Why Am I An Amiga User In 2009

This blog post is a reply to:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/whos_still_using_windows_3_1_and_amiga_os

Apologies for some camera auto-focus issues, the display does not look like that.

Why Am I An Amiga User in 2009? from Dan Wood on Vimeo.

A recent blog on ComputerWorld has been posted in various Amiga communities recently, the post is by a blogger called David Ramel, who upon checking his visitor stats was rather shocked to find visitors using such esoteric operating systems as Windows 3.1 and AmigaOs. He asks the question "Who is still using Windows 3.1 and Amiga OS?" and encouraged responses. I can forgive David for the comparison, even though the latest AmigaOS cannot really be compared to the 1992 release of Windows 3.1, but many of the mainstream computing industry have obviously not been aware that the Amiga has been in development, and still has a large community to this day.

The Amiga's peak was in the late 80s and early 90s. When the machine was first on the market, it really was the first true multimedia machine, although in its infinite ignorance, Commodore was too blind to see this, and instead marketed it as a games machine, a market it did dominate in Europe, but companies such as Apple did breathe a sigh of relief when they realised Commodore were not going to use the Amiga properly.
To give an clearer picture, the Amiga had high resolution graphics capable of displaying 4096 colours (later 16 million on AGA systems), 8 channel stereo sound, and a fully pre-emptive multitasking graphical user interface OS, in 1985. Back then PCs were still bleeping at the DOS prompt, and Macs were limited to monochrome displays.
The below graphic is from a 1985 Amiga:

Compared to the CGA graphics of a PC, and the dominating 8-bit machines such as the Commodore 64, it was groundbreaking. These graphics and sound capabilities obviously made the machine a prime candidate for gaming, and the Amiga became the leading home computer in the UK and Europe from the late 80s-mid 90s.

Several users went beyond gaming and discovered a beautifully compact, fully multitasking operating system with lighting fast response times. Infact the AmigaOS is widely regarded as one of the most elegant and well designed systems ever made, a prestige it still has to this day. Largely programmed by Carl Sassenrath, who went to Amiga with the freedom to create his dream multi-tasking operating system.

Some of the AmigaOS's prominent features, as outlined on it's Wikipedia page, include:

* Quick on / instant off: OS4 boots/reboots up in a few seconds, and can be switched off in an instant by just hitting the off switch.

* Responsiveness: A fully pre-emptive multitasking scheduler that ensures important tasks will get a fair share of processing time. Optimized to respond to user actions in an instant.

* Screens: You can have as many different screens as you like for any purpose, each with its own application on it. Or you can open a "public screen" which several applications can share. Switching between different screens takes an instant, and you can come back to an application and find it exactly how you left it. It is even possible to drag the current screen down to reveal another screen behind it, so that you can view two screens simultaneously, or even drag and drop files and other content from one screen to another.

* Datatypes: Recognises and handles file types: displaying a picture, playing a music file, decoding a video file, rendering a web page or whatever. Any application can access Datatypes transparently, and thus have the ability to use any file that you have a Datatype for.

* Scripting: Implemented scripting as a fundamental feature. Using the AREXX scripting language and Python it is possible to automate, integrate and remote control almost every application and function of the computer. Function sets and tools from several applications can be brought together into a single, integrated interface to allow the most complex jobs to be performed with the utmost simplicity.

* Icon handling: A file can have a default icon representing the type of file or a custom icon specific to the individual file. Additionally icons can store extra commands about the associated file - which program to open it in, for example.

* Clear file structure: Operating system files are divided up into clearly labelled drawers (folders) so you know exactly where to find whatever you're looking for.

* RAM disk: A virtual hard drive, acts like any other disks, that stores files and data in memory rather than on your actual hard drive. The RAM disk takes up only as much of your memory as it needs to. It can be used as a temporary store for your own purposes or as a place for software installers to put temporary files, and is cleared out at reboot so you won't be cluttering up your computer with thousands of unnecessary files that bog down your system. Additionally there is an optional RAD disk, a recoverable version of the RAM disk, which preserves contents after a reboot.

* Assigning devices: Instead of assigning drives (devices) a letter or fixed label, each drive can be given a name. Drives can be given more than one name so the system always knows where things are, if it is the system boot drive it is also known as "Sys:". Areas of hard drive can be assigned a label as if they were a virtual disk. For example, it is possible to mount MP3 players as "MP3:" and external networked resources as logical devices.

Not to mention the microscopic size of the OS, all of the above features were carried out first on machines with half a megabyte, and loaded entirely from a floppy disk.

An interesting history lesson, but why use the AmigaOS today?

Well the system has been incredibly unlucky, its parent company Commodore went bust in 1994, the Amiga was then sold to Escom, who also went bankrupt in 1997, before selling the Amiga trademarks to Gateway, who gave a lifetime licence to a company called Amiga Inc. Amiga Inc (despite not being too popular with the community for reasons too lengthy to go into here) have licenced various third party companies to write newer versions of the AmigaOS.

OS 3.5 was released in 1999, 3.9 in 2002, and they marked the last operating systems that would run on the "classic Amigas". Today, the AmigaOS is recompiled for PPC processors, which despite being underpowered compared to x86 CPUs, due to the small footprint and very low resources of the AmigaOS, they are more than powerful enough.

The latest AmigaOS 4.1 was released in September of last year, and I currently run this on an AmigaOne-XE with 933mhz PPC G4, 1 gig of RAM on a 24" Acer monitor, and it is by far the most enjoyable system I own.

Partly due to familiarity, but the logical layout of the system, and the fact that I feel like I know what it is doing inside-out, I have never used an OS that puts the user so much in control, and is such an absolute pleasure to use.

Hopefully my video will give you an idea of the Amiga today, and a here's a screengrab to polish it off :)

(Right click and View Image to see full screen)

Tags: 4.1, advocacy, amiga, amigaos, amigaos4.1, operating, os, system

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Comment by Gordon Keenan on October 23, 2009 at 10:35am: Brilliant video and I just love the negativity from some of the viewers LOL!!!
The Amiga was way ahead of the time and let down badly by Commodore, utterly useless.

Now where did I put that old Acorn Archimedes.... now that had multitasking. yadaa yadda...

Nice one!

Comment by GranitW on October 20, 2009 at 7:05pm: *drools* I want it!

Comment by Raymond Mendoza on April 12, 2009 at 9:15am: I love the Commodore vent on the side. I also love the advances that Amiga has done with their OS. I am envious, and feel a need to look into picking up one of these G-Series machines. Too cool, man.

Comment by Guru_Meditation on March 9, 2009 at 11:01pm: @Persia, a forum member at Amigaworld.net has also replied to your post, I'll repost it here:

Quote:

danwood wrote:

" Quick on / instant off: Who turns a computer of nowadays? But you want quick on, use a light Linux like Puppy.

Almost nobody. Why is that though? Because it's a pain in the ASS. To turn of my Windows XP box takes about 2 minutes (which I don't have to wait for of course), but turning it back on takes 2 minutes at least before it's "usable". No one wants to turn their computer off when it takes a long time to load. If I want to jump on the web real quick and google something no one wants to wait for there OS.

But if it booted up in 10 seconds......

Quote:

Responsiveness: Small programs are quick, edit a 12 MP raw image or render a 3D image and tell me how quick it is.

Yeah, I do it in in TVPaint (take a lot of b&w pics and colorize parts of them) and there is no delay. Hell, if I want to do the same thing in Photoshop, well, I'd be half done with the pic in TVPaint before Photoshop finished loading.

Quote:
Screens Old news, not quite spaces on a Mac, in fact it appears that it just makes your OS screen another app.

You obviously have never used screens.

Quote:

Datatypes: Default apps, been there done that.

Has nothing to do with "default apps" thats an entirely different concept. I could have XYZ media player as a default app, but if it uses datatypes, then if a new codec comes out, XVID7 or something, I just put the "datatype" in the datatypes folder and that XYZ app now magically supports XVID7. Has nothing to do with "default apps".

Quote:
Icon handling: To what end? What's the point? Either your Icon opens an App or it doesn't, I spend less than 1% of my time looking at icons, the purpose of a computer is to run the apps...

There are a ton of things... jeez off the top of my head, first thing would be like a .jpg, maybe the "default app" for .jpgs is Photoshop. In AmigaOS you could take any certain .jpgs you wanted and have them open with some other program.

Quote:

Clear file structure: OS X and WIndows have this, Linux doesn't, well actually it does if you understand it, you just need to "think differently."

Windows has this?? Are you kidding? EVERY important file, 1000s of them, are just sitting in the System32 folder!! What a MESS. And half of those are duplicated file names that are viruses so you don't know if you're deleting the "real" one or the fake one.

Quote:

RAM disk: Umm, it's 2009 on my calendar, I can buy 1.5 TB drives for a little over US$100. Why waste RAM on storage?

Laugh! Funny because you point out how cheap 'ram' is in the next comment. Anyway, it has nothing to do with HD space. I use my ram disk to DL temp stuff into, I uninstall stuff there, then I run programs from there to test them out. How is this different from the HD? If I reboot I know everything is instantly cleared out.

Quote:

Small OS? 1 MB memory costs as much as GB memory nowadays. Memory's cheap, I have 16 GB on my main computer.

Yeah and even though my Windows System has 4gb of RAM it still freezes/slows on switching between IE and Outlook! And uses at least that much pagefile.

Quote:

Assigning devices: So what? You plug an MP3 player in and it's icon appears on the screen and you double click it, I don't really care what it's called. Can you sync your address book on your Amiga with your address book on your phone?

Again you obviously have never used AmigaOS. You're right there would be no need to assign MP3: to your iPod of "mp3 player".... What you do is you assign MP3: to c:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Music and then you also add assign MP3: to your other HD that has just data on it, so... 'add assign' MP3: to D:\My Data Stuff\My Music.

Now when you go to MP3: all the files form both locations show up in one "MP3:" 'drive'. You can do this with as many locations as you want.

(Now you could also have an "add assign" to your iPod and all those files on you iPod would show too when you go to MP3:)

Again just one example, there are tons more.

Quote:

In the end it's high priced (US$1000 for a SAM board, video card hard drive and case) about 3 times the price of an EEE PC, far less powerful and with no modern software.

Agreed, need to go to an x86 MB in my opinion for price, plus we'll never have a laptop otherwise. Would love to have AmigaOS 4.1 on my HP Mini 1000, too.

Quote:

Interesting that the modern features are all from Windows, Linux or OS X, the dock, the web browser, the media player, etc.

OSX?? How old is OSX exactly??? I'm pretty sure Amiga had web browsers, docks, and media players long before Steve Jobs got fired from Apple the first time.

Quote:

As far as command lines go, care to do a head to head with Bash? "

Sure.

Comment by Guru_Meditation on March 9, 2009 at 8:26pm: Sure, compare the Amiga to a Mac or PC and it can't do anything they can't do, but that's not the point, as I said its a hobby, and I do use a Core2Quad PC and a Macbook with OS X.

The comparison here is unfair, obviously the hardware is the limitation here not the OS, I'd gladly bet my money on AmigaOS rendering HD video quicker than Vista on the same hardware though.

The file structure of AmigaOS is very different to Windows, and much more logical, windows apps tend to just dump DLLs in the Windows folder, the Amiga has clearly labelled library files and they are in easily accessible folders.

RAM disk is useful for the reasons I said in the video, if you download apps, you can run the installers from here, its a temporary storage, the setup files are not cluttering up your hard disk then.

Yep RAM is cheap, but the Microsoft attitude of "just throw more hardware at it it doesn't matter how bloated it is" is not prevelant here, its always been an excercise in showing what you can do with efficient coding.

Datatypes are not the same as default apps, datatypes are file handlers which mean applications can support different file types without upgrading the software.

The Icon handling is useful if you want certain files to open in certain apps, its not a blanket "always do this for this kind of file" like in Windows, plus the OS handily shows where files were downloaded from, the URL is embedded in the Icon information, a very useful feature.

AmigaOS still boots faster than any Linux I've used.

AmigaOS had a dock before OS X actually, there were similar dock programs around as early as 1993, and 3.5 shipped with one included in the OS in 98/99.

Assigning devices is useful due to the way the OS works, it looks for volume titles often, to help you understand, say you wanted to install something and an app asked for the Windows CD, it looks for a CD inserted with the title "Windows", but you have this CD in a folder on your harddisk, open a shell type assign Windows: sys:windows and it will tell then system that the Windows: volume is actually this folder, its useful.

I'd say AmigaDOS command line is more logical and just as powerful as Bash from my experience.

The object of this video was not to show "the Amiga can do more and is better at everything that Windows or Mac" obviously not, it was to show why its still alive and some of the features of, what is essentially, a hobby OS, but still useable for day-to-day computing and far from dead and buried as the original blog assumed (the author was shocked it had changed from 1992).

Comment by persia on March 9, 2009 at 8:54am: Quick on / instant off: Who turns a computer of nowadays? But you want quick on, use a light Linux like Puppy.

Responsiveness: Small programs are quick, edit a 12 MP raw image or render a 3D image and tell me how quick it is. Take a standard HD video and edit it on your Amiga, oh an mix it with your firewire video camera stream...

Screens Old news, not quite spaces on a Mac, in fact it appears that it just makes your OS screen another app.

Datatypes: Default apps, been there done that.

Scripting: Python exists for almost every computer on earth. OS X even gives me a GUI that allows processes to feed into one another. And if i'm using a resource intensive app I can farm it off to other machines.

Icon handling: To what end? What's the point? Either your Icon opens an App or it doesn't, I spend less than 1% of my time looking at icons, the purpose of a computer is to run the apps...

Clear file structure: OS X and WIndows have this, Linux doesn't, well actually it does if you understand it, you just need to "think differently."

RAM disk: Umm, it's 2009 on my calendar, I can buy 1.5 TB drives for a little over US$100. Why waste RAM on storage?

Small OS? 1 MB memory costs as much as GB memory nowadays. Memory's cheap, I have 16 GB on my main computer.

Assigning devices: So what? You plug an MP3 player in and it's icon appears on the screen and you double click it, I don't really care what it's called. Can you sync your address book on your Amiga with your address book on your phone?

In the end it's high priced (US$1000 for a SAM board, video card hard drive and case) about 3 times the price of an EEE PC, far less powerful and with no modern software.

Interesting that the modern features are all from Windows, Linux or OS X, the dock, the web browser, the media player, etc.

As far as command lines go, care to do a head to head with Bash?

Comment by Guru_Meditation on March 8, 2009 at 9:13pm: You can however buy a SAM440 to run it on right now.

Comment by Guru_Meditation on March 8, 2009 at 9:13pm: Thanks for the comment Steve! Unfortunately AmigaOS is PPC only and is also proprietery like OS X, and actually checks for the presence of a motherboard validation dongle to run, I have heard it can be made to boot on old PPC macs with severe hacking, but its compiled for PPC chips, so no chance it will run on an x86 PC.

Comment by Steve Bushakis on March 7, 2009 at 10:42am: Absolutely amazing! I'm going to do a little investigating of the Amiga OS and see if there are any possibilities of running it on an old PC.