Channel 9 Forums - Coffeehouse - AmigaOS marches on ...

Coffeehouse - AmigaOS marches on ...

Ray6 — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 07:15:33 GMT

This is the OS that just refuses to die. I'd love to get hold of a system for a few hours, and see why the user base is so attached to it.

ArsTechnica is reporting on the movement keep the platform moving forward, even while its major players seem intent on destroying it, and themselves in court.

Coffeehouse - AmigaOS marches on ...

ScanIAm — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:24:38 GMT

Ray6 wrote:

This is the OS that just refuses to die. I'd love to get hold of a system for a few hours, and see why the user base is so attached to it.

ArsTechnica is reporting on the movement keep the platform moving forward, even while its major players seem intent on destroying it, and themselves in court.

How closely does it resemble the OS that the actual Amiga ran back in the early 90s?? I played with one, then, and it was way ahead of it's time, but it would be a dinosaur, now.

Coffeehouse - AmigaOS marches on ...

Lee Dale — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:54:00 GMT

I got my 1200 out the loft the other day and had a play with Workbench 3.0

Coffeehouse - AmigaOS marches on ...

figuerres — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:27:59 GMT

Ray6 wrote:

This is the OS that just refuses to die. I'd love to get hold of a system for a few hours, and see why the user base is so attached to it.

ArsTechnica is reporting on the movement keep the platform moving forward, even while its major players seem intent on destroying it, and themselves in court.

well some parts of the story go back to the guys who built the Amiga
before Commodore bought it.
one of the guys designed several custom chips that made a lof it work. he was also one of the guys who designed a bunch of the atari game machine chips and the first pacemaker chips.

and the Amiga OS when it first came out was like a mix of the best of the Mac, UNIX and DOS....

also they had a neat way of dealing with DLL's which on the amiga were .Library files.. no re-basing an amiga dll when it loaded casue it had no absoulte addresses, everything was relative to the load point.

and the only fixed address your app ever had was 4

and that was the pointer to base of the address table of loadlibrary()

also they designed the hardware and OS to multi-process from day one.
the AMiga hardware could have a card installed that was a complete x86 system.
so it culd run DOS / WIndows async and share keybaord,mouse,video and other hardware.

and look up the history of the NewTek Video Toaster.

just a few of the things ... that made it a sweet system.

Coffeehouse - AmigaOS marches on ...

Jason Olson — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 01:05:29 GMT

Anybody check out the code for the Open Source rebuild of the Amiga OS?

Coffeehouse - AmigaOS marches on ...

Xaero_Vincent — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 04:49:44 GMT

I never got to play with an Amiga but I'm sure it was awesome in the day.

Too bad Commodore is no more... we could have had a real alternative to Apple.

Coffeehouse - AmigaOS marches on ...

Ray6 — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:29:15 GMT

figuerres wrote:

just a few of the things ... that made it a sweet system.

Wow.

I had no idea.

Sounds like this thing was years ahead of its time.

Coffeehouse - AmigaOS marches on ...

figuerres — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:59:22 GMT

Ray6 wrote:

figuerres wrote:

just a few of the things ... that made it a sweet system.

Wow.

I had no idea.

Sounds like this thing was years ahead of its time.

Yep it sure was....

things like the GPU cards we have today.... well do some reading about the AMiga chipset,

Fat Agnus, Bilitter,Copper, Paula and Daphine.

they were the custom chips that made the hardware special.

they plus some chips that were versions of chips used in the other Commodore systems and the 68K cpu.

Bilitter was a dedicated hardware Block transafer processor.
Copper was a video "Co Processor"
some of the other chips did sound, DISK I/O and other stuff...