@Wumpus
Where is the "Like" button when you need it. You just hit the nail squarely on its head.

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@Wumpus

Quote:

I don't see it being as popular as Android, Windows, Linux or Mac, but the platform would have been far healthier than it is today.

Popularity has little to do with it, AmigaOS was popular, but developers left Amiga because of a thing called "Internet", which came with a set of requirements to the operating systems, and it was obvious that AmigaOS would never be able to meet these requirements, due to the nature of its design.

Microsoft fixed the issue by replacing their "home user OS" with their server OS.
Apple fixed it by buying NeXT and building their OS on NeXTStep.

The equivalent fix for Commodore would have been to use Amix as the base for the next generation AmigaOS, but that was never the plan. Rather they had plans to follow Microsoft and license NT as the core for the next iteration of Amiga systems.

AmigaOS is about as healthy as you can get for an 80ies home user OS design, pretty much all the other operating systems of that time are long gone. All that is needed for your "dream" to come true, is that everyone just drop whatever Amiga activities they are into, and fall in line behind the MorphOS project.

Last edited by kolla on 15-Apr-2018 at 11:05 PM.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

Quote:

Wumpus wrote: I voted Amiga community divisions. If everyone had worked together instead of fighting, duplicating effort, screwing each other over for a dollar and filing lawsuits, all the other options in the poll could have eventually been overcome. We've got 3-5 barely compatible versions of everything in the OS between OS3.1, OS4, MorphOS, AROS, UAE and Amithlon. How many man hours of work just on simple command line tools? The 68k JIT? Reverse engineering how everything was done originally? It extends to every part of the OS, all applications and every bounty. I don't see it being as popular as Android, Windows, Linux or Mac, but the platform would have been far healthier than it is today.

+ INFINITY & well said

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@kolla

Popular, market share, whatever, I'm just saying I don't expect it to take over the desktop like some people have fantasies of, regardless of what changes tomorrow.

We probably would have needed a replacement OS at some point and to me BeOS looked like what I would have liked to see a healthy Commodore do at some point, with OS legal 3.1 68k backward compatibility.

It's just that every fork off the Amiga family tree does certain things well and are week at others.

AROS is open source and thus can live forever. They produce a lot of good code which can and does get picked up by other projects, but from what I've seen, it's weak on 68k both native and on other platforms and that's a huge part of our software base that we can't easily give up, yet it's apparently not very high on their priority list.

MorphOS is pretty slick and integrates well with the old apps and libraries, which unfortunately for us is very important. It's stuck on an essentially dead platform again since no Macs are made and they are doing something apparently incompatible, but we'll have to wait and see. It's also closed source, so at some point we're going to be locked out.

OS4 I can't comment on because I can't justify the price of entry, but it looks like it would be nice too. It's also closed source so some day that will be stuck in time just like OS3.1.

And then there are the various others that barely made a dent, but used our scarce resources.

But they all wasted time not sharing code, artificially split the market and developer base to the detriment of all.

And we all ate up the marketing to argue with our friends over which limping platform was better rather than having one platform that was 3-4 times larger and better supported.

Maybe with a 3-4 times larger market and the community behind it, the developers would have seen a reason to stay or instead of 4 different people rewriting layers.library and 4 rewriting exec, we could have had 6 of them working on a decent browser.

@Wumpus

Quote:

Maybe with a 3-4 times larger market and the community behind it, the developers would have seen a reason to stay or instead of 4 different people rewriting layers.library and 4 rewriting exec, we could have had 6 of them working on a decent browser.

Having a decent browser doesn't really help, since AmigaOS is inherently unsafe on a network.

If you want a modern browser running in a safe environment, your best option is UAE or FS-UAE on Linux. (Or WinUAE on Windows, if you must.)

Last edited by bison on 16-Apr-2018 at 01:28 AM.
Last edited by bison on 16-Apr-2018 at 01:24 AM.

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@bison

If you add "unsafe for networking" to the list of poll options, that's solvable with more focused manpower too.

Divisiveness put us here.

@Wumpus

Quote:

If you add "unsafe for networking" to the list of poll options, that's solvable with more focused manpower too.

I don't think it is solvable, at least not without breaking backward compatibility with most existing software. One would have to create an entirely new memory-safe AmigaOS with a compatibility mode for classic software. Or one could just run UAE on an existing modern OS and achieve similar results.

If the lot of us were retired system programmers with nothing else to do, we wouldn't have the manpower to make AmigaOS a modern operating system. For what it's worth, I'm not trying to be divisive; I'm being realistic.

Last edited by bison on 16-Apr-2018 at 04:39 AM.

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A different perspective: I think it is incredible that we can buy new "Amiga" hardware, or install Amiga-flavored operating systems on "commodity" hardware in 2018. Commodore failed us, Escom failed us, Gateway failed us. Yet there are people trying to keep this platform alive.

Are any of the options perfect? No.

I remember complaining about Commodore too. The A1200 was definitely too little, too late by 2-3 years. Didn't stop me from buying one.

Personally I'm going to:

1. enjoy bringing my A1200 back into operation
2. building a dedicated AROS box (mini-ITX based... maybe ATX)
3. hopefully adding an X5000 to my collection and/or maybe a neat PORTIA laptop if that is viable

I'd love to see an open-standard for Amiga OS 5 that the three OS camps could unite behind. The what is more important than the how at this point.

@bison

The nice thing about an emulator for classic compatibility is that the emulator process itself can run with memory protection.

What's really missing to make AmigaOS "modern"?

SMP and memory Protection (bye-bye message ports)
multi-user (maybe)?
File IO caching?

I think a small team could build these features if we're ready to break backwards compatibility... which we should be... because emulation.

@remotenemesis

"I'd love to see an open-standard for Amiga OS 5 that the three OS camps could unite behind. The what is more important than the how at this point."

+1

Once I win in eurojackpot, I'll fund a bounty that bribes all to unite.

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@KimmoK

hahaha Quote:

how

:

aros, or how else?

@Wumpus

why is Aros weak on 68k?

@Kolla

Quote:

All that is needed for your "dream" to come true, is that everyone just drop whatever Amiga activities they are into, and fall in line behind the MorphOS project.

Bit of a problem here 99% of the current installed X5000 user base are unable to run MorphOS at this present time without downgrading their existing graphics card and losing out on some Warp3D based goodies with the current set of installed graphics cards.

So the dream of running OS4 MorphOS and Linux all off the same boot screen remains for the time being just that a dream.

And I get that this is all just a community effort which should be applauded, until someone realises that hey we can try and make some money and chase existing markets, we are going to be stuck with many years before MorphOS 3.11 or AmigaOS 4.2 get released.

Target market=chase money=more users=larger installed user base=more and quicker development in order to chase more money from the larger user base . It’s a revolving circle....

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@wawa

That is where I'm investing my time right now.

@kolla

Quote:

Rather they had plans to follow Microsoft and license NT as the core for the next iteration of Amiga systems.

Interesting! I've not heard that before. Do you have any more information or some references for me to read?

BeOS would have been a truly elegant choice for a second-wave of mid-90's Amigas.

Last edited by remotenemesis on 16-Apr-2018 at 03:24 PM.

@remotenemesis

Quote:

The nice thing about an emulator for classic compatibility is that the emulator process itself can run with memory protection.

The emulator is running as an isolated process, but all Amiga apps are still running in a shared address space, so while it protects the host system from Amiga, but it doesn't protect Amiga App 'A' from Amiga App 'B'. This is fine in some situations, but one has to be constantly aware of this and the security implications.

Quote:

What's really missing to make AmigaOS "modern"? SMP and memory Protection (bye-bye message ports) multi-user (maybe)? File IO caching? I think a small team could build these features if we're ready to break backwards compatibility... which we should be... because emulation.

Yes, if you are willing to break backward compatibility and rely on emulation for running classic software, then the task becomes possible. But if you added the things listed above, what you would end up with is a host system with capabilities of a 20-year-old version of Linux. Is this worth the effort? If you're having fun doing it, then yes, but by any other metric, probably not.

This is why I'm on the fence about getting an A1222, if it ever comes out. On the one hand I would have a very unique Amiga-like system, but running classic software would still done via emulation, and on a host system that is far less capable that what I already have. This ends up being an exercise in nostalgia, since there's no rational reason to make the purchase. There are probably people with a significant investment in Amiga PPC software where this might make sense, but I'm not one of them.

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@bison

Virtualization, isolated boxes, you have program that you don't trust in untrusted box, and program you trust in the trusted box. And so on, so don't need to say good by to message ports, but there will be heavy restrictions between the boxes, for example programs in BOX 1 can not communicate with programs in BOX 2 using message ports, but can have access to etch other using pipes or TCP/IP, file-system.

In etch box you will have the same API, but the resources are virtualized, what this means is that you only have copies of the data, and you only change the data using function calls, poking it wont work. (just like bsdsocket.library in UAE for example).

Only trusted programs or legacy programs will run on the real libraries.
To do this without being too slow, AmigaOS will need support for hypervisor.

Having hypervisor will also enable easy emulation of MacOSX and Linux PPC under AmigaOS, this will give AmigaOS developers access to Linux tools like GIT, and the other development tools. That is really hard to port to AmigaOS. having good development tools means that, more developers might look at compiling OWB, this manes again that we might be able fix endian issues, and or fix problems we have today.

Another way to better and more secure system is by using languages that have security built in, like Java on Android where have to allow the program access, this can be implemented into thing like Amos Language as well. It wont be too hard to analyze a Amos program and find out if its poking memory or accessing SYS: LIBS: DEVS: and so on.

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Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 16-Apr-2018 at 04:26 PM.

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@bison

Quote:

Amiga apps are still running in a shared address space, so while it protects the host system from Amiga, but it doesn't protect Amiga App 'A' from Amiga App 'B'.

Yep. Sandboxing classic-land is likely the most practical way to retain backward compatibility while implementing new features in a modern-izing OS.

Quote:

But if you added the things listed above, what you would end up with is a host system with capabilities of a 20-year-old version of Linux. Is this worth the effort? If you're having fun doing it, then yes, but by any other metric, probably not.

That's really the crux of it, although we're all still here ;)

I'll reiterate my point that operating systems haven't innovated all that much. Most of the focus in Linux is on optimization and stability for example. Its not a huge stretch to modernize AmigaOS with enough people, a clear vision and affordable _reference hardware_.

Is it worth it? To me, yeah.

I've never really enjoyed Windows and while my main computers are MacBook Pros... they just aren't fun in the same way Amigas were.

I think that the real and only reason is the fact that the Amiga can't replace a PC or a Mac. Who in the world outside the Amiga community want to use an OS without security and mainstream software? Add to that the premium price, lack of basic features and insecure ownership...
The day it will be possible to replace one of those OS even Linux and do whatever you want with it then it will take more traction. When you see the development pace, I don't see this happening any time soon.

In the end I'll stick with the so called Classic (which is the Amiga) because it is fun to tinker with.

@ilbarbax

Quote:

so it is evident that the root cause is not just one of them but all of them!! This is definitely the worst scenario.

True, but i saw some moves during the past years that deserve appreciation, Acube, A-eon.... and others.

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@Wumpus

Quote:

I voted Amiga community divisions. If everyone had worked together instead of fighting, duplicating effort, screwing each other over for a dollar and filing lawsuits, all the other options in the poll could have eventually been overcome. We've got 3-5 barely compatible versions of everything in the OS between OS3.1, OS4, MorphOS, AROS, UAE and Amithlon. How many man hours of work just on simple command line tools? The 68k JIT? Reverse engineering how everything was done originally? It extends to every part of the OS, all applications and every bounty. I don't see it being as popular as Android, Windows, Linux or Mac, but the platform would have been far healthier than it is today.

+1

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