@AmiDelf :
Lovely thoughts, and a lot of it is true. But your OS is only as good as your software, and I don't see the same kind of capabilities available currently with AmigaOS as I get with Win XP. Now I haven't been actively aware about what's been going on with this OS for a while, so let me hit you up with a few things I do with my current rig and things I want to do in the near future and tell me if it's even CLOSE to being comparable as far as ease of implementation and the all-important cost/performance ratio:
Primarily I web-browse on my machine, with a little e-mail and some word processing and printing on the side. I do SOME gaming, but I'm not so much into the ones that justify humongous graphic cards as simple/retro style games like Tetris-alikes and Galaxians. I also like to do a smidge of skinning (switching, not creating. . . yet) and various other things, but let's stick to my daily experience.
Okay, power up and ready to go in about a minute. No biggy considering how much I load up on my system, enough to justify a P4 at 1.4 Ghz and 512 MB of RDRAM (double the RAM it came with and quadruple the RAM I thought I'd need--I'm something of a power user!).
Immediately, the Weather Channel's Desktop Weather pops up, giving me current conditions for my locale. Not the most necessary app I run, but it does automatically notify me of severe weather alerts and it's nice get the current temperature with but a glance at the system tray icon.
Next, Netscape 7.1, browser and e-mail, get run. No WAY I use the virtual open doors to my system that are Internet Exploiter and Outlook! The latest version of NS does an excellent job of bringing up any and all websites I visit, even given that most if not all are constructed or optimized for IE. E-mail is e-mail, but I do get quite a bit of HTML mail, so the client needs to handle this, not to mention a flexible message filter system, so the right messages go to the right boxes and I can easily route spam to the trash (not a huge consideration since my recent change of e-mail addresses, but something I really needed beforehand).
Now hitting the web is something I really question. Not so much the layout engines of a given browser (I've had to muddle along with some pretty sad affairs with Netscape before the 7.x releases), but the ability and availability of them all important helper applications. Guaranteed I'm gonna need to run a Windows Media stream on a daily basis (gotta get my commercial-free Rush fix!), but on any given day I'll also need something to play RealAudio and even RealVideo streams, Quicktime movies and show Acrobat documents.
And since I'm on the web so much, no sane man would do so without both a competent anti-virus program and a good firewall. Both are less necessary for the Amiga, but I'd feel naked without a good firewall given my cable modem connection. Come to think of it, do I need to worry about things I've never needed to worry about on XP, like a TCP/IP stack? Does this come standard these days?
As far as word processing, I guess it's a matter of taste, but Word does do a good job. Plenty of help, easily configured and good spell-checking (grammar checking I can take or leave). I suppose an app as mature as Word is good enough; I can't see a need to upgrade for my purposes.
Printing, however, begins to get into what is the primary weakness of AmigaOS in this day and age. The Wintel market has leveraged tons of affordable and high quality perepherals, but as with all such items, you need drivers for them to work with your OS. Given the Wintel market, drivers that'll work with your machine come with the perepherals and upgrades are free, plentiful and frequently updated on the web. So when I got a printer, I chose by manufacturer and specs, not even bothering to wonder if it could work with my 'puter. Same thing as when I added a TV tuner card, and when the actual software that came with it sucked balls, I could easily find new software that worked with the card and did a much better job. So now I've got near-TiVo flexibility for my TV viewing. Yes, it costs, but you get what you pay for.
Same thing goes for all kinds of other items; even if I wanted an iPod, there's a Windows-compatible version. I got a little digicam and since my rig came with USB ports, I knew I could connect the camera to it and download pictures, not to mention using it as a webcam (not that I'm likely going to do so, but more flexibility is better than less). My next tech purchases are going to include an MP3 player, a better digicam and a more powerful graphics card, as I've discovered that having the web browser, e-mail client, Windows Media stream playing with visualization running AND playing Warblade (Edgar Vigdal's excellent port and upgrade of his Deluxe Galaga game for the Amiga) runs into the occasional graphics hiccup. In all of these cases, I don't have to worry about if I can hook them up to my machine or if they'll work with it once attached, nor do I have to wait for someone to upgrade, let alone provide, a driver for any of the above.
As I mentioned before, I conceed many of AmiDelf's points on the capabilities and simplicity of the Amiga OS; I've made many if not all of those points in the past, and most of them reduce the power of the hardware needed to do the same thing on the Amiga. Then again, not all the hardware that I either have or would like can work with an Amiga-compatible machine at any price, and the cost for acquiring and upgrading a machine that can run Amiga OS currently ramps the price up to equal, if not surpass, the price of far more powerful Wintel hardware.
A painful case in point: in 1999, I pre-ordered an Anit-Gravity Alien BoXeR system that would have been a top-of-the-line system. As I recall, it had about 64 MB of RAM, a '060 CPU running at 50 MHz or so, with a (for the Amiga!) cock-of-the-walk graphics card (a Picasso, if memory serves) with a TV tuner add-on (the Pablo) and something like a 8x4x2 CD-RW drive. Other things that slip the mind right now, but a truly kick-ass system for a touch over $2800, not including monitor or speakers or anything like that. Fast forward two years to 2001: roughly the same amount of cash (closer to $2900, I think) got me a 1.4 Ghz P4 machine with 256 MB RAM, 16x DVD-ROM drive, 12x8x4 CD-RW drive, 19" monitor, speakers with sub-woofer and a full productivity suite (Microsoft Works with Word, Norton Anti-Virus, Encarta, Publisher, etc.). Yep, I forgot, I can watch movies on the system as well (well, once I clean up a bit; the upgrade from ME to XP remains a little problematic). OS differences aside, that's a titantic difference in the amount of bang you're getting for the buck. And as opaque as Windows can be, the fact is it works and does so fairly well. I mentioned an example of how well it multi-tasks above, and however much more efficiently AmigaOS does it, it works just fine under XP. And screw the old format-a-floppy test; I've defraged my hard drive while listening to streaming Windows Media audio and playing a Tetris-alike game!
I have great nostalgia for the Amiga. While it wasn't the first computer I worked with, it was the first one I brought home and was my primary experience for almost 10 years. But that's when the market started to change (~1997) and the Amiga was already technically an orphan. The burgeoning growth of the web demanded a whole lot more power out of computers and without a well-heeled and responsive owner, the Amiga just couldn't compete. There were a lotta nice tries, as detailed in the current poll topic, but nothing came of it until just this last year, and even then, these PPC-based machines hardly compete with even the Macs on price vs. power.
What did move forward? The OS. Not as much as it could and not as regularly as one would like, but it did go forward and if we're to believe the current Amiga "braintrust," is still doing so. The solution is obvious and has the virtue of already being put forward: port it to the Pentium. Given my preference, we'd already have the Amiga OE on everything from the box I'm using now to my PS2, all happily interconnected via the Amigaverse. Since I don't see this happening any time soon, you need to neutralize the hardware advantage of Windows by running on the same system. I'm just sorry that there was so much unreasoning bias against the actual HARDWARE that Windows runs on that the many trial balloons for such a port were burst before they had a chance to fly.
Where do we go from here? Who the frell knows? I guess OS 4.0 gets released eventually, but ya gotta wonder why it seems to be on world demo tour and not as yet released. But this'll only matter to those who were fanatical enough to pick up an AmigaOne, which is to say far less than even the original Amiga userbase. That doesn't bode well for increased software support, but that'll likely do better than the MorphOS/Pegasos combo, which, if I'm not entirely looped , won't even be as backward compatible as OS 4. And since I severely doubt any cross-compatibility, we're gonna see a fragmenting of an already miniscule market, which can't help the situation.
So what am I still doing here? Reminiscing, my friends, reminiscing. at least since AInc seems to have gone dormant. I had some hope once, but now I'm just waiting the final nail hits the coffin, just so I know that the dream is at last over and I can entirely move on.
