Will there every be another computer like the amiga?

[pkivolowitz]

The Amiga obviously wasn't about ground breaking CPU power anyway.

I recently purchased a Wii and took note that everything it is supposed to be groundbreaking in was done by 1986 on the Amiga. ASquared did the conceptual equivalent as the Wii remotes and the original Amiga guys did the conceptual equivalent of the Wii Fit board (it was where the Guru Meditation came from).

[pkivolowitz]

Forgive me as I have not read all of this very long thread so maybe this question was asked (all I saw was mac vs windows messages).

For another machine to be "like the Amiga", do we have a working definition of what being "like an Amiga" is? What are the essential elements of Amiganess?

I don't think the answer to this question includes any hardware notions as all "modern" machines ought to have adequate sound, color and animation capabilities (all things the Amiga pioneered).

I don't think the answer includes a lot of software notions like multitasking and linear address spaces (again pioneered by Amiga) as all modern machines should have these.

Maybe some of the essential distillations of the Amiga might include:

1 - A nimble OS that programmers can actually fully understand. The Amiga OS was the last OS I completely understood. I completely understood Unix V6 (circa 1978) but I could probably never completely understand any modern version of Linux. Too big.

2 - A nimble OS that didn't get in your way. Interesting, this came back to the OS for me. The machine I'm typing this on can, if all cores were running flat out, execute something like 10 billion operations per second. Sometimes I wait for minutes while Vista is doing "something". I have no frigging idea what it's doing but I'd like to think that with the trillions of operations that the machine could have been doing while I'm waiting for it, it might have cured AIDS or cancer.

On the Amiga I pretty much knew what every cycle was being used for. If a disk head moved, I pretty much knew why. There weren't any mysteries.

So maybe what I mean is an environment that is open to examination and is fully documented. I guess I'm back to my number 1 - an environment which I can fully understand.

3 - Something that I think made the Amiga the Amiga was the non-isolation of tasks. The ability for one process to poke the memory of another process really made a lot of cool things possible. I don't think this could be done today and allow the platform to be a success. In this era of malware no system that allowed easy access of any memory by anyone would make it.

I don't know - fast forwarding to 2010 I don't really know what being "like an Amiga" means today. I think this is a really cool question though and would love to know what you folks think.

(as an aside: Carl Sassenrath was a genius)

[pkivolowitz]

Crazy idea - what if the "next Amiga" was a web browser? A web browser that emulated the Amiga and used the Internet as its disk drive? Think of ADPro (for instance) as a place on the Internet. Navigate to it on your Workbench would be navigating to it over the Internet behind the scenes. It would download to the browser and run in its sandbox like it was running on a real Amiga.