In a time when home PC’s were single tasking DOS boxes with 8 character file names and Ataris and Macs were single tasking GUI boxes, hampering any hacker with their glaring lack of a CLI, the Amiga was a champion of both worlds: It combined the CLI and GUI, leveraging both their strengths. But there was more to it than that, something that’s hard to convey in so many words.
A long list of little things that the author believes made the Amiga great. There’s some interesting touches in there, but personally, the Amiga OS and its derivatives just do not click with me – and I’ve extensively used all of them. Not that it matters, though – there’s more than enough love for the Amiga to go around.
Wait…what?!
I always thought you were a yuuuuuge fan of the Amiga.
Yeah, what is up with that? Actually I always thought Thom was too young to have appreciated it when it was current.
Yeah, that caught me too. Looking back on it though I think it was actually BeOS.
Could be. As his Twitter profile says, though, he’s “weirdly obsessed with OS/2,” which considering that (again according to Twitter) he just became a parent, probably means (correct me if I’m wrong, Thom), that unlike me he’s too young to have used OS/2 when it was current. (I’m not too young, but I didn’t.) So, if he’s too young to have used OS/2 and is still obsessed with it, he could also be too young to have used, but still be obsessed with, the Amiga or anything else. (I for example have used Multics in a simulator, despite the fact I was born a decade after Bell Labs pulled out of the project.)
The writer seems to still use the obsolete OS3.1, thus there is no mention of the powerful ReAction GUI or other such features. 🙁
The article is about AmigaOS while the Amiga was still owned by Commodore. It says so right at the start of the article: “This text is about the later versions of AmigaOS produced by Commodore, from 2.0 to 3.1.” and they go on to explain why.
One thing you missed is the 880K floppies disks. This was at a time when most floppy disks were 320K-720K, in size. Worse most computers only supported 2 floppy drives without special work, it was a snap to add three more PC drives (not the auto-change Amiga ones). So while I had 3520K of disk storage on my Amiga 1000, most non-Amiga owners I knew had a lot less and at that time 5-10 Meg hard drives cost a fortune com[ared to buying some floppy drives.
Amiga FFS with the 880K floppies shipped in 1988 when the PC world was moving to the 1.44 MB and already had the 1.2 MB 5.25″ drives. External Amiga floppy drives cost between $150 and $200 while $300 could get a 30 MB hard drive plus controller for the PC. The Amiga never had the volume necessary to push down the prices of its proprietary parts.
The hard drives were standard SCSI/IDE parts, but Amiga models like the A500 did not include a controller by default. The A600, A1200, A3000 and A4000 came with built in IDE or SCSI controllers so adding a hard drive was relatively inexpensive.
The double density floppy drives were standard parts, the same drive could store 720Kb when formatted on DOS, or 880Kb when formatted on an Amiga. The external floppy port on the Amiga was non standard, so you ended up paying for the adapter and case plus a standard drive. Prior to FFS, the floppies held 836Kb and used extra bytes for a checksum i believe.
Those 1.44Mb drives could hold 1.76Mb when formatted on an Amiga. Problem was the high density drives were not a standard fitting on most Amiga models, and the built in floppy controller could not handle the higher data rate of these drives. The high density floppy drive in the A4000 was a special model which span at half the rpm in order to feed data to the controller at a rate it could handle.
It was possible to format floppies to hold 1.1mb/2.2mb respectively, using extra outer tracks that usually go unused and cramming in more sectors per track. But this was not part of the default OS.
Which Amiga-like OS is most likely to survive?
I am wondering which of the three systems is the most likely to have a future.
1. AmigaOS 4 obviously has the advantage of the brand name, but it seems like there hasn’t been any updates for a few years now, plus Hyperion Entertainment insolvency, so it looks like this OS is pretty much dead unless another company continues the work? Besides that, it only runs of exotic PPC hardware.
2. MorphOS seems to be a mature OS that works well, however it also has the disadvantage of only running on old PPC Macs, which very much limits the amount of users. I would think that unless they port it to x86 (or maybe ARM?) there is no long-term future for this system, because the hardware will just disappear over time, and is obviously limited in its capabilities. Even if MorphOS might run fast on 20 year old systems, browsing the web with a modern browser might be too much for the hardware.
3. AROS at first looks like the best choice, as it runs on multiple architectures including x86 and it’s free and open source software. However, from what I’ve heard it is actually less mature than the other two. Indeed I tried running Icaros Desktop in Virtualbox, which works well on the Live CD, but once installed the mouse movement is very slow and a right-click will crash the whole system. Meanwhile, MorphOS works fine in qemu (ppc emulation – so should be much slower than x86 virtualization).
I know there’s no objectively right answer, just wondering. What OS do you think is still around in 10 years?
MorphOS has been shown to be working on x86, not sure why they haven’t released yet, probably waiting for more drivers, as x86 has a much larger variety of combinations. Plus no nvidia support, as they don’t have any source.
Aros has been much more stable lately, and is what is distributed with the Vampire Stand Alone now. Though they now call it ApolloOS.
So I owned one of the first 1,000 Amiga 1000’s, and wrote software for my employer for the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000. But that dates me to the Amiga OS 1-2.x era; but I don’t recall the lack of a CD command being a good thing. It wasn’t a exactly bad thing, per se, it was just more of a thing. So if feels pretty bottom of the barrel to include that the current director could be a moving target on the list of things that made the Amiga great
I think it was in one of the Fred Fish disk, there were a set of utilities write in machine language and using a common library that was fast and added a number of commands to the CLI. Found it FF 123 and 284 goes go to https://www.amiga-stuff.com/pd/fish.html and search for ARP (Amiga Replacement Project).
Maybe I am misunderstanding your intention, but this isn’t a problem I need solving — and wrote my own scripts for things I felt were missing from the OS at the time.. I stopped developing for/owning the Amiga back in the 90s. I was just sharing my perspective on what I thought was an odd point in the article linked to.
I have a soft spot for the Archimedes and RiscOS. I have no emotional attachment to the Amiga. When OS/2 was discontinued I bought a copy of OS/2 Warp for cheap just so I could try it out. It was pretty spiffy. I think I have just got over Microsoft burying Windows 2000. Things have now got so bloated and locked in I cannot imagine how difficult it is for kids to develop an interest.
Older systems like the Archimedes, Amiga and C64/Spectrum etc encouraged kids to learn…
The best way to learn is to experiment. These systems either had the OS in ROM, or in the case of the Amiga at least the instructions told you how to copy your workbench disks and then encouraged you to experiment with the copy, knowing that you could always make a fresh copy if you managed to destroy the first one.
This is great for kids, as it lets you experiment and learn without finding yourself in a situation where the machine becomes unusable.
By contrast, modern systems are highly fragile and are full of scary warnings trying to keep users away from the inner working incase they break things. It’s always been all too easy to trash a windows install, rendering it unbootable and requiring a tedious and complicated reinstall. All of these warnings scare kids away and prevent them from learning.