Amiga's Grand Plans Revealed

[Kent]

Jim Louderback writes: "With stories about the new Amiga shipping spreading across the web, including here on ExtremeTech, I thought it would be worthwhile to sit down and talk about these, and other developments with Bill McEwen, the CEO and President of Amiga, Inc."

Read More...

[CodeSmith]

OK, the ppl who want AmigaOS on Intel should be happy: here we have a public statement by the Guy In Charge (tm) saying that OS5 will support x86.  It will take a year and a bit, but IMHO this is better.  Odds are much higher this way that we'll have AmigaOS on a 'good' i86 (itanium) rather than the baggage-ridden 80x86.

[ne_one]

Ok, boys and girls straight from the horse's mouth:

"ET: What about Pentium 4?

Bill McEwen: Not with OS4, but it will with our next version, OS5 due out within 12 months from when OS4 ships. We'll merge the code-bases and go cross-platform."

Which, by all accounts is 12 months + 3 weeks from now according to other comments Bill makes. Also expect AmigaDE integration and dual boot capability.

Oh... and it supports the 40,000 programs from the 64k chip as well. Typo there one would hope. Or did those crafty Hyperion guys come up with a C64 emulator too!

All kidding aside, some very pointed and intelligent questions. We'll see about the responses.

[System]

Ummmmm......I just read it and all I can say is.....I'm confused....

ET: And that if you want AmigaOS, "you're not allowed to buy it. You have to buy a new Teron board."        
Bill McEwen: That's untrue.

This isnt how I understand it....I thought it was posted that the only way to get a copy of OS4 is to purchase it with a PPC MoBo..."There will be NO shrink wrapped versions of OS4.0"

Also I though that OS4 wouldnt be out until Q1 2003...Why is he saying 3 weeks?

Not to sound bad but I am starting to get the impression that Bill McEwen is answering questions before he knows the correct answers.....Like when he said you could get Bernithalon and you couldnt.

P.S.  I guess we see that as far as he is concerned there will be other platforms that the OS will be ported to...Or is he Mixing AmigaDE with Amiga OS?

[ksk]

I thought OS5 was supposed to be a 64bit operating system. You can not run it on a lousy Pentium4 CPU ... oh well...

[Quixote]

Also I though that OS4 wouldnt be out until Q1 2003...Why is he saying 3 weeks?

Not to sound bad but I am starting to get the impression that Bill McEwen is answering questions before he knows the correct answers.....Like when he said you could get Bernithalon and you couldnt.

;-) I suspect the "three weeks" figure may be due to the traditional time lag involved in the print media.  Magazine articles are written months before you and I see them.

Bill may have meant three weeks after he expected the article to be released, instead of three weeks after the interview was conducted.

[Seehund]

Retarded_Fury wrote:

   ET: And that if you want AmigaOS, "you're not allowed to buy it. You have to buy a new Teron board."
    Bill McEwen: That's untrue.

This isnt how I understand it....I thought it was posted that the only way to get a copy of OS4 is to purchase it with a PPC MoBo..."There will be NO shrink wrapped versions of OS4.0"

Yes. This has been "clarified" so many times by himself, fleecy, Gary Peake, Alan Redhouse and Ben Hermans. I hope that's not a word-for-word quote of McEwen, as what he says is simply "untrue." *)


And what's with this nonsense:

Bill McEwen: EyeTech is one of the larger computer resellers in England, and they licensed the right to take the project over. The Amiga One is our spec, our design, but they built it.

Again, I hope he's been misquoted. Otherwise he's spitting right in the face of Bill Mueller and the other Mai Logic engineers. "No, you didn't design your board, it's our spec, our design."


Things like this...

Bill McEwen: OS4 is the next version of the Amiga OS, it's a total rewrite of the operating system. It's brand new from the ground up, rewritten for the PPC hardware. And it's bloody fast. It's currently in beta testing at 20 external sites, and it's just about ready to go .. in three more weeks. The components are ready, we just have to plug them together and go.

ET: Did you just throw everything out and start over?

Bill McEwen: Well, major portions of the code are still being used. We took those pieces that were hard wired to the custom chipsets, and worked through those issues to make sure we could take advantage of the special capabilities of the Power PC chip. [my emphasis]

...also suggest that he really should abstain from commenting on technical aspects of AmigaOS, and concentrate on trademark licensing.

The rest was the same old, same old. I.e. more marketese.

*) Edit: It could of course be that he was thinking of a special OS version meant for old PPC kludges on Amigas, but forgot to elaborate on that fact. Either way, Amigas with Cyberstorm cards are not very relevant to Extremetech readers, so, AmigaOS will still not be available for sale separately as far as they or anyone else interested in reasonably modern hardware is concerned.

[Seehund]

ksk wrote:

I thought OS5 was supposed to be a 64bit operating system. You can not run it on a lousy Pentium4 CPU ... oh well...

OS5 is whatever the religious nutjobs want it to be, and it'll stay that way until it leaves the vague-outlines-in-an-old-marketing-announcement stage.

[AmigaMac]

OS5 is whatever the religious nutjobs want it to be, and it'll stay that way until it leaves the vague-outlines-in-an-old-marketing-announcement stage.

Well as long as it keeps the x86 zealot freaks happy, then so be it... maybe this will finally put to rest the never ending debate over x86 vs PPC!

[blubbe]

one word:  :crazy:

[CodeSmith]

Actually, that's a picture, so it's technically 1000 words  :-D

[blubbe]

Actually, that's a picture, so it's technically 1000 words

I KNEW someone would say that    :-o

[whabang]

The image is 702 bytes big, so theoretically it's about 100-150 words... :-D ( 70 words more )

[Hammer]

OK, the ppl who want AmigaOS on Intel should be happy: here we have a public statement by the Guy In Charge (tm) saying that OS5 will support x86. It will take a year and a bit, but IMHO this is better. Odds are much higher this way that we'll have AmigaOS on a 'good' i86 (itanium) rather than the baggage-ridden 80x86.
 

The "baggage-ridden" X86 is for running legacy software investments.  

Itanium is not considered as the true X86 successor unlike AMD’s K8 Hammer series CPUs (X86-64).

[Hammer]

Again, I hope he's been misquoted. Otherwise he's spitting right in the face of Bill Mueller and the other Mai Logic engineers. "No, you didn't design your board, it's our spec, our design."

Well, the original Amiga Inc(later CBM) designed the “Amiga” while Motorola designed the main CPU.

I think Bill McEwen was referring to the complete packaged solution, NOT just the components.

MAI’s chipsets alone doesn’t deliver the Amiga™ solution.