Executive Update - Amiga Status Announcement

[DarkHawke]

I suppose the best thing about this EU was that it was SO extensive!  Tons of information and that's a damn nice thing to see given how sporadic and information-free these things have been in the past.  Lots of red meat for the still hanging on Amigans, but for ex-patriates like myself, I'm still left a little wanting.  

Again we hear about the wondrous day when Amiga Anywhere (nee DE) will merge with the desktop Amiga OS in OS 5, thus ushering in the Millennium! :-)  But what does this really mean?  Just that you can run AA apps on Amiga hardware?  Seems to me that should happen as soon as OS 4.0 (mercilessly chained to the Amiga One!) comes out.  I can run AA apps on the 'Doze box I'm using right now, so that at least SHOULDN'T be what the great "code merge" means.  Or does this mean what I and many others would like it to mean?  That is, that instead of AA becoming a subset of Amiga OS (which it should already be), Amiga OS is enabled by AA code to shrug off the surly bonds of hardware dependance and goes worldwide, on any platform of any size and at optimal speed, power and efficiency.  To truly make manifest the new slogan "Amiga Anywhere!"

Pipedream?  Possibly, but consider: the Amiga OS 4/Amiga One combo consolidates and solidifies the Amiga faithful, while at the same time AA gets a foothold in the mass computing market (i.e. Windoze).  Unifying the codes forces the current Amiga market to migrate apps to the now  hardware independant OS, leveraging that market.  Coders in the non-Amiga computing world who like working with AA now find that this cute environment for small games and PDA-caliber apps is a full-blown OS that'll run their big-time apps without a lick of change on ANY computer!  We have seen, courtesy Mr. McEwen himself, that AA is OS/hardware independant in a real-time/real world senario.  I'm still blown away by this possibility and I hope that plenty of other folks are as well!

And to those still wedded to a hardware-bound Amiga OS solution, until I read something more definitive from the man himself, I'm still gonna wax hopeful for this senario.  Seems at least as viable an idea as the Amiga One did this time last year! :-D

[DarkHawke]

Those hardware specs are starting to look decidedly last year. What about G5 / USB 2 / 4x AGP etc?

There you are, Adasha.  A big part of the problem is that there hasn't been new Amiga hardware production in over eight years, but perhaps as big a problem is that for a small manufacturing run, trade-offs must be made between the computer employing cutting-edge tech and not costing a fortune.  Clearly all involved are doing the best that they can, and there is the further difficulty of allowing for a fairly generous amound of legacy hardware support.  Remember the uproar in the Mac world when the first iMacs eliminated all legacy hardware ports?  Imagine what would happen if the same course was taken with the A1!  It'd take a nuke going off to surpass the sound of the screams of protest from the die-hard Amigans! :-D

I've yet to hear any prices attached to the A1, so we'll have to see how well they were able to balance all of the above concerns, but if you truly want to see bleeding-edge tech AND an Amiga OS to run them, join me in cross-fingered hope for OS 5!

Quote:
With the world economy starting to move out of recession...

eh? I thought we were just getting into one

Yep, we are getting out of it, if the slowdown was even enough to technically be called a recession.  It'll take a bit, but the comeback is on (curiously, just as it FINALLY looks like Amiga is coming back.  Coincidence?).