@Hypex

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I don't think MacOS was that bad that it needed replacing

It was!

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and it's almost a shame as a system like Windows hasn't been replaced for a foreign OS.

Eh... it was!

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amigang Quote:

Plus also anyone know where number6 is, he usually on top of this and hasn’t logged in a while.

That is worrisome for Mr. consistent. The consistency of #6 was the one thing we could count on in a chaotic Amiga COVID time warp. I guess it says something about how long these immature lawsuits have been going on. I'm surprised we haven't lost more Amiga users to the virus but maybe our solitariness offsets our sedentary computer behavior risk?

Hypex Quote:

Yes, it looks like that was planned from the start. I don't think MacOS was that bad that it needed replacing and it's almost a shame as a system like Windows hasn't been replaced for a foreign OS. And a system like Linux, with it's old fashion looking lower case commands and kernel calls, somehow was more future proof than MacOS and AmigaOS combined. For Amiga, it had no parent company to make that kind of decision, since they died. And OS4 is the closest to any OS3 follow up. I tend to think the AmigaOS is perhaps more sacred and that replacing it with a skin and matching apps sitting on a foreign OS wouldn't work. Apart from being too late to be practical I don't know how such an idea would work in the Amiga scene. I don't think I'd be really interested as what makes OS4 an AmigaOS is the core AmigaOS code forming it. The community is too small for offshoots. The world has settled on Windows, Linux and a Mac skin on Unix. And that's my take on it.

Unix was *not* designed "more future proof" than any other OS. It was *not* designed for portability or multitasking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix#Overview Quote:

At first, Unix was not designed to be portable or for multi-tasking. Later, Unix gradually gained portability, multi-tasking and multi-user capabilities in a time-sharing configuration.

After multitasking was added, it was many years before it was SMP capable. The monolithic kernel made it difficult to port and update drivers. It was low performance and was going nowhere on the desktop until a highly optimized and hacked Linux version was created for the large x86-64 platform. Binary compatibility was not as important as the source code was often open source. Old versions of Unix based software requires a recompile and may require code changes as well. The open source philosophy saved Unix but the flavor/distribution and ISA/binary divisions keep it from becoming more popular.

The AmigaOS is somewhat like a cheaper more efficient Unix but the Amiga has binary compatibility and standard hardware while lacking the open source code philosophy. The AmigaOS either needs to break compatibility and evolve like Unix or return to standard customized hardware and focus on maintaining compatibility. In 1985, the AmigaOS may have had a chance at becoming like Unix but doing it today is likely to result in another fragmented Unix like flavor that is three and a half decades behind Unix derived OSs. Returning to standard customized hardware could unite all Amiga fans and makes more sense to explore and possibly ride the retro computing wave back to prominence while taking advantage of hardware integration.

The 68k MacOS was probably serviceable but likely difficult to update while maintaining compatibility. It was not multitasking from the beginning like Unix and adding cooperative multitasking had issues and is inferior to preemptive multitasking. Apple had decided to change architectures from 68k to PPC breaking compatibility anyway so they decided to fix it with something that was working and proven. Apple nearly went bankrupt during the Mac PPC years and changed again to x86-64 and ARM but they eventually successfully made the transition to a more advanced OS. There were definitely politics involved in both OS and architecture decisions. Jobs likely didn't care what was under the hood as long as it worked well enough and supported his GUI design.

Windows at least started out with cooperative multitasking even though it was primitive in the beginning (windows couldn't even overlap). It was also a mess under the hood trying to support segmented memory and the quirky x86 architecture. The Windows XP kernel was replaced with the Windows NT kernel to provide preemptive multitasking and there were many compatibility problems but also an improved "compatibility mode" introduced. The x86(-64) platform has payed attention to compatibility and has a unified OS and ISA unlike the others which has helped to attract developers and retain customers. It has also allowed the OS to be profitable and has supported the organic evolution which has occurred. The days of quickly evolving commodity hardware are over as the efficiency advantages of better integrated hardware is becoming more important. As only the most popular OSs can make a profit off sales of the OS in order to pay for commodity hardware drivers, expect any OS which gains personal computer market share to be on standard custom hardware. The Raspberry Pi is standard hardware and even ARM creating a more standardized AArch64 ISA is a move toward better standardization integration which should improve Android and Apple offerings.

The AmigaOS is closed, divided and has barely evolved compared to the other OSs mentioned above while there is not enough money in any of the niche markets to properly develop it. Replacing the AmigaOS kernel with a SMP capable kernel will not allow existing Amiga programs to use SMP without placing them in a sandbox using slow emulation. The AmigaOS is adequate for lower performance affordable hardware which could be popular enough to mass produce. It would be interesting to see what could be done with customized hardware as far as performance improvements while retaining enough compatibility for the retro computing markets and allowing some modern computing.

Last edited by matthey on 31-Jan-2022 at 09:07 PM.
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