Does Linux have an Amiga feel?

[psxphill]

But that's what I like about AmigaOS, instead of, as Linux did, copying Unix directly, TripOS took the major concepts of that day and improved on them. Instead of anally sticking to what was, they took a step forward and improved it all.
 
Of course, that to me is what makes Amiga "Amiga." They didn't give us what they could, they improved on it all and gave us quite a bit more.

Actually, they did only give us what they could.
 
"As most of you know, AmigaDOS was not the first choice for the top-level OS/DOS on the Amiga computer. What we now call AmigaDOS was really the backup DOS, based on an already existing OS known as Tripos"
 
"Once in a while, someone suggests that the original DOS be written according to the original specs. This was even proposed by some members of the Amiga team, but Amiga management decided that it wouldn't be possible to complete the DOS and still launch the Amiga on time, especially since the software guys had already given up weekends at home. And going home. And sleeping."
 
"CAOS stands for the Commodore Amiga Operating System"
 
"CAOS was contracted out, for the most part, to a company that felt Unix was a better choice and didn't buy into my design. They became history when they started using their Sun development systems for other projects, not the Amiga higher level OS functions."
 
So we know that before Commodore came along, there was nothing resembling dos.library. They found a cheap 68000 compatible operating system that was similar to what they wanted, even though there were a lot of things that it didn't do that were spec'd for CAOS.
 
They appear to only have done the bare minimum of work, to integrate TRIPOS with exec and make it callable from C. They should have done something about BPTR, so that when BCPL was removed it wouldn't have left an annoying legacy.
 
CAOS actually has some limitations that weren't in TRIPOS, like a 1mb maximum file size, which would have had to be removed for it to have achieved similar success.
 
Some of the concepts in CAOS were similar to unix though, like /dev for devices and access to operating system structures using special files in /exec
 
What made it an Amiga is that they took an old unheard of OS (TRIPOS had been around since 1978), written in an old forgotten language (BCPL came out in 1966). The hardware also wasn't revolutionary, it was an evolution of the Atari 8 bit.
 
Microsoft and Apple got caught with inferior products, but their business skills allowed them to survive long enough to catch up.
 
Atari pretty much followed the same path as Amiga, but went cheaper on everything (CPM/GEM/graphics chip/sound chip).

[psxphill]

just imagine where it could have gone if it *was* based on UNIX...

It wouldn't have survived, unix is too bloated for the hardware available at the time. I believe what they did was really the best compromise for performance against functionality. Anything they had done differently is likely to have made things worse.
 
WindowsNT has more in common with AmigaOS than unix does.

[psxphill]

But there was UNIX for the Amiga, that was sold with some A3000s, but requires an MMU so wouldn't have worked on the original 68k machines.

It didn't sell many though, it's unlikely that commodore would have survived as long as they did with just that.

[psxphill]

and btw, I never said that the Amiga was Unix, I said it was an off shoot of Unix, which means that it has multi tasking features

As does modern versions of Windows, which is descended from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
 
The granddaddy of them all is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS-10. The follow up was called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPS-20, which started as TENEX (ten extended) because DEC didn't want to add virtual memory to their hardware and after creating an add on they needed an OS to drive it. TENEX was developed for use in projects funded by DARPA and was used to build the Internet.

[psxphill]

This is an amazing thread! I'm going to have to do some research into the other operating systems mentioned here, such as UNIX, DEC, and VAX. What hardware would I need to run any of them, though?

Some of them can be emulated.
 
A lot of the hardware either doesn't exist anymore, or are in museums.
 
There are plenty of photo's online though.
 
http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/PDP-6

[psxphill]

Seriously ? I cannot think of a single operating system that epitomized a revolution than Linux. Without it and the open source ecosystem that blossoms from its very roots , the internet, the mobile space, even the desktop space would be a very different place indeed. Companies like google - if they even existed at all would be very different to what we see today.

I think you've over-estimated Linux's role in all of that.
 
I've used various operating systems, including Linux & I never got indoctrinated into any of the cults.
 
The way you talk suggests you have an unhealthy relationship with Linux. Like people who thought that Amiga was viable in the mid 1990's. I still had an A1200 as my main machine at home until 1999, but I was increasingly doing personal stuff on my work PC after hours.
 
Linux also jumped the gun, GNU provide most of the software stack and were working on their own kernel. Linus took an old monolithic kernel based OS and cloned it.
 
But if you enjoy living your life like that then go ahead.
 

Talk of Unix "clones" is a bit misplaced since Unix isn't really an OS so much as a standard. It's not a proprietary product as such and an OS doesn't need to be source-code descended from any older Unix in order to be considered Unix.

Actually Unix is a product, you can find the real descendent of Unix for sale here http://www.xinuos.com/
 
You can read about it here.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_OpenServer
 
POSIX is the name of the standard.
 

The point is it is intended to have modern levels of security but achieves this in a single address space, this latter being one of the principles of TripOS. Switching address spaces has a big overhead, as well as requiring MMU which the first Amigas didn't have.

Multiple address spaces implies an MMU, while a single address space can work without an MMU. However to achieve any security you either need to use an MMU, which will have the same overhead as using a multiple address space. Or you have to use a virtual machine, which means that any code you write will automatically check bounds on every access. This is also quite an overhead too. It would preclude running any legacy software as there is no way of knowing what the bounds should be. You could try sandboxing it, but shared libraries expect that they can write to different tasks memory and so compatibility is a problem (the same problems as trying to use an MMU for the same purpose).

[psxphill]

Talk of Unix "clones" is a bit misplaced since Unix isn't really an OS so much as a standard. It's not a proprietary product as such and an OS doesn't need to be source-code descended from any older Unix in order to be considered Unix.

Actually Unix is a product, you can find the real descendent of Unix for sale here http://www.xinuos.com/
 
You can read about it here.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_OpenServer
 
POSIX is the name of the standard.

[psxphill]

Being "descended" from the original Unix is not a requirement for registering to use the Unix trademark. Meeting the standard is. The standard is called the Single Unix Specification. There are Unixes that are products, of course, but no single one of them is exclusively "The Real Unix" no matter what its lineage.

Well that is POSIX
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification
 
However, that just qualifies you as Unix compliant.
 
While there are Unix products available that actually use the Unix source code that descended from the Unix product from Bell labs (later AT&T).
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
 
"Other companies began to offer commercial versions of the UNIX System for their own mini-computers and workstations. Many of these new Unix flavors were developed from the System V base under a license from AT&T; others were based on BSD. One of the leading developers of BSD, Bill Joy, went on to co-found Sun Microsystems in 1982 and created SunOS for their workstation computers. In 1980, Microsoft announced its first Unix for 16-bit microcomputers called Xenix, which the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) ported to the Intel 8086 processor in 1983, and eventually branched Xenix into SCO UNIX in 1989."
 
fwiw Amiga Unix came from the AT&T source code, which is one of the reasons the source code has never surfaced.
 
Sun jumped between using Unix and BSD for their operating system and then back again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunos

[psxphill]

except for AIX which I gather is like Unix as implemented by space aliens from mind-probes of Unix-hacker abductees, but I've never used it.

AIX is based on ATA&T's Unix System V R1/R2/R3.
 

Solaris is about like Linux or FreeBSD when you get right down to it

Solaris is based on AT&T's UNIX System V R4
 
They both include source code from BSD as well.
 
People use an old SGI or Sun for the same reason they use old Amiga's.
There is no real justification for it.

[psxphill]

No. It's the other way around.

Yeah, I would have said more people use command prompt on windows than open a shell on MacOS.
 

[psxphill]

I'll let persia answer for himself, assuming he actually ever will answer, but if it's anecdotal, I can provide plenty of counter-examples.

I thought you were both writing roughly the same thing.
 
The majority of people only use facetwitmytube, they only need a simple appliance. He is making the distinction of people using facebook or html5, but that is just for comparison of user types. Not because facebook and html5 are the only thing you can use a computer for. There are plenty of ways you can consume and plenty of ways you can create. In the UK they are talking about teaching programming in schools again (they only teach you how to use things like word, excel, some form of database right now).

[psxphill]

Surely you mean in secondary education, they must still teach programming at the tertiary level.

Higher education isn't called a school in the UK. Even people with degrees barely know how to program these days.
 

And what is creative? There are video, audio and image editing apps on iOS, surely this is being creative.

Probably something you could make money from. Editing your selfies doesn't really count.

[psxphill]

Your original message does not contain the word "school." It contains the word "teach" something they do in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions.

It did
 
 

I thought you were both writing roughly the same thing.
 
The majority of people only use facetwitmytube, they only need a simple appliance. He is making the distinction of people using facebook or html5, but that is just for comparison of user types. Not because facebook and html5 are the only thing you can use a computer for. There are plenty of ways you can consume and plenty of ways you can create. In the UK they are talking about teaching programming in schools again (they only teach you how to use things like word, excel, some form of database right now).

 
 

I also find it ironic that you as an Amiga fan would talk about limited apps, iOS has apps far more sophisticated than Deluxe Paint or the video toaster software, so if using 'limited" apps is an issue why do you still use an Amiga?

I would say that nostalgia was the main reason. I question whether iOS has anything that could do what a toaster does. Not sure about deluxe paint, are there any pixel art packages on iOS?

[psxphill]

Yea. Amiga OS is definitely more like Windows.
It's not always a good thing, since stuff like torrent software or unpackers are easier to get for Linux and are already included with most distros, while Windows/AmigaOS are pretty barebones and leave you with a sense of not knowing what to do.

If you don't know what you're doing then I can't imagine there is any difference between finding utorrent online and installing it than finding where a torrent client is pre-installed on Linux.
 
The only difference is that you have to be more careful when installing Windows software so you don't install hidden extras. If Linux had any meaningful user base then people would be bundling crapware on that too.
 
Linux is ok if you like a challenge & want to "be different".

[psxphill]

and dispense with the constant need for virus protection.

You need virus protection on Linux, there just isn't any.
 
When someone can be bothered to target you then you'll be stuffed.