[HN Gopher] Little Things That Made Amiga Great
___________________________________________________________________
Little Things That Made Amiga Great
Author : eitland
Score : 168 points
Date : 2020-11-29 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (datagubbe.se)
| burlesona wrote:
| I got really into computers in the mid-late 90s by which point we
| were mostly down to Wintel and Apple hanging on by a thread.
|
| What I remember from that era is that nothing was compatible with
| anything else. It took a lot of work to interoperate between two
| PCs, let alone cross the gap between OSes. So for a long time, I
| have kind of taken the current world of few OSes that are highly
| interoperable as being a great thing: you can build your own
| Linux machine and still do real work with people on Windows and
| Mac, etc.
|
| But the more I learn about computing in the 80s and early 90s,
| the more I'm impressed by the variety and diversity of ideas that
| came out of that era. I see now that today's standardization has
| a real cost, which is that we don't really see new ideas or new
| paradigms.
|
| For the HN crowd, especially those who are older than me and can
| remember the earlier era of computing, what do you think about
| that trade off and where we've ended up today?
|
| Are we better off living in a world where all computers can work
| together with minimal fuss? Or would it be better if we still had
| a wide range of vendors taking significantly different approaches
| and innovating at a much faster pace - albeit in incompatible
| ways?
| Ekaros wrote:
| What I'm personally bit horrified with is that "Unix" is the
| end all of OS design and so on. With some fundamental designs
| going back to 70s... Like everything being text. Which seems
| quite a mess in current world with multimedia and increased
| networking. Yes we have spend decades hacking to get it to
| work... But maybe more options and different designs would
| enrich us lot better.
|
| And really we do have layer that can connect all of the
| different systems together. Namely IP. So even if we had
| fundamentally different systems, there is no reason why
| intercommunication wouldn't be possible at this point.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yes, it's not either/or. The web is a kind of meta-OS with a
| very minimal and simple API, and as far as the web is
| concerned everything in userland operates as a thin-client.
| The OS is only of interest locally.
|
| By the mid-90s I was _furious_ with both Microsoft and Apple
| for setting computing back by at least a decade.
|
| You could - with extreme effort - make an Atari ST multitask.
| And of course with the Amiga it was built in.
|
| So why did we throw that away and go backwards to DOS and
| then single-process Windows - which eventually reinvented
| multitasking nearly a decade later and sold it as if it was
| the most astounding development in the history of computing?
|
| Of course there were technical challenges - protected memory,
| protected processes, and so on. But the earliest versions of
| Windows didn't have those either.
|
| So it was a disappointing and frustrating time - an
| alienating difference of philosophy between consumer
| computing designed for creativity and exploration, and box-
| shifting commodity computing designed for form-filling and
| bureaucracy, which _might_ allow you to have some fun after
| hours if you behaved yourself and the machine didn 't crash.
|
| Considering how smart the Amiga team were, it would have been
| very interesting to see what they could have done with
| ubiquitous fast networking, high-res graphics and video, and
| pocketability.
|
| I suspect the result would have been far more open and
| inspiring than the corporate sand trap we have today.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Good enough, cheap, source code available wins in the long
| term. Also worse is better. But even worse was a lot better
| than DOS.
| swiley wrote:
| IMO Unix hasn't taken over as much as people think it has. If
| you look at an OS more closely they typically have a POSIX
| API layer on top of whatever unique ideas they have. Even
| Linux does quite a lot of its own thing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Most of the "new" Linux ideas you will find them in the
| mainframes world.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I think this is largely a factor of PCs getting more
| powerful and the lag to libre implementations. Trying to
| build container infrastructure during the pentium 90 days
| wouldn't have succeeded.
|
| See "the innovators dilemma" for the process.
| njharman wrote:
| People don't know or underestimate how much Unix has taken
| over. From cellphones to super computers. From consumer
| devices to industrial control. Unix servers made and
| continue to run the internet, aka everything.
| pjmlp wrote:
| POSIX more than anything, many of those IoT OSes aren't
| anything UNIX related although they support some form of
| POSIX.
| ithkuil wrote:
| This! Also, we take now many unix abstractions so much
| for granted that when they occur in different places we
| assume it's just convergent evolution.
| patterns wrote:
| This reminds of Robert Pike's "Systems Research is
| Irrelevant" speech [1]. Now, 20 years after his speech, we
| are still stuck with the same notions (such as everything
| being a string). It's not that there are not plenty of
| alternatives around, however, expectations are so high that
| it's almost impossible to make a new computer system
| economically viable. On the other hand, the hacker and maker
| scene is very active, some of them building operating systems
| and hardware such as tiny Lisp-based machines [2] and OSes
| [3]. (My only gripe is that most of the new "avant-garde"
| systems are still text/file-based.)
|
| I'd love to see a next wave in personal computing, starting
| with a clean slate, building on the research, insights and
| learning from the mistakes that have been made. I have no
| doubt that it will happen, the question is only when.
|
| As for interoperability: Even on the same platform there are
| countless problems getting software to talk to each other, so
| I don't think that a new system will make the situation any
| worse.
|
| [1] http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
|
| [2] https://www.tindie.com/products/lutherjohnson/makerlisp-
| ez80...
|
| [3] https://mezzanos.herokuapp.com/
| simonh wrote:
| I think the issue is that, from a user perspective, the
| implementation details of the kernel and base OS doesn't
| matter. As long as it's sanely implemented and doesn't impose
| onerous limitations, it should just get out of the way. The
| vendor can implement it however they like, with whatever
| technologies they like, and as long as it supports featureful
| applications users shouldn't need to care.
|
| The reason Unix was so successful was precisely because it was
| simple and portable a d designed to get out of the way. It was
| as unremarkable as possible, by design. All the interesting
| stuff is left to application developers. You want to implement
| a relational file system, go ahead. You want to develop your
| own GUI layer, fine. Compared to the other major OSes of the
| day like VMS, Pick, PrimeOS, etc it's as unoppinionated as
| possible. Likewise with C, which is intended to be as low level
| and paradigmless as they could. Just an abstraction over
| assembler just as Unix is a thin abstraction over the hardware.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| Whatever got us the Internet was worth it. To generalize, it's
| fine to have a variety of components, as long as the interface
| between them is roughly standardized, and the innovation can
| come in the components. That we can have a Playstation and an
| iPhone use the same network is a good thing, and they can do
| whatever they want with the rest of the stack.
|
| A computer pre-internet felt a lot more like an island. I had
| an Amiga, but I wasn't aware of 90% of the stuff that was out
| there, and could barely afford to buy a compiler.
| ddingus wrote:
| I was in a similar scenario during those times. I did end up
| with internet gateway access in the very late 80s, which
| helped a lot.
|
| Speaking of islands though, check out this FujiNet thing!
|
| https://fujinet.online/
|
| Turns out, Atari 8-bit computers have device independent I/O.
|
| Suddenly, all those little islands are connected, and people
| are writing games in basic, playing together online.
| alexisread wrote:
| I think there have been many missed opportunities in computing,
| however I'd suggest that the Internet and GPL (open source
| licencing in general) would have come regardless of the
| diversity of operating systems. Both these two innovations have
| really bound the software world together - compatability these
| days is really at the TCP level (eg. docker and APIs) and
| allows for a massive diversity of architectures (kafka, istio,
| materialize.io, IFTTT, Macrometa etc) - the bar has moved in a
| way.
|
| Having said that, some of the missed opportunities of note are:
|
| MINT: Gem and Tos weren't really developed much by Atari, but
| they did buy in MINT which has preemptive multi tasking and
| memory protection. With the Aes being retargetable (graphic
| cards), gdos vector fonts and postscript printing, tcp and lan
| networking stacks, shell, global shortcut system, posix
| compatibility and multi-user capabilities, it managed to evolve
| Tos to effectively a unix with usable desktop aka a standard
| OSX or linux-on-the-desktop well before now.
|
| Secondly, choosing A2 instead of Android would have been huge.
| A compiled multithreaded, multitasking self-hosted OS with GC,
| zooming UI, 3x faster than Linux and small enough for one
| person to understand (250k kernel).
|
| https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20....
|
| One other benefit here would have been no Google-Oracle lawsuit
| to mess with API copyright :)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Personally I prefer the plethora of OSes approach, and I never
| been a big UNIX fan to start with.
|
| Yes it does have a couple of nice ideas, and it was much better
| to use than Windows 3.x + MS-DOS, but that is about it.
|
| All the UNIX based OSes that I really appreciate, have moved
| beyond it, namely NeXTSTEP, Solaris/NeWS, Irix, Plan 9/Inferno.
|
| Thankfully only BSD and GNU/Linux are stuck into being a
| continuum of UNIX clones without much to add, when you see
| their conferences it always boils down to kernel features or
| filesystems.
|
| GNU/Linux has the ingredients to make an Amiga like desktop
| experience, with D-BUS, GNOME/KDE, but the fragmentation and
| love for POSIX CLI applications just doesn't make it worthwhile
| to try to make it work.
|
| Look at iOS, macOS, Android, Windows (UWP), GenodeOS, Fuchsia,
| Haiku, Azure Sphere for the pursuit of modern ideas in OS
| research. The fact that some of those have a POSIX like kernel
| (or deeply customise Linux kernel) it is just an implementation
| detail of the overall architecture.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Looks like you missed the whole systemd and cgroups thing.
| The two are huge and novel developments in OS design, and
| much more significant than the GUI flimflam you pine for.
|
| (Yeah, Linux is a server OS, not news.)
| tsm_sf wrote:
| The older I get, the more our devotion to the CLI feels
| like gatekeeping.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Gatekeeping from what? Linux is a server OS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Finally given up on "Year of Desktop Linux"?
| the_af wrote:
| The year of Desktop Linux arrived for me about a decade
| ago. Now I work, game, watch movies, edit graphics and
| photos, all on Linux.
|
| I like and want the powerful combination of the CLI and
| GUI applications.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Finally met one of the happy 1% from Steam surveys.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I don't see it that way. My first computer used Win95 and
| I didn't get into CLI until college and then seriously at
| work. I'm not a Unix expert, but am blown away by how
| much more powerful it is than Windows in many uses. I
| even push files to a Linux server for analysis at times
| as I can tear through a file with grep/cut/awk/sort/uniq
| and some pipes very quickly and efficiently. There are
| many other technologies I know, yet the simple terminal
| is still the best approach for many of my uses. The
| design has stood the test of time for a reason and the
| compositional approach is nice. Nobody is gatekeeping
| here.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Systemd is nothing new, Linux copying comercial UNIXes and
| Windows/VMS, with the community dumping hate left and right
| on the authors.
|
| cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.
| anthk wrote:
| SystemD is like Solaris service manager, but far worse.
|
| And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but
| much, much, MUCH better.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Systemd does a lot more than just manage services. The
| underlying architecture is a generic resource and
| dependency management system.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is called LPAR.
| monocasa wrote:
| It's called WPAR. LPARs are hypervisor level
| partitioning.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You're right, I stand corrected.
| qz2 wrote:
| It's even worse. Systemd, dbus and journald are basically
| service manager, DCOM and Event Log from windows, but
| worse!
|
| It's not the wrong type of solution but systemd is
| somewhat stinky compared to what we could have had.
| pjmlp wrote:
| D-BUS ideas actually trace back to ToolTalk on Solaris.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToolTalk
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| What made Solaris sm better? Curious as I never used that
| one.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Everything "has been done before" in computing. The
| difference is a matter of degree and attention to detail.
|
| And your comment about it having been a thing on
| mainframes underscores my point.
|
| The server story for Linux is evolving (and maturing)
| greatly, and very quickly. The Linux of today is not at
| all like the Linux from 2010. To say that Linux is stuck
| in some sort of legacy UNIX quagmire is just silly.
| jl6 wrote:
| This is the way of the world in microcosm. When globalization
| has smeared all cultures together, and the only languages left
| are English, Spanish, and Mandarin, the world will be far more
| interoperable - but at the cost of every other independent
| niche society. I'm not actually saying it's not worth it.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Prior to the iPhone we were "standardized" on resistive touch
| screens, which sucked compared to the iPhone's capacitive
| screen. Not because a stylus was a good way to use a portable
| device, and not because capacitive touch screen technology was
| unknown - it was invented long ago. It's because of cost.
| You're just conflating standardization with cost cutting.
|
| If there was a cheap and easy to install OS in that era they'd
| all use it. Oh wait that was DOS & Windows, that was the whole
| point, that's what happened, it was adopted because 999/1,000
| vendors are interested in cost cutting not innovation.
|
| It's hard to celebrate cost cutters. History never celebrates
| the crummy cost cutters. I feel no nostalgia for that.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Arexx ports for scripting IPC / automation, the standardized
| installer ( _especially_ the "Pretend to install"), and
| datatypes (which _sort of_ exist in Windows at MacOS, but aren 't
| exactly the same thing either) are the three features I'd love to
| see in current OS's.
|
| All three would need buy-in from application developers, and
| since using them would tightly-couple applications to the host
| platform I can't imagine that any developers would take advantage
| of them anyway.
|
| We've ended up in this world where a vaguely POSIX-flavored
| feature set is about the best we can hope for if a developer
| doesn't want to go "all-in" on a given platform.
| zmix wrote:
| Oh, yes! Sys:> mount IMAP:
|
| or the no-brainer Ram Disk.
| vidarh wrote:
| My favourite is FrexxEd (co-authored by the author of curl) -
| a text editor - that exposed all open buffers as files, so
| you could run script directly on the contents of the open
| buffer.
| zmix wrote:
| That's pretty cool and innovative! I didn't know that
| (though, I remember hearing about FrexxEd). I was a GoldED
| guy ;-)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| One unique feature of the Amiga that I've not seen referenced
| here is that programs, scripts etc. could reference removable
| media by label and if the media was not in the drive when needed,
| a Kickstart-managed requester would pop up asking for it to be
| inserted promptly. This made it very easy to manage even a
| single-floppy-drive system. Linux could support this even now, as
| all the required pieces are there (e.g. automount support) and it
| would be quite useful for a number of things; however it doesn't,
| AFAICT.
| rob74 wrote:
| To be fair, this feature was more useful in the nineties than
| today :) And for the ones not familiar with Amiga jargon, a
| requester is what you would call a dialog box on other OSes...
| toyg wrote:
| _> it would be quite useful for a number of things_
|
| Would it really, though? CDROM are basically dead, what are you
| going to ask: "please connect another internet cable?"
| kitotik wrote:
| Prompting to connect to a remote server, insert a thumb
| drive, enter an encryption key, attach a backup drive would
| all be useful.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >And we were fierce: if you think Apple fanboys are annoying
| today, be very happy you didn't meet an Amiga zealot in 1995.
|
| I was an Atari 8-bit guy, but I have a friend who was an Amiga
| zealot, and to this day every time we have a conversation he make
| an Amiga reference.
| timbit42 wrote:
| > to this day every time we have a conversation he make an
| Amiga reference.
|
| The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that there hasn't been
| anything else comparable. I lived through that time and I
| reference it a lot as well because so many things today are
| based on the Amiga or still aren't done as well as they were
| done on the Amiga.
| sebastien_b wrote:
| Was quite fond of my Amiga - this blog post even taught me a
| couple of things I didn't know.
|
| ARexx was pretty cool - I had written up an AmigaGuide glossary
| (index) maker; was quite slow, but became quite speedy when I
| rewrote it in C.
|
| I'm surprised it still has some advanced features that some OS's
| lack (like system-wide desktop customizable fonts, which macOS
| still lacks)
| Freaky wrote:
| > Any command that evaluates to a valid path will automatically
| change the current working directory to that path
|
| You can get similar behaviour on Unix shells with options like:
|
| * zsh: `setopt auto_cd`
|
| * bash: `shopt -s autocd`
|
| * tcsh: `set implicitcd`
|
| I think fish has it by default but only for paths prefixed with
| tilde, ., /, etc.
| smcl wrote:
| I just can't get over how those original Amiga screenshots always
| look stretched vertically. That would have driven me insane.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The font is tall and a bit ugly but could be easily improved.
| It was the late eighties after all.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I don't see what you mean by stretched vertically. The square
| icons are square.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| It's because the default screen resolutions are PAL (or NTSC),
| so they have double-height pixels to avoid interlacing.
|
| Regular progressive screen modes are also available (some may
| require the installation of a graphics card), and if you're
| using a much higher resolution, increasing the workbench font
| size also makes all the widgets bigger.
|
| High-DPI before high-DPI.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| You can create a ramdisk in Linux by using "tmpfs" as the file
| system.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs
|
| Sometimes you can mount /tmp as tmpfs to have an extremely fast
| /tmp partition. You can make the change permanent via /etc/fstab
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| In the old days this was a big performance boost. Now with nvme
| ssds barely noticeable. Still most distros set up a few by
| default.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Can you create a RAD: device and reboot instantly from it, like
| the Amiga could?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Only by cheating, you can save the contents of a tmpfs to
| disk on shutdown, and then restore it on boot. This can be
| done with a systemd unit or an init script.
| josteink wrote:
| But then it's not a RAD disk but just a HDD boot which
| preloads things into RAM.
| floatboth wrote:
| Usually it's not really about speed, you usually want tmpfs on
| /tmp /var/tmp /var/run etc. to just specifically _avoid
| persistence_.
| reaperducer wrote:
| One little thing that I always liked about the Amiga was that it
| could show human dates.
|
| I never owned one, but my friend had an Amiga 1000, and I
| remember the directory listing had dates like "Last Thursday," or
| "Christmas, 1990," or "An hour ago."
|
| I don't know if that was part of the stock Amiga OS, or an add-
| on, but it was awfully cool.
| timbit42 wrote:
| "Last Thursday" and "An hour ago" were part of the stock Amiga
| OS but it didn't include "Christmas 1990".
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Was Amiga ever big in the United States? I had this realization
| the other day (which might be completely wrong) but it feels like
| US computing industry is a lot more business focused than the
| European computing industry. E.g. most DAWs are built by European
| companies (Ableton, Logic (before Apple acquisition), FL Studio,
| Reason, Bitwig).
|
| Same goes for the demo scene. The demo scene was really big in
| Europe, but it feels like it was never that big in the US (but I
| might be wrong).
|
| I legit wonder if part of the reason is due to the popularity of
| Amiga in Europe.
| jandrese wrote:
| In the US Amiga was a niche player. Video production nerds went
| crazy for it and some people got them for games, but PCs were
| so clearly the way forward that you had to be something of an
| iconoclast to go for the Amiga. Macs were another niche player,
| although some businesses went for Macs which gave them a bit
| more of a "you can justify this by saying you'll work from home
| sometimes" purchase. In the US it's harder to convince people
| to spend thousands on a machine that's only going to be used
| for games.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| It wasn't big, but it did exist. While in Europe Amiga was the
| "default" games computer, the US adopted games consoles much
| faster, so most Amigas sold in the US were used for
| productivity purposes, and mostly video, due to the popularity
| of the Video Toaster.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Yeah that is my impression too. Always got the impression that
| PCs, Macs and Nintendo was bigger in the US.
|
| Growing up in Norway in the 80s I remember the Commodore 64 and
| Amiga really dominated the home computer scene. We used to read
| computer magazines from Sweden, so it must have been big there
| too.
|
| Pretty much nobody used Macs. Schools used a home grown
| Norwegian computer system called Tiki, with these odd keyboards
| with round orange keys.
|
| I had the impression that Macs where much more prevalent in the
| US due to school usage. My American wife has fond memories of
| playing Nintendo games as a kid. But for me it was all about
| Amiga.
|
| It was really sad that it died. It was a really enabling
| system. I compare to people who used Nintendo and we learned so
| much more. I learned to do Basic programming on the Amiga.
| There was even this Game making Basic called AMOS which as
| really ahead of its time.
|
| Using Deluxe Paint to draw was amazing. I learned so much about
| colors and shading from that. Then there was Assembly
| programming which was actually kind of nice on the Amiga.
|
| But before all that I remember making things like bootable
| disks with menus where you could select preferred program.
| mrwh wrote:
| AMOS! I swapped my copy of Easy AMOS with a school friend's
| copy of AMOS Professional. It set me on a path to becoming a
| professional software engineer. (Later, I swapped AMOS for
| Amiga E. Anyone remember that?)
| timbit42 wrote:
| The Amiga was somewhat popular in the US but I think it was
| mostly with people who had Commodore 8-bit systems and
| remained with Commodore when upgrading to 16-bit systems.
| There were a lot of Atari and Apple II systems in the US
| besides the C64 and Atari and Apple II owners likely upgraded
| to Apple Macs, the Atari ST and IBM PCs and not the Amigas.
| Beyond home computing, the Amiga got quite a bit of use in
| the video industry in the US.
|
| In contrast, Commodore systems were huge in Canada, where I
| live. All the schools here had 8-bit Commodore systems from
| the PET to the C64 era. This meant a lot of homes had the
| VIC-20 and C64. I only knew 1 person in my school with an
| Apple II and one with an Atari 800XL. Many of the Commodore
| owners upgraded to Amigas, especially once the Amiga 500 came
| out. Of course, Canada had 1/10th the population so there
| weren't as many Amigas as in the US, but a higher percentage
| of the population had them.
| gdubs wrote:
| I very badly wanted an Amiga as a kid, primarily for the Video
| Toaster which included Lightwave. It was out of reach
| financially, but also on its way out with the Commodore corporate
| problems. My parents drove me to B&H Photo in Manhattan to take a
| look at one, but they were pretty honest about it being near the
| end of the line for Amiga, sadly.
|
| The closest I got was a subscription to Amiga World and a NewTek
| magazine if I recall correctly. I must have read and re-read the
| same articles on the visual effects for Babylon 5 about a
| thousand times.
|
| Despite the cost, the Toaster plus Amiga was insanely inexpensive
| compared to the alternatives of the time.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| It is pretty crazy to think that Babylon 5 had better special
| effects than TNG (in my opinion) and did it for cheap on the
| Amiga compared to Industrial Lights and Magic that TNG used.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| You might want to go watch that stuff again before you make
| your mind up.
|
| It is still impressive however that some of these amiga +
| lightwave effects were done with 12MB of RAM.
| jacobush wrote:
| But for the time it looked OK, especially on the typical
| bedroom 14" CRT.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| He wasn't stating how it looked for the time, he was
| comparing it to star trek: the next generation, which
| used models and was shot on film while even high budget
| CG was still in its infancy.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I rewatch B5 every few years. It still looks great with
| some exceptions (Vorlon planet killer looks like it didn't
| get much time).
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Originally you made a comparison to Star Trek.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| It's a weird comparison. Babylon 5's special effects were
| very early CGI, but TNG has almost no computer graphics at
| all. (Nearly) everything was done practically, and with
| models. Personally I think TNG stands up better, and the fact
| that it was done practically and shot on film now allows a
| high-definition version to exist, which can never happen for
| B5.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| B5 was done mostly in HD, they lost a few shots IIRC.
| monocasa wrote:
| Their effects weren't, which is the point the parent was
| making I think.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| There was one version of Python ported to the Amiga. I believe it
| was 2.4 perhaps.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The Amiga has a very impressive demoscene...
|
| Two Amiga demos that I like from The Black Lotus (TBL):
|
| - Eon (2019): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc (4:16
| is my favorite part)
|
| - Starstruck (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM
| WillFlux wrote:
| Both great demos. I recommend watching Eon from the Revision
| 2019 Amiga compo stream:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwoyfH7TgEQ&feature=youtu.be...
|
| Hearing the crowd react definitely adds to this one!
| masterofmisc wrote:
| Don't forget the Jesus on E's demo by the LSD group.
| https://youtu.be/0MjNsNW8DvM. If I remember rightly, the LSD
| group also did the scene Grapevine magazine and also Dox disks.
| cutitout wrote:
| I love how the circuit diagrams were part of the manuals.
| Admittedly, an Amiga 500 was vastly less complex than a modern
| computer, but still: what today companies like Apple want to keep
| under wraps, so not everybody can just repair anything easily,
| everyone got whether they wanted/needed it or not.
|
| Amiga nostalgia isn't just nostalgia, the Amiga was great. From
| age 10 to 14 most of my life revolved around my Amiga 500 and
| then Amiga 4000, and while it was great then, too, I feel doubly
| blessed in hindsight, considering what tech has become and where
| it's heading, to have been allowed to catch a brief glimpse of
| what could have been. And the music. All that music.
| bhauer wrote:
| A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga,
| but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and
| for years, I could not understand why the major platforms
| (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered
| me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time.
|
| I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's
| "mobile first" UX regime, we now have many desktop experiences
| that hide the scrollbars entirely--revealing them only on
| interaction--wholly removing any at-a-glance utility we enjoyed
| from proportional bars.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It's even weirder when you realize how much more resolution we
| have now.
|
| A favorite implementation of mine was 4dwm on SGI. You could
| middle-click on the trough and it would go directly there,
| rather than the normal paging by left-click. Still try to use
| it everywhere and am disappointed.
| twic wrote:
| In Cinnamon on Linux, the scrollbars in Firefox, Terminal,
| and Xreader are all proportional, and jump directly on left-
| click. Shift-click moves one page.
| masswerk wrote:
| Option + click on Mac...
| justforyou wrote:
| Command + click.
| abrowne wrote:
| Chromium does this on Linux (at least I assume a three finger
| trackpad tap is middle click). IIRC, Qt apps show a menu with
| a "scroll to here" option.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| > revealing them only on interaction
|
| but you can't interact with them except by bringing the mouse
| over the right side, and you can't see them so you literally
| have lost a visual cue of the very thing you want to interact
| with. It's just amazing.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains
| probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people
| use.
|
| Touchpads with two finger scroll and mouse with scroll wheels
| have turned scrolling into a gesture that doesn't necessarily
| require UI element, in pretty much the same way that a
| physical keyboard is just there for you to type on and
| doesn't pop up in existence when you have a focused input
| field
| bhauer wrote:
| But this is partially missing the original point about
| _proportional scrollbars_ , which is that they illustrate
| how large the scrollable content is at a glance. With
| hidden scrollbars or, as I believe you're describing,
| simply not even looking at the scrollbar, there's no
| indication of where you are in the content or how large the
| content is. I would argue this is one of the chief
| grievances I have when consuming content on a mobile device
| (among an armada of other grievances with mobile
| consumption, at least on the web).
|
| Those of us who like knowing contextual information such as
| document size at a glance are sad to see (proportional)
| scrollbars go.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Few people complain about them because there are so many
| new-to-computers users who don't have enough experience to
| appreciate the value of default-visible, proportionally-
| sized scrollbar thumbs. We're in some kind of awful
| eternal-September of user interfaces world where
| experienced users get to suffer through new developers,
| eager to leave their mark by making "modern" user
| interfaces re-learn all the old lessions.
| Jedd wrote:
| > Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains
| ...
|
| I'm curious where you're getting your numbers for that
| claim.
|
| In Microsoft Word, f.e, there's a lot of questions around
| how to disable the auto-hiding, and I believe the only
| remedy is to disable auto-hiding of all scrollbars within
| Windows 10 itself (it's under the accessibility setting
| hierarchy, weirdly).
|
| There's myriad native & web applications that choose to
| hide these, and they're an endless source of frustration
| for people that would like them present, but find they are
| not, and subsequently find there's no convenient way to
| disable the auto-hide, and then lose interest in filing yet
| another bug / feature request.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| I think you're right about the touchpad, it's my
| understanding they removed scrollbar visibility because of
| that input style, however ATM I'm using windows and and I
| have a trackball with a scroll wheel and I very regularly
| look at the scrollbars when I'm doing C#, or looking at
| browsing in palemoon, my two main activities. It tells me
| where I am (heavily looked at in vis stdio), which us part
| of the reason some people (not me) like minimaps.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > While certainly not a UNIX clone
|
| Yeah, that's why it was great.
|
| For me, ARexx and Datatypes still stand out. A standard scripting
| language with standard interfaces into all your desktop software
| is a magnificent tool, and one that common desktop OSes still
| don't have.
|
| Datatypes meant that every program could open relevant data;
| again, something you can't rely on even 30 years later on your
| desktop OS.
| s4n1ty wrote:
| I had an Atari 800XL, then a 520STfm, then a Falcon 030.
|
| Back in those days there was quite a bit of tribal rivalry
| between Atari and Amigas - but I have to admit that the Amiga's
| OS was way ahead of Atari's, which didn't even get true
| multitasking until the Falcon (which almost nobody bought).
| hvs wrote:
| As expected, most of the features were rare on home computers at
| the time, but have become ubiquitous (or unnecessary) on modern
| computers. HOWEVER, the `Datatypes` feature is really cool and
| would actually be a nice feature that still doesn't exist in
| Windows, macOS, or Linux.
|
| https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library
| mrob wrote:
| My favorite feature from the past is RISC OS's "adjust"
| feature, bound to the third mouse button. This had three
| functions:
|
| Selecting menu items without closing the menu.
|
| Toggling selection status of selectable icons (same as
| control+click in modern GUIs).
|
| Changing the length of text selections (same as shift+click in
| modern GUIs).
|
| Sadly, modern GUIs seem to limit themselves to two mouse
| buttons. Adding "adjust" would improve productivity if you had
| a three button mouse, and you could ignore it if you lacked
| mouse buttons and not be any worse off. Maybe there are other
| good features from early OSs we have forgotten.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It does exist in Windows,
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wic/-wic-lh
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions//dd443207...
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/customi...
|
| and in macOS,
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Gr...
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Mu...
|
| Although, yes I do concede it is more complex to implement, the
| way to do it depends on what kind of data type we are talking
| about, and it only works properly if the applications actually
| make use of the OS frameworks instead of doing their own thing.
|
| And as expected with the GNU/Linux "desktop", nothing does
| exist that comes close to it.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I'm possibly missing something but that Image Unit thing
| seems to be a filter rather than a decoder?
|
| The Core Audio stuff is definitely datatypes though -
| converting things to a common backend format for apps to use.
| vidarh wrote:
| That seems limited to specific types of media, though.
| Datatypes is a general purpose framework for creating a
| hierarchy of parsers for file formats.
|
| It can be images or sound, but also text, or anything else.
| E.g. here's a small sample of datatypes from Aminet,
| excluding anything sound and graphics related:
|
| * Datatypes for transparent decompression
|
| * Datatypes for syntax highlighting
|
| * Datatypes for parsing document formats (word etc.)
|
| * Assorted hypertext datatypes
|
| * Assorted datatypes for showing debug information and
| structure of various binary formats, like executables.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I just didn't want to list everything, hence why I added
| the remark "the way to do it depends on what kind of data
| type we are talking about", and yes I do not mean it was as
| exhaustive as DataTypes, as I don't know all use cases.
| richardjdare wrote:
| Wow, in 24 years as a Windows user I never knew about Windows
| Imaging Components, nor did I come across Image Units in the
| 4 years or so I was doing iOS dev on a Mac. I've never seen
| an end-user application that used them, or told me as a user
| that I could expand its functionality with them.
|
| In contrast, on the Amiga, I knew about Datatypes out of the
| box as they were written up in the user manual, and pretty
| much the whole developer community got on board with them. If
| an app used DataTypes it was a feature that the user knew
| about.
|
| The Amiga community seemed much more unified than today with
| respect to using all the latest features of the OS. Even the
| smallest public domain utilities provided AREXX ports so the
| user could script them.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Unity among a much smaller group is easier and more likely
| than a larger group
| tyingq wrote:
| I'd always hoped that extended attributes (xattr) would be used
| for something like that. Nobody seems to use them, though,
| since they are optional and no standard naming scheme exists.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| BeOS (and by extension Haiku) has Translators:
| https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheTranslationKi...
| Supports image, text, sound, streaming, etc.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The Windows equivalent is/was COM and in particlar OLE ("object
| linking and embedding"). With appropriate DLLs you can make a
| new file format and drag-and-drop a file into Word and open it
| inside Word.
|
| The peak of this was ActiveX; in Microsoft's world around 2000,
| they _really_ wanted you to be able to embed controls and
| programs in web pages and then put those web pages everywhere,
| including on the desktop background ( "active desktop").
|
| The problem of running third-party code inside your application
| is not just security but it tends to crash bady and put the
| name of the _hosting application_ on the crash. Eventually
| Microsoft got so fed up with that, especially in the kernel,
| they built a system where video drivers could crash and restart
| while the OS kept on trucking, and use of COM has faded.
| toyg wrote:
| _> The Windows equivalent is /was COM and in particlar OLE
| [...] it tends to crash badly_
|
| The mistake was implementing this stuff in C++, which is way
| too fragile on its own. Had they built a separate VM to
| manage requests for these objects, it would have been no
| problem: VM crashes, host app just restarts it. But Java did
| not exist yet and VMs were not really a thing, resources were
| too scarce.
|
| I do think the ideas behind COM/OLE were pretty good,
| unfortunately real development on desktop OSes basically
| stopped mid-'00s so we might never know what it could have
| been.
| pjmlp wrote:
| UWP is COM + .NET type system, and the basis of modern
| stuff like WinUI and React Native on Windows.
| pjmlp wrote:
| For those not following up with Windows development, all
| major new Windows APIS since XP are ActiveX aka COM aka WinRT
| aka UWP.
|
| COM is pretty much alive and was modernised with .NET type
| system.
| codevark wrote:
| I started programming in the 70s, on Z80s and a PDP-11. Then I
| moved to the Apple IIe. Also got a bit of early exposure to MS-
| DOS in the early 80s. When I first was able to get my hands on an
| Amiga 1000 (my friend got one as a graduation present), it
| completely blew my mind. The Amiga is still my favorite, and I
| have several that still boot up and work fine, even though they
| are quite a bit older than my kids, who do not always boot up and
| work. :) There are a bunch of things I still miss when working
| with Windows (for "work"), even though it is well documented that
| Microsoft ripped off a bunch of ideas and features from the Amiga
| (and early Macs). There are, of course, some things I've gotten
| used to in the intervening years, like increased CPU speeds, but
| the UI of my old Amigas is actually sometimes more performant
| than a brand new machine running a modern OS with thousands (or
| millions) of times the available resources. Go figure.
| BruceEel wrote:
| Anno 2020, I still miss ASSIGN ... ADD.
| stutonk wrote:
| export VAR="$VAR:whatever else"
| BruceEel wrote:
| Yes, for things like PATH. But ASSIGN did more, you could
| essentially create a "device" (combining all ADD'ed things)
| that could be transparently accessed as such by other
| programs. It worked like a version of the Windows SUBST
| command accepting multiple arguments.
| stutonk wrote:
| Like a union mount?
| BruceEel wrote:
| No direct experience with union mounts (I'm on Mac) but
| it sounds like those would do the trick.
| stutonk wrote:
| If it is indeed a union mount mechanism, then that's
| truly a remarkable feature. Reading the documentation
| makes it sound like something akin to an symbolic link
| but perhaps not in the actual filesystem; I still can't
| tell if it's implemented in the kernel/FS or just the
| shell (or to what extent the two are integrated). If it's
| just the shell then this seems to be a shining example of
| where the POSIX interface is holding us back. In Linux,
| they've tried to implement union mounts a number of times
| (as UnionFS, aufs, and OverlayFS) because it's almost too
| complicated to get right for Unix-style filesystems and
| you need a bunch of kernel-level code. Do you happen to
| know if it was possible to create the ASSIGNs
| programmatically? Does deleting/renaming files in the
| ASSIGN work like you'd hope?
| BruceEel wrote:
| Yes, it was indeed implemented at OS-level, you could
| point at the assigned name/alias from, say, a paint
| program and find the files/dirs you'd expect to see.
| Changes to files/dirs too worked as expected as far as I
| can recall (disclaimer: most recent Amiga experience ->
| 1994). It was also possible to create assigns
| programmatically with calls to the Amiga DOS library, see
| "dos.library/AssignPath" in http://amiga.nvg.org/amiga/re
| ference/Includes_and_Autodocs_2... NAME
| AssignPath -- Creates an assignment to a specified path
| (V36) SYNOPSIS success =
| AssignPath(name,path) D0 D1
| D2 BOOL AssignPath(STRPTR,STRPTR)
| FUNCTION Sets up a assignment that is expanded
| upon EACH reference to the name. This is
| implemented through a new device list type
| (DLT_ASSIGNPATH, or some such). The path (a
| string) would be attached to the node. When the
| name is referenced (Open("FOO:xyzzy"...), the string will
| be used to determine where to do the open. No
| permanent lock will be part of it. For example,
| you could AssignPath() c2: to df2:c, and references
| to c2: would go to df2:c, even if you change disks.
| The other major advantage is assigning things to
| unmounted volumes, which will be requested upon
| access (useful in startup sequences).
| INPUTS name - Name of device to be assigned
| (without trailing ':') path - Name of late
| assignment to be resolved at each reference
| RESULT success - Success/failure indicator of
| the operation SEE ALSO
| AssignAdd(), AssignLock(), AssignLate(), Open()
| sime2009 wrote:
| Yes, a lot like a union mount except that it was read
| only and easy to modify.
|
| Assigns were often used for things that we today would
| stuff into an environment variable to represent an array
| of paths. Instead of an environment variable for setting
| the search path for shared libraries, on the Amiga you
| would just setup `LIBS:` and an application could find
| its libraries by opening `LIBS:MyFoo.library`. Similar
| story for $PATH. Amiga has `PATH:` which "contained" all
| of the executables in your path. Unlike unix style
| environment variables, assigns were system wide. (Amiga
| was a single user system.)
| ithkuil wrote:
| Eerily similar to openvms logical name search lists
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Netware had named volumes as well, aka SYS:
|
| Felt like a good compromise between DOS drive letters and
| Unix single root.
| ithkuil wrote:
| That's only half of the story. The interesting part is when
| assigning multiple targets to the same logical name and
| effectively creating virtual "collections"
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I sold my very first piece of software (aged 13) leveraging the
| Amiga RAD disk.
|
| It was called 'RADBench' and essentially installed a mini version
| of Workbench into the recoverable RAM disk, so you could work
| better with floppy-based files by having key executables in
| memory.
|
| It's still out there somewhere on the Internets.
|
| Ah happy memories dear old Amiga.
| Yuioup wrote:
| _No CD_
|
| _While AmigaDOS does have a CD command, it 's usually not
| needed. Any command that evaluates to a valid path will
| automatically change the current working directory to that path_
|
| How is that useful?
| antiterra wrote:
| It just means you don't have to type cd before the path to
| change directories. It's not a big deal at all, especially in
| the context of the DOS shells of the day or modern *nix shells.
|
| eg: > Quarantine/Trojan
|
| Will dump you into the Trojan directory relative to the current
| path. Unless....
|
| Trojan is a binary, then it will run it. Oops.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The second is no different than any other shell.
| antiterra wrote:
| The point is that you might mean to change directories but
| accidentally execute a file instead.
| [deleted]
| rektide wrote:
| Speaking for the Dead is something I really really hope we can do
| more for computing. There's so many pasts that we forget.
|
| I want condensed good & bads of CORBA, SOAP, NeXT, ESB, & so many
| others. It feels like there's only dwindling folklore of so many
| of these things. At least I can point newcomers to C10K and
| Apache forking models to discuss some of the webserving systems
| architecture work that emerged around 2000, that gives a fairly
| broad view of the challenges & was afoot. But I've found few
| clear stories, clear tellings for so many of the faded
| technologies. Nice to see Amiga here somewhat avoiding that fate,
| having some stories told.
| mhd wrote:
| Note that a lot of the "shell"/AmigaDOS details were inherited
| from Tripos[1], along with BCPL to implement that (the BCPL that
| begat first B and then C at Bell Labs). IIRC, that was a
| temporary solution until they got their own design running, but
| as usual, nothing lasts longer than a stopgap.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| After Switching from Amiga to PC, I missed the RAM disk for a
| long time for some reason. It has been so long ago now that I
| cannot remember my workflows that well anymore. But I seem to
| remember that the RAM disk was a really natural part of my
| workflow.
|
| I also remember how us Amiga users got really used to that you
| could set the layering of Windows specifically.
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