM(aka "Close-To-Metal")/CAL. The abstraction layer enables rapid hardware architecture changes without completely killing software compatibility.
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Hammer wrote:
Have a look at Vista: what does it need to install (recommend) 12G of hard drive space. I have most of the text and pictures of the Encylclopeadia Brittanica and it fits on one 650 Mb CD. How can it take possibly take more information than whats in an encyclopedia to make a hard drive arrange its data in order, suck information of it or a DVD, put the info into memory so that the CPU can do something to it, show some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen or print it out?
Windows provides more than just showing some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen.
Windows Print Spooler supports multi-user objects and network printing.
Ok, so we need 20 times the data thats in the Encyclopedia Brittanica (with maps and pictures) so that we can run a multi-user print spooler. Great. If I were a hardware vendor I'd be having a stroke at how the OS is crippling my hardware.
Its a croc. Todays programmers are the laziest ever. I am not a programmer but I did it for 1 semester at university years ago. Just by writing better code we more than doubled the search speed and halved the file size of a little database proggie we had to write. Today its: "who cares: we'll have double the processor speeds in 18 month time, lets write for that.." An this extends to the OS programming as well.
yes Windows does more things than AmigaOS, but not by a factor of 1000 or 10000. If I had a modern web browser, PDF reader/writer DVD player and burner I would not need to suffer through it (or Linux for that matter).
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stefcep2 wrote:
Its a croc. Todays programmers are the laziest ever. I am not a programmer but I did it for 1 semester at university years ago. Just by writing better code we more than doubled the search speed and halved the file size of a little database proggie we had to write. Today its: "who cares: we'll have double the processor speeds in 18 month time, lets write for that.." An this extends to the OS programming as well.
If the software didn't cripple the hardware, people would simply not buy hardware often enough to make manufacturing PC hardware profitable! A PC used to be considered to have a lifespan (free from hardware failure) of about 3 years. These days, you can expect a brand-new PC that never sees smoke or other environmental factors that cause damage to last you twice as long.
If Dell had to wait 6-7 years for repeat customers, they'd be screwed. They rely on Microsoft (and other software vendors) to up the ante with bloated crap software that needs ever increasing amounts of CPU time, disk and RAM. The average user is not a gamer who 'needs' to have the latest system; he is not even the owner of the computer - because he uses it at work, to do computationally trivial work that could have been accomplished on a 486 DOS box.
Granted, there is a (more) diverse set of applications now that do need some level of performance to run at all (digital video comes to mind and I'm sure there are others but it's too early for me to think of them), but the vast majority of users get by with just ie or firefox, word and excel.
The reason for this, of course, is that there are any number of tasks that computers can do now that they simply couldn't a few years ago, which are not prevalent enough to make the economies of scale sufficient to support manufacturing high-end systems for them. So we all have to suffer with crap software in order to get the average user to keep buying new computers, just to keep costs down for commercial applications! These rarely run on the desktop operating systems, instead you see them on linux or windoze's server variants (which are much more efficient, imho, than XP or Vista).
I am a programmer by trade, and I will tell you that is a sad fact that most programmers are _very lazy_ in their code. They will happily type garbage for an hour to avoid thinking for half of that time; their ideas are all similar to each others (they call this 'improving readability') and they are well and truly attached to their von Neumann programming languages and methodologies. This is an antiquated system which needs to be destroyed through education.
Sadly, most universities (and university professors) have given up on teaching alternate methods of programming that could have a great impact on software performance. They still offer their courses on programming languages, but they end up being weak surveys of scheme or lisp and prolog, which never delve deep enough into the material to empower the students to use these languages in the real world. The students also just do not care about this material (which is why people are understandably disinterested in teaching it) because they do not see ads on dice.com for prolog or lisp programmers - they see C# and Java and .Net.
Those programming languages are crap, because they force programmers to use libraries that are ever increasing in size and complexity without providing more functionality than one could produce in a few prolog statements. The only area in which I consider so-called modern programming languages at all efficient is in the changes they cause in the learning curve for database- and network-oriented programming. (When you write code that has to be viable in the real world, it still takes just as long, but you can get basic models that promote understanding running with much less effort than using the POSIX system libraries from C/C++ or Pascal.)
Sorry if I ranted a bit - I'm facing major feature creep this morning. :)
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@ persia:
Yeah, I can drag an app out of the Applications Folder on a Mac and put it in say iTunes music folder and it will work, but why in the name of the bugbladder beast of trall would I?
To add to what Matt_H has already pointed out. Many times in the past (and present) I've run out of space on my Windows system and, rather than adding a new drive and tossing the old, I would add that drive and keep the old. But then I'd need to transfer data over to the new drive and, naturally, those apps would break. I still have this problem today. Fortunately, many software designers design their software to be independent of this problem or to reinstall themselves one started again, but not all do and reinstalling those can be a pain in the S.
Presently, I have 4 OSes installed on my main machine. Maintaining these can sometimes cause my partition information to break. Suddenly, what was identified as drive P: is now drive E: and, once again, everything breaks.
Assign and the RDB, for my examples, make these issues easier to deal with.
Ed.
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Other than boot-time, I can't see how it is better than other OSes. The lack of new hardware is a big issue.
I still enjoy running my Amigas, but I'd say the baton has been passed on some years ago.
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@ Hammer
Well, my laptop is fitted with 1GB of Intel's Turbo Memory (Flash Memory).
I hadn't heard of this before, but based on a quick look at Wikipedia it does look pretty cool and useful. But it seems to me like its raison d'etre is a workaround for the bloat and inefficiency of Windows. It seems like it would make "disk" loading unnoticeable, whereas the point of the ROM tag is to make disk loading unnecessary.
Similar ends, different means.
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sdyates wrote:
Other than boot-time, I can't see how it is better than other OSes. The lack of new hardware is a big issue.
I still enjoy running my Amigas, but I'd say the baton has been passed on some years ago.
Not meaning to offend, but there are over 80 posts here highlighting the benefits of the Amiga operating environment over other systems. We are not talking about the lack of new hardware or software, but the concepts. If you want to see what AmigaOS might be like on new hardware, try Winuae. See how quickly it boots, how quickly it lists window contents, how quickly applications start, how smooth the multitasking is, all the while its actually emulating a foreign instruction set. Why does outlook take longer to fetch my email than YAM under Winuae and under my A4000? Imagine if it were running native code: your PC would fly. Here are some of the advantages:
1. 5 sec boot.
2. Amiga RDB/Assign command
3. Wonderfully smooth preemptive mutitasking
4. Highly configurable GUI
5. Datatypes
6. Arexx
7. Shell
8. Multiple screens, each with their own color depth and resolution.
9. Highly efficient RAM and hard drive usage.
10. Graphics and sound co-processors with their own DMA, leaving the CPU to act independently on house keeping tasks, ensuring that you always have a responsive GUI.
11. Autoconfig
12. RAM: disk
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pkillo wrote:
If the software didn't cripple the hardware, people would simply not buy hardware often enough to make manufacturing PC hardware profitable! A PC used to be considered to have a lifespan (free from hardware failure) of about 3 years. These days, you can expect a brand-new PC that never sees smoke or other environmental factors that cause damage to last you twice as long.
I could do everything on my circa 1994 PIII 650 256 meg Win98SE machine that I do on my Athlon 4800 with 2 gig ram XPPro machine . In fact i can't think of a single thing that I do now on the XPPro machine that i didn't do before on the Win98 machine. Yes USB support wasn't as good but how hard could it have been to add a service pack-hell Amiga does it on a 1993 or earlier OS. For me i upgraded only because XPPro is more stable, and to run XPpro on that hardware would have cost 50% of the cost of a new PC, about $200 more.
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stefcep2 wrote:
I could do everything on my circa 1994 PIII 650 256 meg Win98SE machine that I do on my Athlon 4800 with 2 gig ram
I completely agree with your opinion here, but I think you haven't had enough coffee today - win98 in 1994? :)
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Yes I inherited it from my brother, I was mainly using my A1200 then.
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Sorry, but you must have the dates mixed up. In 1994 Intel was still trying to get the original Pentium to do better than 90MHz and Microsoft was desperately attempting to get Windows 95 to be Windows 94... I actually wish I had a quality-built PC from back then, because as you know if you've ever tried to write an OS for a modern PC, that was just about the end of being able to use old-school assembler tactics on an IBM-compatible. (I wrote a boot-loader/screen pager a few years ago for the early AMD 64-bit systems and was aghast at how many instructions it took just to read a text file off disk and write it to the screen with line wrapping and scrolling...my AT hardware reference manual became a relic around the time we are speaking of..)
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stefcep2 wrote:
Not meaning to offend, but there are over 80 posts here highlighting the benefits of the Amiga operating environment over other systems. We are not talking about the lack of new hardware or software, but the concepts. If you want to see what AmigaOS might be like on new hardware, try Winuae. See how quickly it boots, how quickly it lists window contents, how quickly applications start, how smooth the multitasking is, all the while its actually emulating a foreign instruction set. Why does outlook take longer to fetch my email than YAM under Winuae and under my A4000? Imagine if it were running native code: your PC would fly. Here are some of the advantages:
1. 5 sec boot.
2. Amiga RDB/Assign command
3. Wonderfully smooth preemptive mutitasking
4. Highly configurable GUI
5. Datatypes
6. Arexx
7. Shell
8. Multiple screens, each with their own color depth and resolution.
9. Highly efficient RAM and hard drive usage.
10. Graphics and sound co-processors with their own DMA, leaving the CPU to act independently on house keeping tasks, ensuring that you always have a responsive GUI.
11. Autoconfig
12. RAM: disk
Please, include:
13. Screen dragging
14. Superbitmap screens in Workbench
15. Locale :-D
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:crazy: D'Oh 2004 damnit, 2004!!!
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I don't take any offense at all. I have a large collection of amigas and videos, but I would still disagree.
1) it is actually more like 10 seconds, but hey, that is a great amount of time - given nothing else is loaded. My A3000 used to take 20 seconds with everything loaded. My current mac takes about 30 seconds.
2) cool for sure, but unix and linux have the same functionality
3) smooth yes, but unstable due to memory management. I still think mac gets the nod here.
4) Unix and linux based variants have this: including mac.
5) not too familiar with these other than I just use them from time to time.
6) never got into this, so once again I am ignorant on this one
7) Shell, again, linux, unix, mac -- can run with gui
8) Ok, I wish this was possible with other oses -- still very cool for the amiga - but spaces and screens for unix and linux and mac is a nice tradoff-- amiga still way cooler.
9) efficient ram, but then again, it has many issues with memory protection.
10) all modern system have a multitude of co-processors where the cpu is not dependant.
11) unix and linux do well here
12) mac has it through image files.
By the way, I would never compare Windows to Amiga. Windows still has a lot to steal from the Amiga!
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You know what's neat? Install OS X, hook a firewire cable and copy all applications, settings and documents automatically!
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sdyates wrote:
Other than boot-time, I can't see how it is better than other OSes. The lack of new hardware is a big issue.
I still enjoy running my Amigas, but I'd say the baton has been passed on some years ago.
Is it really the lack of hardware that is holding the Amiga back today???
We have WinUAE that allows us to run on almost any new computer manufactured today, as I believe that MS still has a stranglehold on the market and the vast majority of computers come with some version of Windows already installed on them.
What is holding the Amiga back today is a lack of general interest and an overwhelming lack of programmers working on an updated version of AmigaOS (the real AmigaOS used with WinUAE, not AROS which does not run any of the thousands of Amiga applications) AND no new applications for the real AmigaOS.
Many people say that OS4 is the real AmigaOS, but is it really? I think that MorphOS is just as close to having that same claim as it runs as much or more Amiga applications as fast or faster than OS4, so all OS4 has is the name. I am not trying to really knock OS4, it was a valiant effort that sadly took too long and now has no hardware support. WinUAE works every where.
I think I am more likely to support further work on OS3.9 and applications/games that run on it, than any other direction. Have all of you looked at AmiKit, AmigaSYS, AIAB, etc.
I have only really spent time with AmiKit, which is a GREAT piece of work. Really great!
I know that my Classic Amigas will be stuck in time and can only do so much, but I will continue using them as long as they continue to fire up. But a lot of my future work and Amiga enjoyment I hope will be on a much faster Amiga through emulation with new applications and games that may, or may not, only run on that emulated Amiga, but that is okay.
Sorry, but I just think that OS4 is a dead end unless by some miracle it becomes Amithlon and is ported to x86 and x86-64bit. But that won't happen because there is no money to pay for such a tremendous task. Look at how slowly AROS has come along and still what can you do with it?
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The Amiga is still superior to other computers of the early 1990s. I wouldn't say it's superior to modern computers... and anybody who claims it is probably has to be considered a religious fanatic. If they'd survive, I suspect a modern Amiga would be much better to other modern computers, but that didn't happen.
As much as I love my Amigas and 8 bit Commodores, and even my old TI99/4a, if I need to do real work, surf the net, listen to music, etc, I use my Linux PC.
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Also, the problems you're having... maybe consider Linux or (I say this grudgingly) a Mac. Linux has gotten much more user friendly, and is dramatically more reliable.
It stores files and directories as inodes (ID numbers, in a way) so hey, it's even got that feature!
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Well,
For me it was the cheese wedge design, and cream colour casing. Most PC are silver and grey nowadays.
It still rocks with its ease of use, and that Amiga OS takes a couple of second to boot up, rather than an is eternity.
The feeling that you could access directories and files easily with no 'hidden' programmes running in the background. The archticture and design is fine and effiecient, and multitasking is great on the Amiga.
It's way more fun to use, and i hope Amiga will get made again, once the technology becomes innovative and chip/processor manufactures work on design, architcture rather than speed, dual core, quad core etc..! Simplicity and style is key :-)
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Today Amiga wins on:
1. Fast boot
2. Better screen-handling (switching etc...)
3. GUI can be adjusted as you wish
4. Nice looking systems! Its more personal
5. Great multitasking while playing games. No lagg
I have to say that the pokal goes to Magic User Interface and MorphOS of all these OS's. ReAction is nice, but MUI makes the system looks so much better. MorphOS v1.4.5 is pretty stable once hardware is stable :) Boots fast, have AmigaOS 68k support and more. I cant tell of how AmigaOS4 works, as I've only seen it on gatherings and meetings.
World is made by people who have money and marketing skills. Without marketing skills, there is simply hard to get out. Sega and its Dreamcast is an example after Commodore went down. Everyone knew that Dreamcast was better than Playstation 2 in every way. But SEGA forgot to add a DVD drive, which made Dreamcast suffer. As Playstation 2 was promoted as a cheap DVD-player in Japan. Its all about marketing and not loose community. Talking with them is important. Now as Amiga Inc. are totally silent. They arent trusted anymore. I would love to see AmigaOS4 for Acubes PPC motherboards. I wish that the future was brighter for Amiga. It really deserves a better future. Just SEE how MANY users STILL uses THIS damn GOOD hardware AND operating SYSTEMS made BY Commodore. It MUST be A good THING!... And the only one actually talking with the community, though he has his history is Bill Buck. Everyone else is silent.
ELBOX
Hyperion
Amiga Inc.
Acube (sorry, but I havent seen anyone posting from that company on Amiga websites yet...)
Well,... Amiga is superior in everyway for a home computing experience. I just wish that it would be taken more seriouselly by its owners.
Regards,
Mike
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1. Because it doesn't support more than 25% of what modern OS's support.
2. Really? So it can switch between 4 pages of 1600x1200 screens at the push of a mouse? Display a picture of all currently running apps and allow you to choose between them?
3. I can make Linux, OS X and even MSWindows look pretty much how I want them to look, including a retro Amiga style.
4. Maybe because nobody else has them... Don't quite get your point.
5. Every OS multitasks today, they all are pre-emptive with memory protection. I've had apps crash and burn and calmly go to the Apple menu, click on force quit and they are gone.
Let's be realistic, it's retro computing, it's like restoring and driving old cars, it's not about superiority. It's a hobby, it's fun, but in the end we still use the people mover to pick up kids from soccer, not the model t...
AmiDelf wrote:
Today Amiga wins on:
1. Fast boot
2. Better screen-handling (switching etc...)
3. GUI can be adjusted as you wish
4. Nice looking systems! Its more personal
5. Great multitasking while playing games. No lagg
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persia wrote:
1. Because it doesn't support more than 25% of what modern OS's support.
2. Really? So it can switch between 4 pages of 1600x1200 screens at the push of a mouse? Display a picture of all currently running apps and allow you to choose between them?
3. I can make Linux, OS X and even MSWindows look pretty much how I want them to look, including a retro Amiga style.
4. Maybe because nobody else has them... Don't quite get your point.
5. Every OS multitasks today, they all are pre-emptive with memory protection. I've had apps crash and burn and calmly go to the Apple menu, click on force quit and they are gone.
Let's be realistic, it's retro computing, it's like restoring and driving old cars, it's not about superiority. It's a hobby, it's fun, but in the end we still use the people mover to pick up kids from soccer, not the model t...
AmiDelf wrote:
Today Amiga wins on:
1. Fast boot
2. Better screen-handling (switching etc...)
3. GUI can be adjusted as you wish
4. Nice looking systems! Its more personal
5. Great multitasking while playing games. No lagg
1. list the 75% of the functions at the operating system level that the Amiga doesn't support, or couldn't support if someone bothered to write it, due to a fundamental design flaw. Nothing, absolutely nothing: as I've said give me firefox, acrobat some dvd codecs and players and I won't need the bloated crap that is Windows, Macosx or Linux.
2. thats a native graphics hardware limitation. under cgx4 on my A4000 68060 with CV64 i can do 1024x768 screen switching thats damned quick, never tried any higher resolutions. if i had faster video ram, it would be faster still. under winuae 1280x1024 is very fast to switch, almost instantaneous
3. yeah but is it as easy as mui, and do you end up with a consistent look and feel?
4. irrelevant personal aesthetics
5. Ah but there is pre-emptive multitasking and there is pre-emptive multitasking. It depends on the scheduler. linux's implementation is rubbish for desktops: read this http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm
As for Windows, well yeah it multitasks nicely if you give it two or more cpu's running at 3 ghz each with 2 gig or more ram; oh and it will still find a way to use the swap file on the hard drive. why do you think intel/microsoft is pushing multicore cpu with their "do more" campaign-because multitasking is now becoming a mainstream concept and they couldn't make it happen well enough with 3 ghz 1 gig ram machines. Laughable.
To this day no mainstream system multitasks as smoothly as the Amiga. Try it under emulation with the brute power of todays processors, even as the cpu is translating 68k code to x86 code, and see how you NEVER have to wait for a window to be active, for the mouse pointer to move, how quickly software starts, no matter what is running in the background.
Memory protection crashing I grant you is an issue, but only rarely these days, and i think amikit has some third party thing that gives partial memory protection that seems to stop other crashing software taking the system with it. if you save regularly, data loss is minimal, and with boot in 5 sec, time loss is minimal. But you are right.
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You can have as many screens as you want in an AmigaOS/MorphOS enviroment. Ive had over 20 1680x1050 screens open at once without problems.
Normally I have 6-7 screens open. Depending on the mood.
1. System with AmiNetRadio + Wookiechat etc
2. Sputnik
3. AmiTradeCenter
4. TvPaint
5. fXpaint
6. Blender
You also have images of all running programs by leftclicking switchbutton in upper-right corner.
MUI lets you customize this as you want. I really enjoy using AmigaOS compared to Windows, Linux or Unix.
Also another thing. To change icons, the tidy system etc. You know why things are as they are. You have the control over it,... :) you dont need to read 1000 pages book to use it neither. AmigaOS/MorphOS is how home computing should have been.
So, for me. I havent found any other OS for home computing that can match MorphOS. It feels different and is really great.
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The Windows swap file gets used for a number of good reasons, and a few bad. Primarily, it gets used because each running program is given a 4GB space in which to work (technically, that's 2GB for program 2GB for system in Win32.) That's virtual space for obvious reasons. Hence, the swap file gets used.
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stefcep2 wrote:
5. Ah but there is pre-emptive multitasking and there is pre-emptive multitasking. It depends on the scheduler. linux's implementation is rubbish for desktops: read this http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm
Please don't take this rant of a frustrated kernel developer as thruth. I play music all the time on my centos 4.7 box with a PIV 1.7GHz without any hick ups, even when two or three program are taking all the CPU time they can.
greets,
Staf.
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CentOS happens to be the Linux distribution I prefer to use (probably because I got used to it in the workplace). However, I find it has a number of flaws (which probably apply to most linux distros).
The first I will address is the X Window System. This is an antique system which is only still useful today because of the extraordinary care that went into its design. It has many nice features, and is highly customizable. But it is absolutely awful for use by the ordinary user. Configuring it initially is and always had been a klunky process involving editing text files.
Linux has, I'll admit, made some advances in making this simpler, but every time I install it, I find myself having to pull up tcsh and fix it. I could not imagine recommending it to anyone who does not have a knowledgeable person available to them on an ongoing basis due to this issue alone.
The system configuration utilities are not up to snuff; an example of this is the Samba configuration utility that ships with CentOS (maybe this is fixed now, I haven't booted my ibm x345 in a month or so) does not allow you to configure the access control properly (it just 'forgets' the input) and thus doesn't let you set up Samba graphically. Once again, I'm using vi to edit text files to make it work. Obviously, this is a major p.i.t.a. to me, but not such a big deal - but to someone who has other computers that they wish to have interact with the Linux system, it is a show stopper.
A great feature of Linux is the ability to build your own kernel so as to eliminate unneeded functionality and enable that which is called for. Perhaps you would like Linux to use more than one CPU because that's what you have? Well, the kernel that ships with CentOS doesn't have SMP enabled, so start installing development tools! I think this affects multi-core use as well, because I have a dual P4 xeon box (four cores on two chips) and only one core was seen by the stock kernel. Maybe you could get lucky and find an SMP kernel on the net that will be compatible with your system, maybe...
Multi-tasking under Linux is great, of course, and memory protection is pretty good as well. Until you run an application that wants to use an amount of ram equal to more than your physical ram... in that case, you had better not try to run a screensaver! Why? Because the screensaver will swap in and out to run, and so will your application, and neither will get any CPU time because the PC is stupidly too busy swapping them at a higher priority than any user-land program can ever have.
I have encountered this myself while running perl scripts and attempting to process too much data. So turn the screensaver off, you say? Well, that's not the only thing that tries to run periodically. You _could_ sit there and trim your system down by editing the rc scripts for an hour, but again, I'm stuck using vi to fix the problem. This is not a viable solution for end users, at all - only for programmers and other technologically inclined types.
I could go on like this for pages; but I think I have already bored some of you to tears. It's a simple fact that Linux is fundamentally a vintage operating system that has been maintained well enough to still perform alright - but just alright. It can be considered one of the best operating systems for PCs (alongside of Free/Net/OpenBSD, which are sadly ignored by most people despite being more stable and, imho, easier to understand than Linux) but that does not make it a good desktop OS, just a viable one.
I would really like to see a new operating system (preferably based on an object-oriented paradigm) that can be used on intel systems. It would be nice if it was simple enough for an end user and powerful enough that developers would produce apps for it. But I know why it's pretty much unlikely: the PC is so poorly designed (it's a hatchet job for the sake of backwards compatibility that is no longer needed) that it has become a daunting task to be able to do hardware level programming.
15 years ago, everyone I knew who programmed at all messed about with the hardware directly at least once in a while, if only to better their understanding of it. These days, I don't know any developers who give a rat's a** about hardware programming unless they are paid to develop that type of code.
I applaud the linux developers for anteing up and developing an OS for the PC at all; I just wish it had been designed to be usable by everyone.
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Yeah, the *NIX variants out there are really, really user adaptable. What other OS gives your it's source code? I think of something like Firefly BSD created by an ex-Amigan. Really that's were many of the Aiiga community went after Commodore/Amiga folded.
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our memories unfortunately :evil:
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probably because it takes me back to a time when my life was less complicated.
when i didn't have a mortgage, or job/money worries, all my friends got into it too.
odd weekends a load of us would gather, and spend in the converted loft at a mates house with us all huddled round glowing 1084s's, microvitec 1438's, and TV's stolen from parents front rooms for that occasion, playing linkup popluous1/2, lotus2, superskidmarks, and on the two max'd out A1200 monsters, extreme racing! dynablaster with a home made four player adapter, scorched tanks still ran on an A500, two player settlers with two mice on one machine. the latest demos, being wow'd by an unexpanded A1200. thats what it was all about. its almost like christmas every time you fire one up. its not about expanding it to the max, go for the burn power, its about usablility, and interaction. an easyness. maybe that because i've been using them for the last (just scared myself) 20 years.
My A4000/030 with cyberstorm2-040,cybervision64/3D (i was phase5's b1tch:-)), and hydra ethernet card saw me through university, introduced then flat mates to extreme racing when we got bored with footy on the then brand new PS1.
good times. guess i don't want to let go.
plus it reminds me what computers could have been with todays technology ... or at least in my imagination... *sigh*
but then, my A1200 with Blizz030,CF hard disk, and PCMCIA nic sees more use than my 1200 with BPPC, BvPPC, and all the trimmings... funny that...
well imagine an amiga with ... well, you know the rest :lol:
recon if we all club together we can get a remake of the 060/ppc cpus at current 45nm tech, plus DDR2/3 ram interface and pci express cobbled onto a rebuilt aga chipset? :lol:
come on, who's got the triple AAA specs and designs? :-D
maybe we should just buy amiga inc...