[HN Gopher] Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS
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Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS
Author : segf4ult
Score : 92 points
Date : 2024-02-02 05:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datagubbe.se)
| doener wrote:
| The Amiga 500 and 1200 of my father were the first computers I
| got in touch with as a boy growing up in Germany in the 80s and
| early 90s.
|
| I think every generation feels more or less nostalgic about the
| things they grew up with. But oftentimes I get the impression
| that this is especially true for the Amiga community (in
| comparison to, let's say, people growing up with Ataris). If
| true, I wonder why this is.
| mark_round wrote:
| I think it's the same reason I guess why people mourn e.g.
| BeOS.
|
| The Atari was a nice system, but it wasn't ground-breaking. The
| Amiga was decades ahead of it's time and could have been so
| much more if Commodore had any business-savvy. It's hard to
| overstate the impact of seeing an Amiga A500 in full flight,
| coming from the previous generation of 8-bit machines. It felt
| like it was straight from the future (and still does in many
| ways).
|
| It also straddled the line perfectly of being ridiculously
| powerful for the era yet simple enough and approachable for a
| kid/teenager with dedication to understand it on a level that
| simply isn't possible these days. To quote myself from an
| article I wrote on the floppy disk[1]:
|
| "I've been thinking a lot recently about what it is exactly
| about the Amiga that captures me in a way that no other
| computer ever did. Part of it is I think because the Amiga was
| the last system that was simple enough that one person could
| reasonably hold the entire machine in their head.
|
| It was complex, true, but with enough studying and time you
| could know pretty much everything about every single bit of the
| Amiga's memory space, workbench, the custom chips and so on.
| That's what makes it so special and endearing.
|
| That simply doesn't exist on other platforms. I mean modern
| systems are amazing - and I've worked on some serious big-iron
| hardware in my time - but you could spend an entire lifetime
| now simply becoming an expert in one tiny piece of the whole
| system. Modern computers just don't have the accessibility that
| the Amiga had, and it straddled the divide perfectly between
| being simple enough to know it and love it, yet powerful enough
| to do things you'd never dreamed possible."
|
| [1]=https://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-
| floppy...
| oldnetguy wrote:
| I don't just miss the Amiga. I miss Commodore. Commodore made
| powerful machines for reasonable prices. The Amiga was very
| powerful for it's price. I would put an Amiga against a PC or
| Mac of the same era any day.
|
| Were there more powerful computers? Yes and they were not
| within reach of most users.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Amiga OS 2.04 still looks so clean and great, and Workbench
| 3.1 with MagicWB and MUI on an Amiga 1200 with a hard disk
| and some FastRAM was just amazing for it's time. This was
| when Windows 3.11 was the competition - or the Macintosh,
| which was much more expensive. Add AmiTCP and AMosaic and
| you're browsing the world wide web, in 1993. Or get your
| software from a Fred Fish PD Disk, or directly from the
| source, by which I mean Aminet over FTP or CD-ROM. And while
| Norton Commander was pretty neat on PCs, Directory Opus 4 on
| the Amiga was just so ridiculously powerful once you started
| customizing the buttons to run custom scripts.
|
| And man, the Multimedia Software. Deluxe Paint was THE pixel
| editor for its time. Not just on the Amiga, but it was used
| to create graphics for many, many other systems like the SNES
| as well. It's only logical that it was created by a video
| game company (Electronic Arts). Then we got the early 3D
| stuff, including Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D. Presentation
| stuff like ScalaMM (and yes, I know that Hypercard existed on
| the Mac many years before). Genlock/Video Stuff thanks to
| Newtek's Video Toaster. And not to forget Brilliance/True
| Brilliance in case you had an AGA system or the holy grail, a
| graphics card. It's a shame that stuff like Final Writer came
| along very late, because I remember it being pretty great as
| a word processor. I think that Wordworth was the popular one
| before it.
|
| The pure elegance of ASSIGN/virtual drive letters is also one
| of those features that seems pointless until you used it with
| removable media. Arguably though, in this day and age it's no
| longer needed.
|
| One could write a history about how the Amiga was amazing
| without mentioning a single video game, so the fact that the
| Amiga 500 was the ultimate video games machine for a while
| (until the SNES/Genesis came along) doesn't take away from
| how great the system was as a work computer.
|
| As you said, it really feels like a machine that has traveled
| back through time, a system that should've been released in
| 1994 but was actually released in 1985, and then got
| significant upgrades in 1987 with the Amiga 500 and 2000.
|
| But enough gushing about it, it's unfortunately all in the
| past, and as much as I want to embrace Linux, it just lacks
| that cohesion that the Amiga had.
| icedchai wrote:
| I still have wonderful memories of the Amiga. I upgraded
| from an Apple IIe to an A500. It was like night and day,
| and felt like a true quantum leap. I learned C on the Amiga
| and probably owe most of my programming career to it.
|
| Unfortunately, I disagree about the "significant upgrades."
| The hardware barely changed from the A1000 release in 1985
| until late 1992 with the A1200/4000 AGA machines. Yes, they
| added multiple expansion slots with the A2000 (an extension
| of the Zorro slot present in the A1000.) They also made a
| few very minor changes with ECS (video modes almost nobody
| used.) All incremental changes.
|
| The reality is Commodore sat on their butt for years. The
| only meaningful change came with the graphics updates on
| the AGA systems, and that was too little, too late. The
| A1200 was performance limited, a 68020 at 14 mhz, a chip
| that was 8 years old at that point, no "fast" RAM, etc. By
| that time, 386s with SVGA and sound blaster cards were
| starting to become cheap and very common.
|
| Software wise, AmigaOS 2.x _was_ a huge upgrade. Too bad it
| didn 't happen 2 or 3 years sooner though.
| teo_zero wrote:
| > The pure elegance of ASSIGN/virtual drive letters is also
| one of those features that seems pointless until you used
| it with removable media. Arguably though, in this day and
| age it's no longer needed.
|
| When you think about ASSIGN's capability to associate a
| virtual drive to _many_ directories, it 's still needed.
| Linux re-invented it with "mount -bind", much later.
| richardjdare wrote:
| Yes, I grew up on the Amiga and think about this a lot
| myself. I think the Amiga occupied a sweet spot in the
| history of computing. You could kick out the operating system
| and hit the hardware directly like an 8-bit machine, but you
| also had a true multitasking OS, a lightweight GUI and a
| command line environment that approached Unix only on a much
| cheaper machine. And as you say, it was feasible to learn and
| master all of it. And the hardware was interesting enough
| that devs could be creative with it throughout its lifetime.
|
| Accessibility, and ergonomic access to the power of the
| machine definitely has a lot to do with it. Blitz Basic is a
| good example. With Blitz on the Amiga you could write
| hardware hitting games, native GUI apps and command line
| tools out of the box, with no dependencies and none of the
| tedious configuration and administrative work that now
| accompanies supposedly high-level languages today.
|
| You'd think that in 2024 our high-level language environments
| would be even more ergonomic, that you could open a window,
| play a sound or draw something in one line of code, out of
| the box. But we've let that fall by the wayside. It
| frustrates me every day when I think back to the future I
| imagined as an Amiga user.
|
| I really hope that the Amiga's accessibility and
| immersiveness is something we can revive in some way. Our
| systems are now very complex, but I don't believe that should
| preclude such complexity being within a humane, ergonomic
| framework that can be navigated and known.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Our modern language runtimes want to be small and portable
| across platforms, so all the features someone might want in
| an accessible BASIC-prompt-like environment (drawing to the
| screen or playing a sound) are delegated to libraries.
| Libraries make the user engage in dependency management, so
| they have to create a project, learn Cargo or 'go dep' or
| npm, find out which packages to install that give them the
| APIs they need, learn those APIs through varying qualities
| of documentation, and finally figure out how to import and
| call those APIs in their program.
|
| The best system for an all-inclusive programming
| environment like this, that one might feasibly already have
| on their system, is Emacs; this is because they've
| accumulated this stuff and made it available on every
| platform, so you truly can write a couple of lines of Emacs
| Lisp to draw an image or play a sound without getting into
| the arcaneries of dependency management. But even with
| Emacs you need to know the right incantation to get to a
| REPL or execute code from the *scratch* buffer, and your PC
| is never going to ship with a bootloader that jumps
| straight into Emacs.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| The other thing I miss from the Amiga is quite difficult to
| quantify, but it's that sense that you have the computer's
| full attention.
|
| I put it down to low latency between the mouse counters and
| the hardware sprite, and immediacy of visual feedback due to
| the on-screen gadgets being rendered in a high-priority task
| distinct from the application's task.
|
| A 40-year-old 7MHz computer can genuinely feel more
| responsive than a brand new machine thousands of times
| faster, because of those two things - even if the machine
| then takes minutes or hours to complete a job the new machine
| can perform almost instantly.
|
| BeOS was probably the last system which offered that same
| degree of responsiveness.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The Amiga's mouse never, ever lagged. Unless the thing was
| completely crashed, you could always wiggle the mouse and
| see the cursor instantly leap in the right way. The cursor
| _was_ the mouse in a way I haven't really experienced
| since.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| The only time I ever saw the Amiga's mouse pointer lag
| was when transferring files over serial with TwinExpress
| at an unrealistically ambitious rate (for a machine
| without a buffered UART, anyway.)
|
| But yes, that direct connection is one of those things
| you don't really notice until it's not there any more.
| The first time I tried using a mouse on a PC (with 1200
| baud serial mouse) I described the experience as like
| trying to walk when my foot's gone to sleep.
| qubex wrote:
| Nostalgic BeOS user here and I can absolutely relate. BeOS
| enshrined the design epitome of the time -- nineties
| cartoonish icons and draggable yellow tabs on windows -- and
| ran rings around existing software on similar hardware. BeOS
| was multithreaded and was designed from the ground up to
| support multiprocessor architectures at a time when even true
| preemptive multitasking, well-understood though it was,
| wasn't implemented in the predominant consumer OSes of the
| time (pre-95 Windows and Classic MacOS). I keep trying to
| imagine a future in which Apple had acquired BeOS and had
| used that as the basis for their next-generation OS rather
| than purchasing NeXT and going the route that they took but
| Apple lacking the Second Coming of Steve Jobs is such an
| imponderable I cannot really draw any even wildly speculative
| conclusions as to how things might've played out...
| bgeeek wrote:
| I almost had an Atari, but ended up with the Amiga back in
| '88, which I am forever grateful for. I'm not sure that I
| would say the Atari wasn't ground-breaking, though. Think
| back to the '90s and you can see how much of an impact the
| Atari had on the music industry in the UK. It was huge, but
| specific to one particular area - music.
| johnklos wrote:
| This:
|
| "Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system
| that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold
| the entire machine in their head."
|
| This is exactly what appeals so strongly to me about Amigas.
| This is so true that I run AmigaDOS on real Amiga hardware
| and also run NetBSD on Amiga hardware (the m68k instruction
| set is actually understandable to me).
|
| There's something so real and tangible about being able to
| look at individual chips, know how they're connected to other
| things, know what they're doing, and imagine the work they're
| doing happening in real time. Modern computers, by
| comparison, are amazing collections of functional black boxes
| that mere humans can't directly touch (some can - but how
| many of us are working with the kinds of electronics that can
| interface with DDR5, or PCIe?), so they lack the
| approachability of hardware we can breadboard / wire wrap.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Everytime I see an Amiga screenshot, I want to use one again.
| kleiba wrote:
| "Well-Known Secrets"... funny...
| wkjagt wrote:
| The Amiga was such an impressive computer for its time. I
| remember having an A500 when it was still fairly new, and
| compared to anything else out there it was way ahead in terms of
| graphics and sound. I had mine hooked up to an old amp and big
| speakers, and the sound that came out of this thing was amazing.
| Graphics were so colourful and fast scrolling too. It's amazing
| to think that the Amiga series is only one generation newer than
| the Commodore 64/128. There were also a lot of good games for it,
| so the game developer community must have embraced it too.
| jug wrote:
| Yes, it's so weird how that 7 MHz thing ran a perfectly usable
| graphical environment with a command line shell within the GUI
| and all.
|
| I had to wait another nine years for that to come to Windows in
| Windows 95.
|
| At least as impressive (now in hindsight that I understand the
| added effort that comes with this) was drivers were fairly
| plentyful and I could buy a random HP printer and just start
| printing documents. It just worked. Besides the printer of
| course. Inkjet printers in the early nineties were no joke.
| dansalvato wrote:
| > Yes, it's so weird how that 7 MHz thing ran a perfectly
| usable graphical environment with a command line shell within
| the GUI and all.
|
| Perhaps not as advanced as AmigaOS, but Commodore 64 famously
| had GEOS for a good few years in the second half of its
| lifespan, which ended up being very popular for that machine.
| On a 1MHz 6502! Although I don't know if it came with a
| command line.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| It was a _lot_ more than just a 7Hmz processor. The graphics
| and sound chip made it head and hands above anything Mac or
| PC, for years. I programmed on it, and when I read how easy
| it was to access everything, my friend who owned it, just
| went out and bought the programming manual. We used the word:
| "Superlative" a lot.
| dansalvato wrote:
| The Amiga I grew up with only ever had AmigaOS 1.3, but I've
| heard a lot of praise surrounding ARexx, a scripting language
| that I believe shipped with 2.0 and later.
|
| From the AmigaOS wiki:
|
| > The ARexx programming language can act as a central hub through
| which applications - even those created by different companies -
| can exchange data and commands. For example, using ARexx you can
| instruct a telecommunications package to dial an electronic
| bulletin board, download financial data from the bulletin board,
| and then automatically pass the data to a spreadsheet program for
| statistical analysis - without any user intervention.
|
| On a more personal note, I've been working on a game for classic
| Amiga over the past couple years, and it feels like such a
| novelty to have OS bindings for things like memory allocation and
| file handling while working with a machine from 1985. Especially
| for file handling, I have the assurance that my game will run off
| of floppy, hard disk, or even a RAM disk on any generation Amiga,
| because I get to use modern file path logic via the DOS library.
| vidarh wrote:
| As a language Arexx was pretty awful, but the pervasiveness of
| Arexx ports and user expectation that "everything" should be
| accessible to script made it immensely useful anyway.
|
| E.g dbus on Linux is comparatively underused because the
| threshold to using it is too high.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I think my unreasonable expectations for applications to be
| scriptable today comes from my experience with the Amiga.
|
| I didn't know the words "interprocess communication" when I
| first encountered Arexx and Aress ports. I came from a mostly
| MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 background. I hadn't used much
| multitasking software up to that point.
|
| Once I grokked why Arexx ports could be cool and useful I had
| a terrible time trying to explain them to non-"Amiga people".
| I remember a friend asking to be shown the "Arexx port" on my
| Amiga 1200 trying to explain it was a software construct and
| not a physical hardware device. I'm not sure if knowing the
| words "interprocess communication" would have helped, but it
| couldn't have hurt.
|
| I feel like I've spent a significant part of my sysadmin
| career making dodgy hacks to bolt-on IPC functionality to
| applications that don't properly expose any. Fortunately it
| feels like it happens a lot less today than, say, 25 years
| ago.
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