Bloat is in the eye of the beholder, the Amiga was bloated compared to the old CPM machine I started with. I could put an operating system, a word processor and the data on a 90 MB disk, compared to that the Amiga was nothing but a bloated over powered hog.
And you programmed in C, how luxurious, you didn't really know what the system was doing underneath, you let the operating system put windows on the screen! This kids today just don't know what it takes to make a computer work.
Seriously, there is nothing I don't understand when I program for the Mac or iPhone, it's all right there, I'm just assisted with the code, I don't have to write a browser to open a webpage, it's just a system call. Nothing wrong with that anymore than letting the system handle the windows or any other bits.
Do you drive instead of walk? Fly the ocean instead of swimming across it? Life moves on. The hard bits move on. There's nothing less elegant about an iPhone than an Amiga because it has more lines of code than there is less elegant about a human than there is about a house fly.
The iPhone has a clean, neat relationship between the hardware, operating system and software. It all fits together in an elegant way. The operating system does what it needs to, and gets out of the user's face when a program is loaded. The thing is rock solid, no gurus. Elegance isn't about size, it's about form and function, both of which the iPhone has in spades. Like it or not, the iPhone is elegant, and while Android and WebOS has the possibility of becoming elegant, they aren't quite there yet.
And the iPhone was a game changer, mobile phones will never be the same, the iPhone has changed the future of mobile devices, they are now pocket computers, something that everyone knew would come, but iPhone delivered it.
Every OS has rules, lines you can't cross, sometimes these lines become a fatal flaw, like AmigaOS' lack of memory protection, sometimes not.
Second about C.S.
And THAT is the question...
To be honest, I don't know...
I've had (and have) lots of computers. Some I really like. Some the perform incredibly (much better than my Amigas). Some that were cutting edge. Some that are.. er. .just bizarre... I like almost all tech..
But the Amiga was about tech AND much more.
It was that feeling that we were part of something that was ahead of its time. Not a few months or years even..
It was the elegance of the design...
When someone (on this or another board) asked about the best part of the Amiga, I answered "intuition", because I was able to write fully Windowed programs in C and actually understand what it was doing and why.
I can do that in other languages, but parts I understand and parts I don't.
I would describe the Amiga - hardware, software, interface, et al as elegant...
I don't see that anymore...
I see bloated, incredibly badly designed devices that are only "incredible" because they have so much memory and CPU that it forces it's way past.
If you're a network person, you can kind of compare it to the Ethernet/Token Ring comparison. Ethernet won. It was so fast and cheap, it was inevitable..
But you look at what you have to do to get it where it is, switching to the port, and you still have collisions on the switch backplanes...
Then you look at Token-Ring.. Packets on the wire... Upstream and Downsteam neighbors... It was an elegant protocol...
Now, it's not the same extreme. I don't run Token Ring at home still, and I do still use my Amigas. :-)
But I think that the combination of the incredible technology and the elegance of the design is what the Amiga is about to me...
Other machines have some great designs.. But I don't see what I see in the Amiga. And now, there is so much power and RAM, there is no reason to be elegant... It's just sad... IMHO..
I don't see how there will ever be another computer like the Amiga..
But maybe..
desiv
