
Today, 30 years ago, Commodore introduced the Amiga - pdknsk
http://amiga30.com/
======
ThomPete
For a 41 year old man like me and many of my generation the influence of
Commodore was life altering.

It was the Apple of it's time, better in many ways than Apple itself with so
much potential. Seeing Defender of the Crown for the first time, or using
Deluxe Paint, or ProTracker. You just felt like living in the not evenly
distributed future where you were in the forefront and everyone without an
Amiga was years in the past.

The innocence and magic feeling of all this at the time, unexplored
possibilities an amazing time I hope every generation gets to experience in
their own way.

~~~
danmaz74
Same age, same experience. I also remember when years later I first started
really using Windows and an IBM PC at university - they were already 486DX2 at
a whopping 66MHz, but the UI still felt more sluggish than my 7MHz at home.

Computations, on the other hand, were incomparably faster.

~~~
Fr0styMatt8
A bit younger (I was in my last year of primary school when I graduated from
the C64 to the Amiga 2000). I fondly remember reading through the back of the
Amiga 2000 reference manual (the ring-bound one) on Christmas day. It had
schematics and everything! (back at that age, schematics just LOOKED cool - I
couldn't really read them as such).

I remember those $5 shareware disks you used to be able to get at the markets.

By the end though, several years later.... Oh man.... Games weren't as smooth
as on the Amiga, but OH THOSE SIERRA VGA GAMES ON THE PC!!!! Especially
compared to their horrible Amiga ports (which were also Sierra abandoning the
platform.... the port of King's Quest VI that was done by Revolution Software
shows how much better they could have been).

Awesome memories!

~~~
bemmu
They had shareware disks bundled with magazines. I knew someone who worked at
the magazine shop and we would slide some out to copy them. It's amazing how
now I can get any software so easily.

------
yason
Amiga was like Tesla (the car) is now.

Not that it was (is) blazing fast and technologically advanced in comparison
to other models but the fact that it seems to have come from a whole another
plane of technology.

Surely it helps to have multiple special-purpose chips onboard as it helps to
have dense battery pack worth of 500km baked into the chassis. But that's not
the thing.

What a 32-bit pre-emptively multitasking operating system with modern library
stacks and system services for building user interfaces and applications was
to old machines where you poked memory addresses directly to draw something on
the screen is quite akin to what an internet-connected fully electrically
powered and from-the-ground-up architected smart&mobile device-on-wheels is to
clunkers primarily designed to host an oily, fire-burning engine and an
appropriate steel drivetrain, with a passenger cabin retrofitted wherever
there's space left from the mechanical components.

You could write high-level code and put that space ship spinning on the
screen, and still have it rotate more smoothly than in any of the machines
from preceding era—where no operating system or user interface was messing in
the way. That was like having the cake and eating it too. And yet you could
switch to "insane mode" by suspending the operating system and commanding the
special chips directly, and do things people couldn't even imagine on 8-bit
machines (and for the most part, on 16-bit machines too).

Amiga had elements so modern that it almost lasted till the end of the 90's,
except for cpu power and marketshare. Considering it was born in the early
80's when 8-bit cpus could beep and produce blocks of color on the screen and
died (for all practical purposes) in the internet era, that's one long stretch
of time where it made the difference.

~~~
MagerValp
It's interesting that the OS has actually aged pretty well. I went back the
other year and wrote a small application in AmigaE, a great little OO language
specifically tailored for the M68k, and had a _blast_. I architectured it to
use multiple processes and IPC, with the UI running at high priority at a
steady 60 fps while image loading a decoding is done in the background. No
assembly code or direct hardware access, just plain E and the full OS
multitasking int he background, and it still runs without dropping a frame on
a 7 MHz A500 with a floppy drive.

The code is on Github if anyone's curious:

    
    
      https://github.com/MagerValp/ArcadeGameSelector

------
nsxwolf
In 4th grade a friend got an Amiga. He boasted that it had 4096 colors, and we
ridiculed him mercilessly. There aren't that many colors! Can you name them?

We had our Apple IIs and TI-99/4As with their 16 colors or less and couldn't
imagine anything greater.

Then we went to his house and saw Defender of the Crown, and we were humbled.

~~~
pavlov
I remember having similar trouble imagining why a PC would need a sound card.

After all, the PC speaker could already play every note: C, D, E and so on...
What could a sound card possibly add?

Then I got a copy of Sierra's demo cassette that had sounds from games like
King's Quest IV and Space Quest 3. It blew my mind. I listened to it a hundred
times. (The whole cassette is on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC91456D0EB82E02A](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC91456D0EB82E02A)
)

Of course the Amiga had 4-channel sample playback several years before my
Sierra cassette revelation, but I didn't know anyone with an Amiga at that
time.

~~~
nsxwolf
I had a similar experience calling into Sierra's 800 number and listening to
their hold music, which was music from their games played on a Roland MT-32. I
had an 8 bit Sound Blaster at the time, which sounded pretty good, but this
just absolutely blew my mind.

Today it's kind of impossible to explain to a young person that at one time,
there were sound cards, and they were analogous to video cards today in that
the music in a game would sound much better depending on how much you spent.
In a world with MP3s, MIDI just doesn't compute.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Yeah, it's interesting how we pretty much hit the ceiling on digital audio
quality more than a decade ago. If I'd built my computers instead of buying
premade, I could still be using the audio card I bought in 2000 and not have
any problems with it. That's so alien to the general hardware experience.

------
foobarge
One can read "The Future Was Here", to learn more about the platform and its
contributors. [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-
here](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here) \- there's also an
accompanying website: [http://amiga.filfre.net](http://amiga.filfre.net)

Note that the Platform Studies series
([http://www.platformstudies.com](http://www.platformstudies.com)) has
exciting upcoming stuff.

~~~
bane
These are absolutely fantastic books. They hit the nostalgia buttons, but then
go into some nitty gritty details about what these things were.

Racing the Beam absolutely changed how I think about pixels on a computer
screen in a way that's hard to explain, but is quite profound.

------
mrbill
I was 13-14, and a member of Telenet's "Net Exchange" BBS, which existed to
support members of its "PC Pursuit" [1] service. I dialed in via a backdoor on
one of Telenet's 800 numbers, using (at first) a 300 baud modem on a HP 110
laptop.

I got to be friends with a number of the folks on the system, and at the time,
my main system was an Atari 520STfm (it was all we could afford). A bunch of
the guys on the board took pity on me, took up a collection, and (secretly)
called my mom. A month or so later, a Very Large Box arrived in the mail.

The guys had gotten together with one of their own who owned a computer store,
and bought me a used, but well-equipped, Amiga 1000 system, along with an
adapter that let me use my Atari monitor with it. The letter that came along
with the system said "No smart kid should be without a decent computer. All we
ask is that you do the same for someone else when you're able." It made my mom
cry.

I used that system every day. Took it to school to show off a couple of times
(we were using PS/2 Model 25s there, in comparison). It was used to do titling
for the public-access news show my media class produced, among other things.
It was my main system up until I had to "upgrade" (blech) to a 386sx-33 so I
could run 1-2-3, Wordperfect 5.1, and DBase III+ for college classes. Over the
years I acquired numerous A2000s, an A3000 or two, and even an A4K, but
nothing beat the fun of firing up that A1000 back in the day.

I turn 41 this year, and have had a great 20+-year career as a UNIX/Linux
systems administrator. I'll never forget those guys who pitched in and helped
out some kid living in a tiny rural Oklahoma town - they really helped get me
to where I am today. To continue the tradition, I build and give away at least
2-3 computers a year to people who are less fortunate. It's the least I can
do.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit)

------
morsch
There's a YouTube channel with excrutiatingly in-depth Amiga repairs:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/RetroGameModz/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/RetroGameModz/videos)

He goes down to the circuit level, including _within_ microchips, identifies
problems with all kinds of tools including spectrum analysers, and shows off
some (to me) amazing soldering skills.

Here's a four hour (I kid you not) video of the repair of an Amiga CD32:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZK3Rmerg1I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZK3Rmerg1I)

~~~
rasz_pl
RetroGameModz videos are extremely by the book, IPC to the letter. Afair he is
from Netherlands, or some other old rich European country, so he can afford
'wasting time' during repairs as a hobby. In real life this level of attention
to detail (pedantry) is present _only_ in military, aviation and space (even
medical is not that crazy). For example normal people dont reconstruct pads,
they jumper over with kynar/enamel wire.

------
jcr
The "Viva Amiga" film project doesn't seem to be finished yet, but according
to their July 3, 2013 blog post, they interviewed Tim Jenison, the creator of
the Video Toaster [2], and the current NewTek CEO, Jim Plant. That alone will
be interesting.

Even if you aren't old enough to remember how the whole world somehow
overlooked the amazing capabilities of the Amigas, it's an interesting and
humbling historical lesson in how the best tech does not always win.

[1] [http://vivaamigafilm.blogspot.com/2013/07/newtek-and-
video-t...](http://vivaamigafilm.blogspot.com/2013/07/newtek-and-video-
toaster.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster)

~~~
bemmu
There also this movie coming some time soon:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1195082866/from-
bedroom...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1195082866/from-bedrooms-to-
billions-the-amiga-years)

------
tjr
I was about 12 years old. I had been engrossed with both the family Apple IIe
computer and the fleet of Apple computers installed at my school, learning how
to write BASIC programs. Wandering through the local shopping mall with my
dad, we saw in the window of a software shop an Amiga 1200 running Lemmings.

I was awestruck. I started getting copies of Amiga-related magazines, and saw
these amazing three-dimensional pictures of things like _balls_ and _rubber
ducks_. It was like gazing into the future.

Thankfully, my dad was likewise impressed, and within a few months we received
delivery of a shiny new Amiga 3000. In anticipation of continuing my pursuit
of programming, we got a compiler for an Amiga variant of BASIC, but I ended
up focusing on two-dimensional graphics with Brillance, three-dimensional
graphics with Imagine, and video editing with a variety of tools.

A friend at school picked up an Amiga 2000 and joined the multimedia
production fun. It might be a good thing that we didn't have YouTube back
then, as we likely would have published all sorts of embarrassingly poorly-
done animations and videos. We persuaded our school to buy its own Amiga
computer for us to edit the student newsletter on, but we both left the school
the following year, and it was reported that the Amiga got shoved into a
storage space, never to be used again.

I tried hard to persuade anyone who would listen to get an Amiga. The IBM-
clones and Macs of the day just seemed so flat-out inferior, I couldn't
imagine why anyone wouldn't want an Amiga if they just realized what it could
do.

I suppose I would have been happy to still be using the Amiga to this day,
except that, after the demise of Commodore, it became increasingly (but not
surprisingly) clear that support for the Amiga platform was dwindling. Some
users have heroically clung to the Amiga even to this day, but even by 1996 or
so it was looking prudent to move elsewhere.

Like remembering a corned beef sandwich from a deli you visited twenty years
ago, I might be remembering the Amiga greater than it actually was. But even
after thirteen years of using modern Apple computers (and iPads and iPhones
and what-not), I still feel there was something magical about the Amiga that
has not been captured in anything else.

Or maybe the Amiga captured something magical in me.

------
ice303
My first contact with a A500 was in a friends house. I was amazed by the
graphics and the sound. At that time, I had a ZX Spectrum 48k, and had to save
money for about 2 years to buy it. never had the money to buy a Amiga. Last
month, got myself a A500 and I'm discovering a whole computer world that I've
missed.

------
mgkimsal
One interesting memory that I still have trouble explaining to people -
multiple video modes on the same screen. I remember having a 640x400(ish) 256
color screen, then pulling it down halfway and having a 320x200(ish) workbench
screen behind it. "Huh?" is what I usually get. Then "why would you want
that?"

~~~
pjc50
A nifty feature that's only possible on analogue monitors, I think. Like light
guns.

~~~
vidarh
It was also only worthwhile as long as multiple resolutions had different
tradeoffs in terms of supported palette etc.

On the Amiga you even had paint programs using this to display the image you
were editing at one resolution/palette, and the UI / tools etc. in a strip
displayed at a different resolution.

------
pezz
Need to add to the Amiga love anecdotes.

\- My first Amiga was an A500, eventually ended up with a chip RAM upgrade, an
A520 20MB hard disk and some extra Fast RAM.

\- I owned several Amigas in the early 90s, but I actually cried when I sold
my A1200 to buy a 486 DX2 66! Why you may ask? Doom. It changed everything.

~~~
pkroll
Doom was the death knell for my Amiga days as well. That and by that time,
IIRC, it was obvious that Commodore was going under fast. I don't want to go
pull out an Amiga and play, but it's rare to experience something that
actually feels like a whole new ball game. (The Oculus Rift is close.)

~~~
lakkal
After my first machine, an Atari 800, I had an Amiga 500 and loved it. But I
didn't keep up with industry news at the time, so my first indication that All
Was Not Well was when I walked into my local Amiga store (Omnitek, in
Tewksbury, MA) and the Amiga stuff had been moved aside to make room for IBM
PC-contemptibles... some of them with Commodore badges.

------
walkingolof
If you want an excellent book about Commodore:

[http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-
Commodore/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-
Commodore/dp/0973864907)

~~~
vidarh
Note that there's a second edition that's split into two volumes. The first
covers the "8-bit era". The second, covering the "Amiga years" has just had a
successful kickstarter [1] and should be ready by end of year hopefully. It
greatly expands on the original.

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1462758959/commodore-
th...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1462758959/commodore-the-amiga-
years-book)

------
toyg
I got an Amiga 500 the following year (or 2 years later? I can't remember). I
was a kid, so 99% of my time was spent on games; most of my friends had a C64
or a ZXSpectrum, so basically they queued to come to my house...

My father went on to use Logistix extensively in his work, and even to compute
results for some school election -- printing tons of pie charts with a dot-
matrix.

He also used some graphic effects software (3dtext? Videotext? Can't
remember). Because we did not have any video equipment or laser printer, he
ended up taking pictures of the screen with his Reflex and then have them
printed on actual slides. His colleagues were in awe. Now I can't believe he
went to all that trouble!

By the time I actually paid some attention to the manuals and tried my hand at
Workbench stuff, Amiga was on its way out. I ended up using an IBM emulator to
run WordPerfect, and then just moved to a Windows 3.1 laptop; by then, "real"
games had moved to consoles anyway.

------
LBarret
The real question : Where do I download a dvd image with an emulator and 1000
games to replay my youth ?

~~~
smacktoward
Here: [http://www.amigaforever.com/](http://www.amigaforever.com/)

------
emptybits
I loved my Amiga A1000. I forgave the early, buggy floppy-based firmware
(Kickstart) and OS (Workbench). I think this experience tempered me for a life
working with good-intentioned but buggy operating systems. :-)

------
gdubs
Fun fact: Comedian Dana Carvey's brother Brad Carvey built the first wire-
wrapped Video Toaster -- arguably the Amiga's "Killer App", which spawned
Lightwave3D and powered the visual effects of countless 90's science fiction
shows (as well as some film work). In Wayne's World II you can spot Garth
wearing a Video Toaster t-shirt to their music festival.

~~~
kstrauser
Also, Wil Wheaton did QA for the Video Toaster (source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Post-
Star_Trek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Post-Star_Trek)).

~~~
gdubs
Wow, that's really something -- stars on hit TV show for better part of a
decade and moves to Kansas to QA an Amiga product. Illustrative of how
passionate people were about the Amiga.

------
ezy
Often the software and OS APIs on that system are glossed over in favor of the
hardware or the graphical shell. The Exec[1] was a marvel at the time -- and
in some ways, still is. I don't know how much ARexx[2] preceeded AppleScript,
but it was also, something that other OSes seldom got right.

It took other user-oriented operating systems about a decade to catch up, and
in fact, the hardware everyone raves about in the Amiga fell behind far sooner
than the system software.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_\(Amiga\))
[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx)

------
gleegum
I still have my Amiga 500, working. Some years ago I built this 'website',
imagining how an Amiga comeback would be:
[http://darioportfolio.com/amiga/](http://darioportfolio.com/amiga/)

------
vanderZwan
There's a very nice interview on Tweakers.net taken on the Amsterdam Amiga
day, with many influential developers:

[http://tweakers.net/video/10600/30-jaar-commodore-amiga-
de-i...](http://tweakers.net/video/10600/30-jaar-commodore-amiga-de-invloed-
van-de-eerste-multimediacomputer.html)

RJ Mical and Dave Haynie are interviewed, who did hardware development for the
Amigas, as well as Mike Dailly (creator of Lemmings) and Allister Brimble
(composed for some well-known games of the platforms).

Lot's of Dutch inbetween explaining the historical significance, without
subtitles, but probably worth a listen to just for what these guys have to say
about the platform.

------
jcadam
I remember when we upgraded the family computer from a (second-hand) Apple ][e
to an (also second-hand) Amiga 500.

I had gotten my start programming in BASIC on the Apple ][, and was blown away
by the stuff I could do using AMOS on the Amiga.

The Amiga 500 was eventually replaced by a new Amiga 1200. Sometime after the
end of Commodore (I must have been 14 or so) my parents bought our first PC, a
486 (the latest and greatest at the time) running DOS / Windows 3.1... it just
wasn't the same.

------
Paul_S
I missed out on the Amiga, going straight from 8bit Atari to x86. I used a
A500 but never owned anything made by Commodore. I still find it fascinating
and the Deathbed Vigil video was a great but melancholy watch. I never
programmed for the Amiga but like everyone else I was always impressed by what
the Amiga demoscene could do.

An unfortunate clash for the opening weekend with quakecon dates.

------
bane
I'm reading "The Future Was Here" and it gives an excellent dive into the guts
and history of the machine. I've really come to a new appreciation for how
this crazy machine worked. Highly recommend this book for anybody with more
than a passing interest in this legendary machine.

------
Banzaaaai
Amazed at an Amiga 1000 of a friend. Amiga 500 then A4000/40/RetinaZ3.

------
justuk
Been reading about modern Amiga hardware recently like the upcoming X5000 with
Amiga OS 4.1. Almost tempted to try it. I forced myself to use Windows, OS X
and various Linux for years, but they never felt right.

------
shawndumas
I am so going to this! My 13yo son is going to be so excited to attend.

~~~
rogeryu
> I am so going to this! My 13yo son is going to be so excited to attend.

I suppose you mean your 13yo inner child?

------
expertentipp
If you can afford it you should always sell a product for no more than a 100%
of your cost. [1]

[1] 31:50
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvbsPNBIyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvbsPNBIyk)

------
kirk21
Good old times!

Cool overview of the history of programming languages:
[http://goo.gl/Fa7mNi](http://goo.gl/Fa7mNi)

------
branchless
Got my amiga 500 down from the loft about a year ago. It had lay dormant for
at least a decade. Plastic had yellowed. I plugged it in and turned on the
power switch, expecting to hear a fizz/pop and declare it dead. It booted up
fine. And ran kick-off 2.

Seems the only thing to degrade in those 10 years is my reaction time.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Assuming you're hoping to play more Kick Off 2 (plus a bit of Sensi perhaps
;-) ), it's highly recommended to replace the capacitors, as leaking
capacitors have a nasty habit of ruining old computers. Also, regarding
"Plastic had yellowed.", you may be interested in this...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright)

------
nirai
I was in love with my C64 and everything Commodore including the Amiga, as any
Apple die hard is today; but isn't it time we moved on? it was a computer, and
it is no more... chao, and thanks for all the fish...

~~~
vidarh
We won't move on until we have systems that consistently beat it. My phone is
incomparably more powerful than my old Amiga - with a quad core CPU running on
a clock frequency hundreds of times faster and with overall performance at
least three orders of magnitude greater, yet even simple apps are often more
sluggish, for example.

Sometimes it feels like we've moved backwards in many respects (yes, there are
amazing improvements too)

~~~
nirai
and I seem to remember "the 6 million dollar man" as the most awesome series
ever, and yet once every couple of years when I get the urge to look up an
episode for old times sake I need to confront reality, that it actually
totally sucked.

take a look at this top 10 games video for the Amiga -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82kwS9fU7N4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82kwS9fU7N4)
, it may have rated as awesome in 1985-1990 but comparing it with anything
today is totally ridiculous; and gaming is just an example, since this
comparison extends to any other software genre, such as office, communication,
engineering, scientific tools, programming tools, etc...

~~~
vidarh
I have used AmigaOS and "descendants" like AROS many times in recent years, so
I'm not just looking at this with rose-tinted nostalgia. In fact, I've
contributed code to AROS.

And yes, there are still awesome things about it.

I've pointed out here before, for example, that I can booth AmigaOS or AROS on
modern hardware (either under an emulator in the case of AmigaOS, or the Linux
hosted version in the case of AROS) and have it boot straight into a text
editor, and that whole process starts faster than Emacs on my laptop.

And there are still massive amounts of functionality that isn't readily
available in mainstream OS's today.

Exactly because attitudes like yours means that lots of developers ignore a
lot of the lessons these systems have for us - it's not just the Amiga.

~~~
nirai
> And there are still massive amounts of functionality that isn't readily
> available in mainstream OS's today.

Can you specify?

> lots of developers ignore a lot of the lessons these systems have for us

what lessons are you talking about?

~~~
vidarh
> Can you specify?

A few examples:

Datatypes lets most newer Amiga programs load any type of file of a format
that people have written datatype libraries for. E.g. all image viewers and
editors that supports datatypes (pretty much all the were still under
development when datatypes where introduced) can load pretty much any image
format you can think of without any explicit application support as people are
still writing them. Datatypes support also exists for e.g. music, word
processing documents and others. For some applications it makes sense to have
their own custom filters for some formats, but datatypes provides a minimum
level of support for even obscure formats, as well as continued support for
new formats for applications that are no longer in development.

Similarly any app that supports XPK can transparently decompress and compress
any compression format you drop a library for into the right directory (and in
fact there's a XPK datatype, that if installed lets any application that
supports another datatype - such as for images, or documents - support
compressed versions of the same).

Assigns is one of my favorites: Amiga applications typically load libraries
from "libs:". "Libs:" is a virtual directory that is the union of a set of
paths that typically includes "progdir:libs/" (but doesn't have to).
"progdir:" again is a virtual directory that refers to the directory the
application is installed in. It's somewhat like $PATH, except you can create
your own assigns, and lookups are handled at OS level. You can somewhat
simulate it on Linux with combinations of various obscure filesystem drivers,
but there's nothing like the ease of use of assigns. Assigns are also given
special treatment in filesystem dialogs/requesters, which meant that e.g.
having a "docs:" and "pics:" assign or similar was common ways of creating
shortcuts to the stuff you used the most, without needing any explicit support
anywhere.

And these names also extends to volumes/labels of physical media. Think backup
application that knows the label of the DVD you burned file X to. Want to
restore it? Backup application could ask you to insert DVD labelled "August
2014", or on AmigaOS it would just try to open the file "August2014:X" and
AmigaOS will ask you to please insert volume "August2014" with no application
support needed. This is admittedly a feature that was far more important when
dealing with physical media was more common.

OS support for running controls/widgets (gadgets in AmigaOS) in separate
threads ensures a high degree of responsiveness even when the machine is under
high load.

Ease of writing filesystem drivers means you find stuff like FrexxEd - a text
editor that exposes the open buffers as files, so that you can operate on the
open buffers with any tools that can process a file.

Pervasive AREXX support meant pretty much _every_ application can be fully
scripted, either "natively" in AREXX, or from pretty much every language by
talking to the applications AREXX port.

> what lessons are you talking about?

Decomposing applications and treating the system as a whole, for starters. For
AmigaOS this was an absolute necessity: You wouldn't have the space to
effectively multitask on a machine with 512KB RAM if everyone needed to pull
in huge amounts of different dependencies. So there was a lot more effort into
standard components, or replacements for standard components, that allowed
applications to do more with very little.

Not being wasteful, certainly. Above I mentioned FrexxEd. The custom
filesystem in FrexxEd might seem like unnecessary bloat. But on a small system
it meant that you did not have to write to a temporary file in T: which would
commonly be assigned to RAM:T/ which would mean you'd suddenly have a second
copy of the file in memory, instead of just processing what was already there.
Similarly, the way cut and paste is implemented in AmigaOS is intended to be
able to deal with efficient buffering to T: _in case_ it has been re-assigned
to a slow device (even a harddrive would have been slow enough to make the UI
sluggish if you were to cut and paste a large chunk of data).

But the things that made these applications work well on such small machines
also makes them blazingly fast on modern machines where UI's are somehow still
sluggish even when they don't add much functionality (it's another matter if a
super-complex UI is slow)

~~~
nirai
the apple II, the C64, the mac, the Amiga, and later the PC, the Internet,
Windows, Linux and then the IPhone and Android, dozens of other amazing
projects, products, technologies and movements (e.g. open source), all
revolutionized and transformed our lives or at least had some impact on the
history of computing,

but how does an API for handling image formats amount to that today?

isn't it fair to say that the Amiga had its day in the 80s and 90s, and that
time is now past?

Or to put it in Mr. Praline famous words: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on!
This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is
maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed
'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are
now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is
mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!!
THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

~~~
SteveMoody73
Datatypes were a very cool feature, not just a simple API. For an application
to be able to support new format be it an image, video, spreadsheet, document
or anything the application has to be updated to use a library or to add
native support for that format.

Imagine if you could add a Datatype for an image format such as EXR and you
would instantly be able to open it in Paint, embed it in Word and Powerpoint
without having to update the apps. A DOCX Datatype would allow Wordpad to open
Word documents. A new video format on the internet? No need to wait for
browser support, just add the Datatype and it would work.

Another advantage of a system like this would be for security. If an serious
exploit was found in a popular image decoding library then you could delete
the offending Datatype and none of your apps could be exploited until the
fault is fixed. May be inconvenient but at least it would be safe. Shared
libraries could be used to handle this to an extent but most apps would
probably crash if you deleted a required library and who knows if the app is
using the shared library or a statically linked version?

There was a few nice features that were in the Amiga operating system but this
was one that i wish had been implemented in other operating systems.

