Will there every be another computer like the amiga?

[persia]

Probably a typo.

This thread is going on and on about Windows vs Mac. Check the title, I believe it mentions Amiga.


Also, I would have a software solution first, let people try out your new Amiga system before they invest in hardware.

[smerf]

Hi,

@haywirepc,

Don't know if there will ever be another computer like the Amiga, the Amiga was a leader in sound and graphics at the time of its birth, today its graphics and sound can be over run by a childs small handheld learning computer.

but

hold on to your hats, the next five years will make the computers that are out today look like the first calculators. They are talking about terrahertz cpu's, graphics like you haven't seen before, and sound so real that you would swear you were at a concert if you could afford the speakers that can produce it.

The computers of the future well it just might be awesome. Not Amazing just Awesome.

smerf

[smerf]

Hi,

@bloodline,

To me the iphone is the worst piece of crap that was ever brought out to the world, it is like everything else rotten core brings out. An overpriced piece of junk that has people dying on the roads because like most of todays new generation, they don't know when to drive and when to text or play with their new tech toys. The girl who hit me was texting on her iphone GRRRRR!!!! another knotheaded rotten core apple user, had to replace my saturn auto.

Now lets get this straight, I hate cell phones, but I carry one for emergencies, and thats it, my auto has to be off the road before I use it. You young generation users just don't understand that a auto is 3000 lbs. of dynomite waiting to go off.

I see these young kids at work all the time with their iphones, if they worked as hard as they used their iphones, this world would have no problems, but getting them to put down their iphones and work, welllll.

smerf

[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)

[persia]

@smerf

Yeah, we realised that the mobile phone basically duplicated the landline, but wasn't stuck in one place, so we dumped the landline.

[persia]

@smerf

Terrahertz chips?  Not bloody likely, that's why the cores keep increasing.  The i7 has 6 cores.  The Amiga dream of parallel processing is here, except for the Amiga, of course,  which supports only one core.

Indeed everything that the Amiga promised in '85 has been delivered, just not by the Amiga....

[desiv]

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)

Second about C.S.

And THAT is the question...

To be honest, I don't know...
I've had (and have) lots of computers.  Some I really like.  Some the perform incredibly (much better than my Amigas).  Some that were cutting edge.  Some that are.. er. .just bizarre...  I like almost all tech..

But the Amiga was about tech AND much more.
It was that feeling that we were part of something that was ahead of its time.  Not a few months or years even..

It was the elegance of the design...

When someone (on this or another board) asked about the best part of the Amiga, I answered "intuition", because I was able to write fully Windowed programs in C and actually understand what it was doing and why.

I can do that in other languages, but parts I understand and parts I don't.

I would describe the Amiga - hardware, software, interface, et al as elegant...  

I don't see that anymore...

I see bloated, incredibly badly designed devices that are only "incredible" because they have so much memory and CPU that it forces it's way past.

If you're a network person, you can kind of compare it to the Ethernet/Token Ring comparison.  Ethernet won.  It was so fast and cheap, it was inevitable..

But you look at what you have to do to get it where it is, switching to the port, and you still have collisions on the switch backplanes...

Then you look at Token-Ring..  Packets on the wire...  Upstream and Downsteam neighbors...  It was an elegant protocol...

Now, it's not the same extreme.  I don't run Token Ring at home still, and I do still use my Amigas. :-)

But I think that the combination of the incredible technology and the elegance of the design is what the Amiga is about to me...

Other machines have some great designs..  But I don't see what I see in the Amiga.  And now, there is so much power and RAM, there is no reason to be elegant...  It's just sad...  IMHO..

I don't see how there will ever be another computer like the Amiga..

But maybe..

desiv

[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.

[Hell Labs]

If you get to the point of rage like the guy in the video you posted: You have serious issues. This dude tried to shove a remote up his ass over his mom canceling his WOW account, but that's not nearly as bad as cutting your dick off over win XP.

Dick is still attached. If you're interested, I actually kicked through the front of the tower case in one go. Emachines cases are really, really weak. Foot>pot metal.

[persia]

Bloat is in the eye of the beholder, the Amiga was bloated compared to the old CPM machine I started with.  I could put an operating system, a word processor and the data on a 90 MB disk, compared to that the Amiga was nothing but a bloated over powered hog.

And you programmed in C, how luxurious, you didn't really know what the system was doing underneath, you let the operating system put windows on the screen!  This kids today just don't know what it takes to make a computer work.

Seriously, there is nothing I don't understand when I program for the Mac or iPhone, it's all right there, I'm just assisted with the code, I don't have to write a browser to open a webpage, it's just a system call.  Nothing wrong with that anymore than letting the system handle the windows or any other bits.

Do you drive instead of walk?  Fly the ocean instead of swimming across it?  Life moves on.  The hard bits move on.  There's nothing less elegant about an iPhone than an Amiga because it has more lines of code than there is less elegant about a human than there is about a house fly.

The iPhone has a clean, neat relationship between the hardware, operating system and software.  It all fits together in an elegant way.  The operating system does what it needs to, and gets out of the user's face when a program is loaded.  The thing is rock solid, no gurus.  Elegance isn't about size, it's about form and function, both of which the iPhone has in spades.  Like it or not, the iPhone is elegant, and while Android and WebOS has the possibility of becoming elegant, they aren't quite there yet.

And the iPhone was a game changer, mobile phones will never be the same, the iPhone has changed the future of mobile devices, they are now pocket computers, something that everyone knew would come, but iPhone delivered it.

Every OS has rules, lines you can't cross, sometimes these lines become a fatal flaw, like AmigaOS' lack of memory protection, sometimes not.

Second about C.S.

And THAT is the question...

To be honest, I don't know...
I've had (and have) lots of computers.  Some I really like.  Some the perform incredibly (much better than my Amigas).  Some that were cutting edge.  Some that are.. er. .just bizarre...  I like almost all tech..

But the Amiga was about tech AND much more.
It was that feeling that we were part of something that was ahead of its time.  Not a few months or years even..

It was the elegance of the design...

When someone (on this or another board) asked about the best part of the Amiga, I answered "intuition", because I was able to write fully Windowed programs in C and actually understand what it was doing and why.

I can do that in other languages, but parts I understand and parts I don't.

I would describe the Amiga - hardware, software, interface, et al as elegant...  

I don't see that anymore...

I see bloated, incredibly badly designed devices that are only "incredible" because they have so much memory and CPU that it forces it's way past.

If you're a network person, you can kind of compare it to the Ethernet/Token Ring comparison.  Ethernet won.  It was so fast and cheap, it was inevitable..

But you look at what you have to do to get it where it is, switching to the port, and you still have collisions on the switch backplanes...

Then you look at Token-Ring..  Packets on the wire...  Upstream and Downsteam neighbors...  It was an elegant protocol...

Now, it's not the same extreme.  I don't run Token Ring at home still, and I do still use my Amigas. :-)

But I think that the combination of the incredible technology and the elegance of the design is what the Amiga is about to me...

Other machines have some great designs..  But I don't see what I see in the Amiga.  And now, there is so much power and RAM, there is no reason to be elegant...  It's just sad...  IMHO..

I don't see how there will ever be another computer like the Amiga..

But maybe..

desiv

[ElPolloDiabl]

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?

1. Ease of use and and easy learning curve to more advanced operations
2. Top notch sound and graphics
3. Low footprint and low resource usage. (I don't want an office app installing half of its functions in memory when I only want to boot up and play games).
4. Compatibility with old software. (Going from 1.3 to 2.04 then 3.1 only broke a few things. Mac kept its backwards compatibility we should do likewise.)
5. Wow factor. If you put in a disk and the thing just installs and works. Presently I have to search around for utilities or drivers or patches.

[desiv]

Bloat is in the eye of the beholder, the Amiga was bloated compared to the old CPM machine I started with.  I could put an operating system, a word processor and the data on a 90 MB disk, compared to that the Amiga was nothing but a bloated over powered hog.

I assume that was a typo?  90MB?  :roflmao:
Yes, I used CP/M before the Amiga too (if you really did)..

And you programmed in C, how luxurious, you didn't really know what the system was doing underneath, you let the operating system put windows on the screen!  This kids today just don't know what it takes to make a computer work.

I didn't say that was all I did, just that I used C.  Jump to conclusions much???

Well, I don't feed trolls, so .... have fun..

desiv

[kolla]

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.

You almost describe REBOL there, you known.

[bloodline]

Maybe all this arguing about which tiny facet of the Amiga was more Amiga than any other part is a slight waste of time...

Perhaps we should see the world around us and realise that we live in a "post Amiga" world, everything that made the Amiga special is now a stardard par of the computing environment.

What we need to do is take our (as in the Amiga comunity) collective understanding of the interelationship between the features and mould the machines we use in our image... Download the SDKs and get coding, then mate we can restore what was once Amiga... Just a thought...

[Hell Labs]

I'd just like to go on record, smerf is delusional.

[dreamcast270mhz]

Maybe all this arguing about which tiny facet of the Amiga was more Amiga than any other part is a slight waste of time...

Perhaps we should see the world around us and realise that we live in a "post Amiga" world, everything that made the Amiga special is now a stardard par of the computing environment.

What we need to do is take our (as in the Amiga comunity) collective understanding of the interelationship between the features and mould the machines we use in our image... Download the SDKs and get coding, then mate we can restore what was once Amiga... Just a thought...

Well when MOS 2.5 is released, maybe I'll learn some PPC asm and some C to help with the closest AmigaOS rebirth. Well put Bloodline, well put.