@COBRA

Re: Amiga never was cheap

I disagree -- in Canada, at least.

The Amiga was unfortunately much more expensive than a Commodore 64. But it was far cheaper than any contemporary Mac or PC. A Mac or PC with (terrible) colour graphics and a low-fi sound card were often $1000 MORE than a similarly equipped Amiga.

Until the early 90's in Canada, Commodore owned the sub-$500 market (C64) and the sub-$1000 market (A500).

@All

Well my definition of Amiga is this :

"Amiga" isn't in the box, it is the people, it is the spirit, it is the persistence, the will, the vision. It can be found in and on any 'box' depending on the person behind the 'box' and what he elected to put in that 'box'. Haynie and Sassenrath aren't the "amiga" nor was Jay. But, the 'vision' they had then and now IS.
If you have the 'spirit', the will, the drive and determination, if you listen to the winds of time here in this group, you will know whether you have that "vision" or not and if you do, God Bless You !

We'll be there ...

Gary Peake (TeamAMIGA mailing list - End 1999)
http://www.OwlNet.Net
Team AMIGA
TAC/OwlNet

_________________
Philippe 'Elwood' Ferrucci
Sam460 1.10 Ghz
AmigaOS 4 betatester
Amiga Translator Organisation

@Carl-S

Quote:

I could return without distraction to making the REBOL OS... a powerful, lightweight alternative OS for people who do not want to support MS and think Linux is too big and complex. And, ironically enough, it is OS is completely configured and controlled by REBOL scripts... sort of like AREXX and shell scripts...

Ah, now I think I know where you're getting at!

@filmamigo

Quote:

Until the early 90's in Canada, Commodore owned the sub-$500 market (C64) and the sub-$1000 market (A500).

Well for me it was damn expensive and I only managed to get my first Amiga, an A500+ in '93. With a 1084S monitor, it cost a fortune. But it was well worth it :)

@takemehomegrandma

On no, please NO!!!

All that is going to do is cause yet another community split. We'll have:

1. Those following Amiga Inc, 'cause it's got the lineage and so it's the Real One
2. Those following Genesi, 'cause The Name is stoopid and Phase 5 rawks and so it's the Real One
3. Those following AROS, 'cause OSS is the Amiga Spirit so it's the Real One
4. Those following Carl, 'cause he was part of the original team and so it's the Real One

@Carl-S
I agree with all the things you say.

@olsen

Quote:

But, at least for me, the biggest bit of baggage the x86 architecture carries around with itself is the instruction set architecture. No matter if what goes into CPU is unlike what the processing unit(s) eventually work with. From what I've learned and learned to appreciate, the less effort that goes into telling the processing unit what it should do, the better. Given a choice, I'd rather tell it as PowerPC instructions than in x86/x86_64 instructions, having to make assumptions about how the register renaming may take place, how the pipelines will be utilized and how the cache hierarchy may come into play

Note that OOOE PowerPCs (e.g. PowerPC 970xx, PowerPC 7448) are equipped with register renaming front end, branch predication/large branch tables and instruction fusion**. These features are also present in Intel Core 2 and AMD K7/K8s.

**PowerPC 970xx/POWER4/POWER5x only. VILW like techniques.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@olsen

Quote:

It ought to suffice. But today's languages are not necessarily well-matched with the hardware the code they produce is supposed to run on.

In-order CPUs (mainly in embedded market) requires more human intervention than OOOE CPUs.

Quote:

Where this mismatch is slight, good for you, but where it's not so slight you ought to be able to let assembly language code help you.

Assembly language reduces the code portability btw.

Quote:

And that language ought to give you better control over what the instructions produce than the high-level language does.

A good assembler programmer must know CPU’s micro-architecture i.e. there’s no point in doing assembler programming if the programmer uses CELL-PPE’s pipeline stalling PPC instructions.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@Carl-S

For me you have ht the nail pon the head about what Amiga is!

So I voted yes!

Great to see you hear Carl by the way

Thanks,
Amiboy

_________________
Live Long and keep Amigaing!

A1200, Power Tower, TF1260 128MB RAM, 68060 Rev 6, OS3.9 BB2, HD-Floppy, Mediator TX+ PCI, Voodoo 3 3000, Soundblaster 4.1, TV Card, Spider USB, 100MBit Ethernet, 16GB CF HD, 52xCDRom.

@CodeSmith

Quote:

CodeSmith wrote: @falemagn OK, we're clearly not on the same frequency here. Let me explain my understanding of what you said, and then you can tell me where we're not in sync. You said, first, that AmigaOS should be binary compatible with Linux. Then, you said that a good way of doing that would be to base AmigaOS on a Linux kernel.

One of the possible ways, yes.

Quote:

My interpretation of that is that you're suggesting that AmigaOS become something like MacOS X, which is a GUI layer and some APIs on top of BSD Unix.

Given that that was only one possible way of making AmigaOS compatible with Linux, I'd say the example isn't exactly spot on, but in the case Linux would become the underlying kernel of AmigaOS, we can say the approach would be somewhat similar, yes.

Quote:

The reasons why I would buy MacOS X as opposed to downloading and installing NetBSD are: 1. All-in-one package, single vendor 2. Apple's APIs are standardized and so there's no "what version of libc do I use" 3. It's nice having an Apple store I can take the computer to if it starts acting weird

So, there's nothing inherent to MacOSX that would make you prefer it over BSD? Is it just a matter of how it's commercialized and whether or not there's some kind of standards, whatever it is? (besides, *BSD's are not subject to the same library versioning issues as the various linux distros are).

Quote:

Parallels with the amiga: 1. I don't see why this couldn't be the same, Hyperion could maintain the ports of Reaction, workbench, etc. Those are separate binaries dynamically linking to GPLd code so there should be no licensing problems. If there are, they can just use BSD (I'm assuming that by suggesting Linux you're not suggesting that Hyperion give away OS4 and turn themselves into a services company like IBM or Red Hat) 2. Amiga APIs make extensive use of byref message passing, which is completely different to Linux's LPC mechanism. So either you break a lot of compatibility with existing apps, turn all those byref messages into expensive memory copies, or cripple Linux's memory protection by making extensive use of shared memory. For thing like games, people are going to bypass the compatibility APIs and just use the devices directly (ALSA/framebuffer device/etc), like on any Linux-based game device. Seems a lot easier and more efficient to just stick with the Linux way. 3. Support would be here/utilitybase/some website, which would be full of people just as confused about the kernel changes as me. So I might as well go to the usual Linux hangouts and ask for help there. Those are the reasons why I think that if we're going to layer AmigaOS on top of Linux, we may as well just use Linux. Please point out where you believe my reasoning is flawed.

The main problem of your reasoning is that you put Hyperion/Amiga, Inc. in the picture, together with the current AmigaOS, but if you read Carl's definition of "Amiga" they are not needed to make a new "Amiga". I myself have talked about keeping the feeling of AmigaOS, some of its paradigms, not necessarily retaining binary and/or source compatibility with it - although it would be a welcome thing.

But there's a living example to look at: AROS. AROS runs on top of Linux, yet it is (or at least can be) totally compatible with AmigaOS at source level (and binary level on the right architectures). AROS could be improved in such a way as to make it transparent to the user that there's Linux underneath, and Linux programs could be integrated with AROS so that you could run them from the AROS CLI and their graphical output would be shown on the AROS screen(s).

More or less is the same with MOS, with its QBox.

_________________
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary
system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
~~ Henry Ford

@COBRA

Quote:

Well for me it was damn expensive and I only managed to get my first Amiga, an A500+ in '93. With a 1084S monitor, it cost a fortune. But it was well worth it :)

Once upon time Amiga was cheaper than PC and one of pro Amiga arguments used to be its good pricing Maybe not in mid 90s but in 80s all other computers having matching or better specs than A500 were much much more expensive... (if you could find any)

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@falemagn

Quote:

The main problem of your reasoning is that you put Hyperion/Amiga, Inc. in the picture, together with the current AmigaOS, but if you read Carl's definition of "Amiga" they are not needed to make a new "Amiga".

While he does not say that AOS4 is strictly needed, at the same time he does take it into account - here's what he says in his definition:
Quote:

Computer System: Amiga is a complete system including both software and hardware. You want people to be able to buy the entire package, not just the "kit". For software, from what I've seen, I think OS4 does it quite well.

It's obvious that his attention(*) and dreams are centered on AOS4: he tells us he dreams of a return of Amiga and acknowledges AOS4 as one of the key components that could help achieve that. He does not say AOS4 is strictly required, but his words indicate beyond doubt that AOS4 fits the picture quite naturally.

(*)Here's another piece where he makes it very clear what he's interested in:
Quote:

I have known of projects like AROS, MorphOS, and a couple others for many years... and you mention a few others, but what I really wanted to find was "the true Amiga 4.0 system" (HW+OS), if there was such a thing.

Quote:

But there's a living example to look at: AROS. AROS runs on top of Linux, yet it is (or at least can be) totally compatible with AmigaOS at source level (and binary level on the right architectures). AROS could be improved in such a way as to make it transparent to the user that there's Linux underneath, and Linux programs could be integrated with AROS so that you could run them from the AROS CLI and their graphical output would be shown on the AROS screen(s).

To me, the Amiga feeling does not come from just its surface.
The AROS layer (with its own issues) on top of Linux (with its own issues) constitutes a complicated system with lots of issues... so, where's Amiga's simplicity and agility?
I obviously agree with you that Amiga would benefit from the availability of applications (that is the point, right?), but I don't want to trade the deep nature of Amiga for applications - it would just make no sense, as, at that point, I could simply go for a Linux/Windows/MacOS/whatever box.

saimo

_________________
RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@Carl-S

First I'm glad to see your renewed/ongoing enthusiasm toward the Amiga.
Seeing how Rebol updates for platform 011 lagged behind I thought that you had dropped/lost the ball for a moment

Thank you for sharing so much at the AmiWest show, and since the question wasn't really asked properly, I'll ask it here for everyone who still wonder too:
Did or didn't some developper(s) go take a seat on the "JoyBoard" while meditating on the cause of crashes?
(This is what many of us believed to be the origin of the "Guru Meditation")

Back to the topic, overall I agree with your point of view, although "cheap" needs to be quantified.

IMO, for the kids, the curious, or someone's 2nd computer (which is bound to become the main one {Dr Evil laughter}), $500 for a complete system is cheap.
For that kind of price people don't expect much of a PC, so the coolness factor of a nicely packaged Amiga would make it worth such amount I believe.

Aiming below the $500 mark isn't feasible IMHO because even with 5M units the cost of the OS, a TFT, HDD, RAM, CPU and other parts doesn't leave much margin between wholesale and retail pricing. The retailer/store has to have a decent margin in order to cover the hidden cost of decent service after the sale.

For the more commited user, be it existing/ex-Amigan or people wanting a bit more performance/features than the low-end model, $800 still is relatively cheap for a complete system.

And when it comes to professional users or technoids who want the best of the best, "cheap" isn't a requirement so $1000, $2000 or even $5000 isn't an obstacle, but they are a minority so they won't make up much of the "mass", perhaps a few percents.

As for the hardware, to me it really matters. Ultimately we're better off with custom motherboards and chipsets, not for the sake of being different, but because there's much room for improvement in the philosophy behind current computer design in general.
Simply put, current designs don't provide enough flexibility to maximize efficiency at any given task and instead uses the approach of "one size fits all", leaving too much of the grunt work to the software, at the expenses of greater CPU load and speed/memory requirements.

The amount of work and funding required to come up with a better design preclude reaching such a goal in the short term, so for now any motherboard will do, but IMHO it should be part of the Amiga strategy.

Simplicity is key and so I completely agree with ChrisH five points too, well put.
I'd add that "Only Amiga makes it possible" really sums it all up.
Before OS4 I hardly ever coded in 'C' on my Amigas and yet managed to get the most complex tasks accomplished with ease in no time.
To this day I still can't do anything remotely close to that with any of the three mainstream operating systems, so the slogan still stands (and the Amiga still graces my desk).

Amiga... Duh!

_________________
AlexC's free OS4 software collection

AmigaOne XE/X1000/X5000/UAE-PPC OS4 laptop/X-10 Home Automation

@Carl-S
I don't actually disagree with your definition of Amiga, and actually I think it would be nice if it were (or could be) true - but I simply believe it's too early to make such grand plans (Fleecy already did that with Amiga Inc a few years ago, and look what happened).

Where-as you are wanting to take a "top down" approach to defining what Amiga is (or what it should become), I much prefer a "bottom up" approach - make decent technology first, and THEN worry about how we might use it - and most likely attract those who would be most suited to that technology.

So I think that we should start with OS4 (which isn't a radical extension of OS3, but it's a good beginning), attract present & past Amigans (hobbyists if you will). Hopefully that'll give us a large enough market to get working on adding all the missing things that are REQUIREMENTS for mainstream use (a modern browser, office suite, etc), and THEN try to attract "millions of creative people at a low cost of ownership". Anything else and we are putting the cart before the horse IMHO.

_________________
Author of the PortablE programming language.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...

@saimo

I don't suggest you go and pick some random quotes from what Carl has written in order to read in them a confirmation of your own personal preferences. Carl may share with you the thought that AmigaOS4 may represent the software part of the equation, yet his definition - and the definition is what matters here - sets aside AmigaOS4 and its current owners. Carl also stated that his own RebolOS could be well suited to the task, if I'm not mistaken, the same way as AmigaOS4 is.

What matters, though, is the point I was making, which for sure didn't consider AmigaOS4 nor Hyperion nor Amiga, Inc. as a prerequisite.

Quote:

To me, the Amiga feeling does not come from just its surface. The AROS layer (with its own issues) on top of Linux (with its own issues) constitutes a complicated system with lots of issues... so, where's Amiga's simplicity and agility?

Everywhere where you put it. I'm not fond of such gross generalizations... if you think the system, in its whole and as I described it, wouldn't fit the definition of "agile and simple" (as simple as it could get while retaining all the provided functionalities, of course), then please go into details and explain why.

Quote:

I obviously agree with you that Amiga would benefit from the availability of applications (that is the point, right?), but I don't want to trade the deep nature of Amiga for applications - it would just make no sense, as, at that point, I could simply go for a Linux/Windows/MacOS/whatever box.

The "deep nature of Amiga" is a concept that should be defined first. If we accept the definition that Carl has given, and if we take into consideration the few points I've enumerated which explain how I would see the "Amiga" evolve (not just the linux argument), in what ways is the "deep nature of Amiga" denaturated?

Last edited by falemagn on 25-Oct-2006 at 11:58 AM.

_________________
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary
system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
~~ Henry Ford

@Carl-S who said Quote:

I could return without distraction to making the REBOL OS... a powerful, lightweight alternative OS for people who do not want to support MS and think Linux is too big and complex. And, ironically enough, it is OS is completely configured and controlled by REBOL scripts... sort of like AREXX and shell scripts...

I do think that you are taking roughly the right approach with REBOL - the bottom layer of a modern computer system needs to be some kind of language, so that the maximum number of 'tasks' can be done with the minimum number of mechanisms.

What mainly puts me off REBOL is that (last time I looked) it was purely interpreted, and that puts a limit on what you can do with it, even with todays obscenely fast computer systems. Oh, plus you seemed to be aiming it as more of a smart web-browser replacement ("executable internet") within large companies, rather than something that is more generally useful; fair enough, there might be a market for that, but it doesn't seem aimed so much for general usage.

One final reason for me avoiding REBOL - it runs on a lot of systems, but not Psion PDAs (rip) or Symbian smart phones, thus limiting anything I would write to just the desktop. Again, that's quite understandable, as you have limited resources. But that's why I decided to write PortablE (my implementation AmigaE), so that I could guarantee that I could target those systems I was most interested in...

EDIT: And having just checked-out your web pages again, it seems that you have dropped support for the AmigaOS. Again, quite understandable, but that pretty much rules REBOL out for me, even if you did support Symbian.

Last edited by ChrisH on 25-Oct-2006 at 12:40 PM.

_________________
Author of the PortablE programming language.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...

Ok, Carl has already gone into more detail than what he posted on AW.net:
http://www.rebol.com/notes/rebol3roadmap.html#section-3
What he says may be true for REBOL, but I'm still not convinced it should (yet) be true for OS4

Last edited by ChrisH on 25-Oct-2006 at 12:29 PM.

_________________
Author of the PortablE programming language.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue...

@COBRA

Quote:

For the majority of people out there it's just nostalgia (at the moment). We (OS4 developers) are trying to change that.

Yep, I think thats accurate for me too. My AmigaOne is the super Amiga I could never afford when I was growing up. I prefer to use this machine over a PC because I'm in love with the OS, and enjoy doing the every day stuff (like email) on AmigaOS. The feel of the platform is awesome. We just need some new hardware and a bit more software. As it is though, the platform covers most of my needs already.

@falemagn

Quote:

I don't suggest you go and pick some random quotes from what Carl has written in order to read in them a confirmation of your own personal preferences.

No personal preferences: you want to take AOS4 completely out of the picture, when instead Carl did include it. I just reported some pertinent quotes (one was even part of the definition... how you can call that "random" is beyond me).

Quote:

Carl may share with you the thought that AmigaOS4 may represent the software part of the equation, yet his definition - and the definition is what matters here - sets aside AmigaOS4 and its current owners. Carl also stated that his own RebolOS could be well suited to the task, if I'm not mistaken, the same way as AmigaOS4 is.

You stick to the strict interpretation of his one-liner, without taking into account his explanation of that one-liner. Feel free. But the fact is that AOS4 *is* contemplated in the very same definition although, as I already clearly stated in my previous post, not as a strictly required component.

Quote:

What matters, though, is the point I was making, which for sure didn't consider AmigaOS4 nor Hyperion nor Amiga, Inc. as a prerequisite.

This, like all you wrote above, make it seem like *I* want AOS4 to be a prerequisite, but what I had already written already shows that it is not so - should I repeat what I just wrote above and in the previous post once again?

Quote:

Everywhere where you put it. I'm not fond of such gross generalizations... if you think the system, in its whole and as I described it, wouldn't fit the definition of "agile and simple" (as simple as it could get while retaining all the provided functionalities, of course), then please go into details and explain why.

To me - and to Carl, given what he says about Linux(*) - Linux alone is not agile and simple in the Amiga spirit. The system you build has added complexity that makes it less agile and less simple.

(*) You may want to have a look at what he wrote here
Quote:

Linux and BSD both have their merits (e.g. I use them for servers, firewalls, etc.), but I don't find them that friendly when used as a desktop system. One other positive distinction about the Amiga is that of being a lightweight system. That was once true of Linux, but no longer. It's become quite heavy.

and other posts (the one I indicate is just the first one I came across).

Quote:

The "deep nature of Amiga" is a concept that should be defined first. If we accept the definition that Carl has given, and if we take into consideration the few points I've enumerated which explain how I would see the "Amiga" evolve (not just the linux argument), in what ways is the "deep nature of Amiga" denaturated?

Let's not forget that this quote was intended to be as a reply to just the AROS+Linux and simplicity/agility discussion, so I'll stick to just that even now.
The "enable" part of Carl's definition implies a few things (which have been later explained anyway). Simplicity and agility are included in them (along with efficiency, lightweightedness, etc.). Linux, to me, to Carl and to many others, just does not cut it (otherwise, after all, we'd just be happy with Linux). So, for me - and I bet many will agree -, using Linux as a foundation of the Amiga building means taking away an important part of the Amiga nature.
If you are referring to models other than AROS+Linux, then I missed them (I haven't read the whole thread) and I don't have time to discuss them - anyway, what I said referred to the AROS+Linux architecture only.

saimo

_________________
RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

@saimo

Quote:

No personal preferences: you want to take AOS4 completely out of the picture, when instead Carl did include it. I just reported some pertinent quotes (one was even part of the definition... how you can call that "random" is beyond me).

Probably "random" wasn't the right term to use, but I used it to give the sense of those quotes being kind of out of the proper context.

Carl has given a definition. A definition, by - err- definition, doesn't require more words in order to be understood and convey its message. If it does, it's not a definition.

Carl has willingly separated the definition of "Amiga" from his own personal preference about how he sees that definition could be applied to the current situation. He clearly prefers AmigaOS4 over MOS and AROS, but then he surely prefers RebolOS over AmigaOS4. Taken in this context, AmigaOS4 becomes kind of irrelevant because it's just not required in order to understand the definition of "Amiga" that Carl has given. If Carl thought that AmigaOS4 were relevant to the "Amiga" definition, he'd have put it in the definition.

Quote:

To me - and to Carl, given what he says about Linux(*) - Linux alone is not agile and simple in the Amiga spirit. The system you build has added complexity that makes it less agile and less simple.

I, again, think you're taking Carl's words out of their proper context. When Carl talked about Linux, he surely had in mind not just the kernel, but the whole operating system, which sees itself deployed in the multitude of distributions available today. This is the same thing I myself I talked about in a earlier post in this thread. Linux itself, the kernel, doesn't suffer from any particular problems, the problem is what surrounds the kernel. This is something that should be taken in high consideration when talking about these issues. Whether or not a future AmigaOS would use Linux as a kernel has certainly no bear on the usability, agility, flexibility and lightweightness of the system as a whole.

To make a very simple example, consider Amithlon: Amithlon is just that, AmigaOS on top of Linux. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone claiming that the Amithlon experience is neither agile or simple.

Quote:

Let's not forget that this quote was intended to be as a reply to just the AROS+Linux and simplicity/agility discussion, so I'll stick to just that even now.

That's basically another way of saying that you don't want to discuss things in the context they belong to. What's the use of discussing just one particular subset of the argumentations I put forward, considering that they heavily rely on the rest of the argumentions which you willingly avoid to consider?

Quote:

If you are referring to models other than AROS+Linux, then I missed them (I haven't read the whole thread) and I don't have time to discuss them - anyway, what I said referred to the AROS+Linux architecture only.

But you still haven't shown in which way the AROS+Linux architecture is not agile nor simple.

Last edited by falemagn on 25-Oct-2006 at 01:10 PM.

_________________
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary
system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
~~ Henry Ford