Wither Natami?

[yogisumo]

persia wrote:
A lot of the Amiga World is like a time capsule, a frozen look into where we were 20 years ago.  Does anyone actually argue about what a PC or Mac is?  No, they have all gone through a series of changes over time but a Mac is still a Mac, whether it is running a beta version of Snow Leopard or OS 7.5.1.  

   Good point.  But what is a "real Amiga?"  An unexpanded A1000?  Or an A4000T?

When the Amiga was released it was cutting edge, it was capable of things that no other personal computer was capable of at that time.  

True.  At first the hardware was something that set the Amiga apart.  But the hardware failed to keep pace and the Amiga is now essentially the OS.

AmigaDos would have been rewritten many times by now. The original creators made some choices, such as the lack of memory protection, that were necessary back them but now make no sense, they would have fixed them and built a new OS.  It probably would have had to run the old stuff through a Classic system like the Macs used to have.  But new software would have arisen and the old games updated to run in the new system.  

Having started out with an A2000 with kick/os 1.3 and now having an A4000x with 060s and PPC, it's clear that the Amiga had to break compatibility with a lot of software and hardware.  So what is a "real" Amiga?  The defining factor is probably the OS.  Why is a "new" Amiga any less of an Amiga?  The "classic" hardware is what it is and it's never coming back.  In my world the the hour and minute hand only turn clockwise.

For a decade and a half the Amiga has been leaderless, slowly losing it's user base.  WHy do we need to tear at each other?  We're all that's left, maybe a few thousand scattered across the globe.  We have different visions, different ideas  We disagree on what we want, but we don't disagree on what we don't want.  We don't want the Amiga relegated to history.

Nicely put.  Enjoy the classic hardware if you have it.  NatAmi and the others look interesting.  It's too bad Amiga Inc are having such problems but it's also easy to see that "any" new system will be a tough sell with PC/Mac/Linux dominance.  If we could get the community to rally around a direction, the energy could be focused and might actually bring some results...

[yogisumo]

bloodline wrote:

But we already do have a common API, that is the collection of technologies that grew up over the period between 1993 and around 2001... DELETED STUFF ... there is really no point since there is no vital Amiga only software anymore... no resaon for this legacy layer. :-(

Whether you design a new API that is based on the existing one, or steal someone else's (e.g., use BSD as a base OS), it's still a new API as far as the Amiga is concerned. What needs changing is nowhere near as much as was required with Mac OS (which didn't even have pre-emptive multitasking).

Basicly if conditions are good... AmigaOS is a great system, it just doesn't have to ability to deal with problems... and it is the robust nature of modern OSs that give them their strenght!

I've often considered this... but think about the implications of this... Once you give exec memory protection, SMP, and a nice new scheduler, some modern data sstructions not just endless linked lists... etc, etc... it's going to end up looking like a pretty ordninary Microkernel... and one that has taken quite a bit of work to get to and won't have the proven track history of modern Microkernels... and then quite a lot of the old Amiga subsystems are either outdated; graphics.library, layers.library, audio.device or wouldn't work with a modern MP/SMP exec; intuition.library and I think dos.library too...

So all that has to be replaced... leaving you with really very little reason to have chosen AmigaOS in the first place :-(

Exactly.  Once you start putting in features to make the OS more stable and modern, you start to increase the hardware requirements and break compatibility.  It will stay a single user hobby OS unless you completely change it... into something that it isn't currently.  You might have a look and feel, but the internals will have to change...