Why AmigaOS 4.0 is going to be successful…

[mdwh2]

@fatman2021:

I suspect that most such people simply hate "computers". To them, hating Windows and hating their computer is the same thing; they haven't gone out and tried any alternatives (and if they had, then presumably they didn't like them if they're still using Windows).

I must have missed the press release that said that OS4 will be free of crashes, viruses, bugs, and that it will always do exactly what the user wants, and the user will know how to do anything with it he wants. Because otherwise, they're going to have exactly the same complaints that they have with Windows.

[mdwh2]

nac wrote:
Slightly off topic but I dont actually remember there being any ads on  UK TV for the Amiga during its reign. I know there were some in the US. Were there any in the UK?

I remember seeing ads for the CD32. Which I guess is a typical example of the way Commodore only seemed to market the Amiga as a low end games console.

I would love the Amiga to reappear in high street shops as they once did under Escom. Sitting in the window running some killer app that grabs attention.

Just so long as it isn't an old model at an expensive price, as was the case with the A1200/A4000 when Escom took over..

[mdwh2]

T3000 wrote:
Since I built my AMD Athlon 500 and started using W98, I have been a very happy computer user.  Sure, there have been virus problems on occasion but, I have yet to loose any data. Unlike my Amiga, which lost years of artwork several times.

Just to offer my experiences in comparison:

Windows 98 is responsible for my worst ever data loss. One day, Scandisk decided that there were errors on my hard disk and decided it would "fix" them. As a result, my machine wouldn't boot, and everything on the Windows partition was destroyed. With some help from some friends, I booted into my Linux partition and wrote a program to scan the hard disk at a low level, and pick out bits which looked like source code. As a result I was able to save things like my University coursework, and the source code to NewsCoaster (I had backups on floppy, but they were several weeks old).

I then was luckily able to borrow a hard disk to install Windows onto (unlike AmigaOS, you can't boot into the OS without installing onto harddisk, which risks overwriting data), and ran a recovery program (a trial version which meant I had to rescan everytime I'd recovered 3 files - unlike the Amiga, there doesn't appear to be anything for free on Windows) to recover some more stuff. But an awful lot of my data was lost.

The worse I experienced on the Amiga was occasional disk invalidations, which the OS automatically fixed if you left it a few minutes. The only data loss was due to using floppies (which seem to be at least as unreliable on PCs).

The point being, the Amiga isn't necessarily worse than Windows in this respect - and indeed, the Amiga has some definite advantages (eg, being able to run recovery programs without reinstalling the OS to disk).

What would make AMiga os4 successful is if it were free.

Given that the majority of the cost for most ppl is buying a new PPC computer, I doubt that would make much difference IMO.

[mdwh2]

ksk wrote:
I would say "MorpgOS depends too much on AmigaOS API to be a good operating system on itäs own merits."

So far the MorphOS is just a AmigaOS clone + some new features.

Well, it's an AmigaOS 3.x clone, with some new features. Is this different from what AmigaOS 4 is intended to be?

When AmigaOS 4 is released, we can judge how these "new features" of each compare, but the basic description fits both, surely.

I could see this point if MorphOS was only ever intending to be a clone of AmigaOS without adding anything new - thus you could say it's depending on AmigaOS too much, and is only going to be following behind it. But as you say yourself, this isn't true.