Nice interview

_________________
Site admins are people too..pooff!

Excellent. Truly nice to hear from Olaf.

Thanks Obligement, Thanks Olaf.

Its not over yet :)

Olsen FTW!

_________________
Wanna try a wonderfull magical Amiga strategy game?
Total Chaos AGA

Great interview :)

@Kicko
+1

_________________
SamFlex Complete 800Mhz System + AmigaOS 4.1 Update 4
Amiga 2000 DKB 2MB ChipRam GVP G-Force040 Picasso 2 OS3.9 BB2
AmigaCD 32

I'm doing some / a lot of http https and ssl socket work in the Java SE / EE world right now.... I hope the Amiga API's are just as shockingly complex...
CORRECTION: I mean easy to use!

_________________
Quote:

Easy Pocket Money, Freelancers & Experts Online

MiniMig FPGA, Sam440 Flex 733Mhz PPC, Amiga OS 4.1 Update 2, MorphOS 2.4, Other - AmiKit + Cloanto Amiga Forever 2008 + E-UAE, AmigaSYS

Olaf rocks. EDIT: And I think "30 books a year" warrants an "Olaf's Book Corner" column of some kind. I'm normally in the 96/year category, but I go through phases. Right now, I'm gaming and tinkering, but as winter moves in, I'll go back to reading. Hard SF for the win.

Last edited by Trev on 12-Oct-2010 at 06:55 PM.

_________________
Sam440ep-flex 733 MHz/1 GB RAM/Radeon 9250/AmigaOS4.1 Update 2
borked A1200/Blizzard1260+SCSI-IV/Z4+MediatorZIV/Deneb/Voodoo3/CatweaselMk3
more borked A1200/MBX1200z/Indivision
A500/clockport/RRNet
A600/A603

Great work as always Olaf.

Quote:

AmigaOS has been ported to the PowerPC platform. Considering the scope of the work, and that most of the code that makes up AmigaOS is based upon the original work of the Commodore engineers, this is a major achievement. As I know by now, this is also the kind of achievement which is extremely rare. Outside the domain of military contractors, hardly anybody is willing to make an effort to port an existing, large operating system to a completely different hardware platform. This is because it is risky, expensive and bound to take a long time to come to completion.

I do think we tend to take for granted the effort it takes to move a large code base to an entirely new platform. What Hyperion accomplished (whether you agree with it or not) is pretty amazing. Add in all the legal hassles it was a bloody miracle AmigaOS ever moved beyond 3.9. Was it insane to even try? Probably.

Quote:

It is a very diffent thing to have met somebody on a personal level than to just have contact through forums and online chats. There is usually less trust involved, and it becomes so much easier to misunderstand each other's intentions, which can then blow up into incessant flame wars and worse.

So very true. This is why meetings and shows like AmiWest are still relevant. Computer geeks often forget the power of a face-to-face meeting. There is no substitute. The telephone/skype is a close second but still not a direct substitute.

_________________
ExecSG Team Lead

Good interview.

_________________
4000T/BFG9060
CD32/Elsat ProModule, TF360
CD32/ Edu's CD32 <> A1200 Adapter, Vampire V2
CD32/ FMV Module

I'm happy I'm not the only one that wants a laptop. :p

I'm more happy to hear that his burnout is fading and he's willing to do stuff again. :)

Last edited by billt on 12-Oct-2010 at 08:45 PM.

_________________
All glory to the Hypnotoad!

Somebody send him a Sam460!!! So he can enjoy Os4!

Can someone please provide an English link which works? I just get an Server Error 500 (in french).

EDIT: Never mind, it's working now.

Last edited by ChrisH on 13-Oct-2010 at 11:00 AM.
Last edited by ChrisH on 12-Oct-2010 at 11:29 PM.

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

Really nice interview and some wise words spoken. Thank you, Obligement!

Steve

_________________
A1200T - OS4.0,OS3.9: 603e PPC 200mhz,060 50mhz, 256mb ram, FastATA MK-III, BVision, 160gb,20gb HDDs

A1200 - OS3.1: Blizzard IV 030, 64mb ram, 400mb HDD

OS4.x - Flying the AMIGA flag

Hello,

Verry good interview. We have a great chance to have him for the amiga since the beginning.

He could even wrote a book for the amiga history and his link with others peoples around the amiga

Yes, A SAM460 bounty for olaf, good idea.

_________________
BTW, what you have done for the amiga today ????

-A1200+Mediator+VooDoo3+060/50+96mo+SCSI-KIT
-SAM440EP-667mhz-on MapowerKC3000+AOS4.1

Amiga Docs Disks Preservation Project

Quote:

And I think "30 books a year" warrants an "Olaf's Book Corner" column of some kind. I'm normally in the 96/year category, but I go through phases. Right now, I'm gaming and tinkering, but as winter moves in, I'll go back to reading. Hard SF for the win.

I am standard geek material and my reading certainly reflects that. The odd bit being that, since it grew up and stll live in Germany, I am not really supposed to have a penchant for the kind of books I enjoy.

I consider myself lucky in that school did not manage to spoil English language literature for me, as it did for German language literature. I'll probably never be able to summon sufficient interest to try and read Thomas Mann, Günther Grass or Heinrich Böll. I would rather spend my time reading Vladimir Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy or Joseph Heller. But I probably won't ever read "Fahrenheit 451" again...

I very much enjoy non-fiction. The non-fiction books I read in the past 10 years which stood out most for me are "Phantoms in the brain" by V.S. Ramachandran and "A people's tragedy" by Orlando Figes.

As for fiction, I prefer what's called "genre fiction", but that does not mean I won't stray beyond its domain. The non-fiction books I read in the past 10 years which impressed me the most were "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake, "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny, "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman, the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, the Book of the New Sun (all of it) by Gene Wolfe and the "Promethea" series by Alan Moore.

I hope that this will satisfy your curiousity

Last edited by olsen on 13-Oct-2010 at 07:38 AM.

Quote:

Somebody send him a Sam460!!! So he can enjoy Os4!

An AmigaOne and a Sam440ep were kindly loaned to me years ago. It would not have been possible to contribute to OS4 development without having the necessary gear at hand.

What I do not have access to is an X1000, and from how things currently look like, it is not for me. I already feel bad for not making better use of the Sam440ep.

@ Olsen From your interview: Quote:

I would say that the chances to see AmigaOS run on an ARM are much higher than to see it run on an x86 family processor.

I'd buy AmigaOS 4.x for EFIKA MX Smartbook in a heartbeat

Quote:

I'd buy AmigaOS 4.x for EFIKA MX Smartbook in a heartbeat

Please take that ARM comment for what it is: the sacrifices that would have to be made to get AmigaOS working on the x86 platform would be greater than by comparison with the ARM, because you can have it load/store data from/to memory in either big endian or little endian fashion, depending upon how the chip is configured. No such choice exists for the x86 platform.

Whether ARM makes a good platform for AmigaOS is a completely different question altogether. It may not be a good choice.

Last edited by olsen on 13-Oct-2010 at 08:16 AM.

@olsen Quote:

because you can have it load/store data from/to memory in either big endian or little endian fashion, depending upon how the chip is configured. No such choice exists for the x86 platform.

Sure there is: Didn't Martin Blom create a version of x86 GCC (for Amithlon) which made memory accesses look Big Endian? Yes that add's some overhead, but I think that'd be more than balanced out by the extra speed you get from x86.

P.S. I was surprised to read that FFS2 was also used by MorphOS. Not sure that OS4 uses any MOS components?

Last edited by ChrisH on 13-Oct-2010 at 11:01 AM.
Last edited by ChrisH on 13-Oct-2010 at 11:01 AM.

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

I know that, but one can only dream