For the 21st of June, there was an ‘AmigaOS4 on Tour’ event planned for Basel. I travelled from Holland to Switzerland to write an extensive report for AmigaWorld.net regarding this event.
For the 21st of June, there was an ‘AmigaOS4 on Tour’ event planned for Basel. I travelled from Holland to Switzerland to write an extensive report for AmigaWorld.net regarding this event.
.. so still no AmigaOS 4.0 for AmigaONE. Still showing the stuff on the old Miggy.
One guy who was at the show posted this at amiga.org:
“Jürgen Schober mentioned a release date around September 2003 for the CSPPC (PPC expansion board for 68xxx Amigas) and end of year for the Amiga_One.”
http://amiga.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9389&forum=9
— gary_c
Hearing amiga news is always good for a quick laugh, thanks!
You must have a very booring life…
A useful report. Progress seems agonisingly slow, but step by step AmigaOS 4 is moving toward completion.
It does look as though new Amigas will really be available at last next year, and with considerable improvements in many ways compared to the old ones.
Is only getting deeper…
They’re already a year past their earliest release dates, and they’re about 7 months past the “end of year” promises that they made in an attempt to get people to purchase one of those arguably worthless coupons (You remember… “If we get xxxx people to sign up, then we’ll give away a free motherboard, but if we get xxxx people to sign up, then we’ll give away an entire Amiga. Come on guys, show your interest in the new Amiga. Yay!”).
I actually considered throwing some $$ at one of the new boards when they were 1st announced. Now I’m glad that I decided to wait and see if this Amiga produced any more fruit than the last half a dozen incarnations of the company. It hasn’t, and I’m glad to say that any money which would have gone towards a new Amiga has now been safely invested in a new P4 box.
While I hope that Pegasos and Morph make it in the PPC markets, I think that these continued announcements, followed by… -Nothing- continue to prove the death of the Amiga in many peoples eyes. Morph should really stop touting their OS as an Amiga knock-off, and try to sell it on it’s own merits (“Able to run Amiga software” is a better sales pitch then “Built off old Amiga technology”, considering the current state of Amiga in most peoples eyes).
Perhaps if someone at Amiga (And this applies to any of the various incarnations of the company & computer) were to wisen up and not release tons of press statements and sales pitches before there was actually any viable product, the Amiga wouldn’t be seen as such a joke.
Linux has done this and proven it could work. Whereas Amiga seems to think that publicity’s the key to success rather than hard facts and actual product, Linux has shown that if you have a reliable product, it will in time speak for itself. I’d rather see the Amiga take this approach rather than continue to make the Amiga appear to be Vaporware due to countless press releases and missed deadlines.
In other words, just finish the damn thing and stop talking about what it’s going to be like when you’re done. At this point you have to wonder who will invest in Amiga OS4, other than the 28 or so guys still running it as their main OS.
When it was announced, OS4 seemed like a good step towards modernizing the Amiga. Now as 3+Ghz processors are becoming the norm, and 64bit’s on the horizon, it appears that OS4’s going to be outdated before it’s released.
Additionally, when you consider how long OS4’s taking, just imagine how long it’ll be until you see any bugfixes or even an OS5 release!
Their marketing slogan should be something like “Amiga: Shooting ourselves in the foot for the next millenium and beyond”
Okay the subject of this post is kinda a joke…
but in seriousness, what does Amiga offer someone like me who’s never even touched such a machine in his life, other than the novelty of trying a different computer/OS?
is there anything advanced or innovative in AmigaOS anymore? I’ve been told that in its day, the Amiga was wayyy ahead of many of it’s competitors…but what is the shape of it now?
What can it do that say Windows XP or MacOS X or Linux or even DOS can’t?
“What can it do that say Windows XP or MacOS X or Linux or even DOS can’t?”
Nothing. But it’s more fun and less of a struggle to use. You feel more in control of the computer. For example, there are no hidden files. It is never necessary to re-install the OS. Downloading and installing a program is simple – no dependency problems. Single platform-wide scripting language since about 1987.
Of course if when OS4 is out, you decided to try it, you would be constantly saying “Why doesn’t it work like Windows?” if that is what you use regularly. It takes a week or two to get used to a new OS.
As everyone knows, it is at best in a state of convalescence right now. Give it a year or 18 months, then take a look at an Amiga, if you can find one.
wasn’t there some sort of emulator that let people run Amiga on i386 PCs?
i’m somewhat of an OS enthusiast (i almost wet myself when i finally found a free OpenVMS shell account)
so i would like to try it…but i’m a poor college student who can’t spend money on new hardware (or even used hardware from e-bay) i’ve heard good things about it…but never had the chance to try it, there’s no chance anybody has some sort of AmigaOS demo website that lets you testdrive one via VNC or something?
I don’t think I will ever go back to te Amiga, althought it was my main (and only) computer I used from may 1986 to april 1998 at home. It took me untill 2002 before I found pleasure in using computers at home again in the form of Gentoo Linux.
But the articles on osnews about the AmigaOS it brought back happy memories. So yesterday I had some free time on my hands and finally took my harddisks out of my broken A4000 (I still can’t throw it away) and connected them to my gentoo linux powered pc (I always select AFFS in the kernel)
. Too my suprise the machine recognised the drives and mount recognized the affs partition with no problem. I copied the contents to directories on the linux site. Then I emerged UAE, found a kickstart rom and assigned the directories with the amiga contents as harddisks to UAE. The damn thing booted with no problem 
.
wasn’t there some sort of emulator that let people run Amiga on i386 PCs?
http://cloanto.com/amiga/forever/
is there anything advanced or innovative in AmigaOS anymore?
I don’t think that’s the point, right now; the point now is simply to revive the thing. Once the thing is alive again, we can talk about getting advanced and/or innovative stuff back in there. There are plans for that, but for now, they are just that: plans. 🙁
In some ways of course, the Amiga platform is positively behind everyone else. Java support and modern browser capability, in particular.
What may be special about it, at least for me, is that it is a “near-real-time” OS with pre-emptive multitasking. I’m not sure Windows or Mac OSX have that yet; if they do, their multitasking still doesn’t “feel” right. I know there’s a pre-emptive Linux kernel; is pre-emption standard yet though?
Something else that’s still advanced (IMHO) is the configurability. For example: separating the icon data from the actual program (the “.info” file). This allows Amiga users to change icon images with great ease, as well as to set all sorts of parameters and default values in a way that I still haven’t seen another system match.
Another matter, was a powerful CLI, and a useable GUI, that gave the user significant flexibility and access.
Unfortunately, much of the rest of what’s innovative & advanced about Amiga was tied up in its hardware, which these days are pretty much the norm for the desktop: graphics & sound coprocessors, DMA bus, … there were some advanced things that modern PCs still don’t do, but the new Amiga’s won’t have that HW either, so there’s no point in discussing that.
Hell yes. There is a lot of innovation in the Amiga OS, when you consider the fact that most OSes tend to copycat either the Mac (i.e. Windows) or copycat the copycats (i.e. Linux). Due to the Amiga being quite an overlooked platform, its advances have never been integrated in other offerings en masse, whether for reasons of ignorance or legacy concerns.
Seeing how the Amiga is a very young system (1985), it didn’t have any legacy dating back to the age before GUIs, while still not ignoring the usefulness of the CLI, unlike the Mac.
You’re confusing two things.
Pre-emptive multitasking is just the ability to time-slice multiple applications without them being specially written to co-operate. AmigaOS had it while DOS and classic Mac OS did not. All the operating systems created in the 1990s like Linux, Windows 9x and NT, Mac OS X, have full pre-emptive multi-tasking.
Modern Linux kernels are also re-entrant, which means the kernel itself can be interrupted and it continues where it left off. This has potential benefits for soft real time applications like pro-audio work.
The “feel” of software is not an OS feature. OS News runs forums where you can argue with Mac, Windows, BeOS etc. people about how your OS feels “right” and theirs are all “wrong”. It won’t get you anywhere.
Thanks Mike.
I look forward to seeing the finished product.