Mike Battilana Interview 2019

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

That, of course, depends on what you want to use it for. A desktop computer has other uses than a cell phone. I would not want to type letters on a cell phone, or write programs on it.

Nobody types letters anymore, nor are they programmers. You are talking about an insignificant market.

Microsoft delivers one, as part of the Os. I'm not sure why this is so insane,

Many people want to run a different browser, or even no browser at all. But Microsoft's browser is part of the OS so you are stuck with it. Though since it's part of the OS you shouldn't confuse it with a GUI (even though Microsoft famously used the browser as the GUI in their 'Active Desktop'.)

...as it is probably one of the elementary programs you may want to use.

To me a web browser is an app, like a word processor or paint program. I run it when I want to browse the web, else it stays out of the way.

After all, CBM also delivered MultiView as part of the operating system.

Oh sure, just like Notepad and AmigaBASIC were 'part of the OS'. Not to be confused with a GUI of course, which isn't.

The AmigaOs user interface design is not quite adequate for today's purpose, but still "somewhat ok". The operating system underneath - is not.

Not just not OK, insane - according to you. Personally I think the current state of PCs is insane, but perhaps I am the insane one for thinking an OS shouldn't need gigabytes of RAM, even more gigabytes of hard drive space and an insanely powerful processor to do anything useful. But hey, why not? The whole World is insane anyway...

Perhaps it does. Linux makes programmers happy, not vendors nor customers. I'm personally ok with Linux, but I'm not the average user in first place. I'm a progammer.

Linux makes me happy since it does the one job I need it for, but I prefer programming on the Amiga. But then I also prefer programming in assembler, which proves I must be insane!

[Minuous]

@BruceAbbott:

Of course the GUI is and should be part of the OS, how else would it support graphical applications?

It seems reasonable to include a web browser alongside the OS like was done with eg. AWeb in OS3.5/9. Even if you want a different browser it makes getting the replacement browser easier. Or if you don't want a browser at all you can choose not to install that component in the first place, or delete it afterwards.

If you mean Windows is bloated I agree completely. But if you are referring to Amigas, there's no version of AmigaOS that requires "gigabytes of RAM" etc.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Nobody types letters anymore, nor are they programmers. You are talking about an insignificant market.

Er, what? Text processing is still the back-bone of Microsoft, and Word their most important application. I'm using word here quite frequently, almost daily. Not that it is a perfect application, far from it. It's mostly technical specifications, though.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Many people want to run a different browser, or even no browser at all. But Microsoft's browser is part of the OS so you are stuck with it. Though since it's part of the OS you shouldn't confuse it with a GUI (even though Microsoft famously used the browser as the GUI in their 'Active Desktop'.)

Actually, I would expect that most people do not really care about the browser they use as long as it works, and given that it supports important tasks such as shopping or buying tickets, checking for travel routes and so on... well, I'd rather believe that the number of people that "do not want to use a browser" is certainly very small. Actually, there are computer architectures just built around the browser. Chrome Os for example.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Oh sure, just like Notepad and AmigaBASIC were 'part of the OS'. Not to be confused with a GUI of course, which isn't.

I'm not sure what you want to say. The GUI came with the Os, and so did Notepad (in 1.3 times) and AmigaBasic. Mostly for traditional reasons, I believe, as users expected back then to have "Basic" with their "Home computer". This tradition died out.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Not just not OK, insane - according to you. Personally I think the current state of PCs is insane, but perhaps I am the insane one for thinking an OS shouldn't need gigabytes of RAM, even more gigabytes of hard drive space and an insanely powerful processor to do anything useful. But hey, why not? The whole World is insane anyway...

Your particular web page will require "a bit more RAM" than what the Amiga comes with. It wouldn't needed "GBs", though. I still have an old Laptop that comes with 1GB of RAM, maxed out. It is mostly ok. Of course, not a sprinter.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Linux makes me happy since it does the one job I need it for, but I prefer programming on the Amiga. But then I also prefer programming in assembler, which proves I must be insane!

Probably. Assembler means that you're hardly ever done. Yes, did that, still do from times, but it is far from practical.

[hth313]

Windows 8 is actually the first meaningful Windows. I have not yet tried Windows 10 so I cannot judge it.

MS Word used to be the worst mainstream program on the planet, has it changed to be any good? (hint: does it still have the ruler and easy access to fonts? does it make proper templates mandatory?)

I prefer something that I can use in my ordinary text editor, why should I change editor to write some text?

Luckily the BASIC tradition died out, thanks to Microsoft on the Amiga in fact (Forth would have been a much better choice back in the days). Actually, the whole tradition that we should have a language and program our home computers died out, came to think about it. Raspberry Pi and similar things are probably the modern incarnation of "home computers".

The whole web browser thing coupled with abstractions drive the bloat we see today. It is hard to get away from it, which is kind of sad really.

Thankfully, there is a lot of niche alternatives, RPi, retro computers, Amiga and RISC-OS to take a few examples for those who want to play with computers. Even UNIX distros and variants can qualify here.

All is not lost, we just have to accept that what many of use think is fun is just further from being mainstream than ever. There are so many choices available today and some are even very cheap.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Your particular web page will require "a bit more RAM" than what the Amiga comes with. It wouldn't needed "GBs", though. I still have an old Laptop that comes with 1GB of RAM, maxed out. It is mostly ok. Of course, not a sprinter.

Not sure which 'particular web page' you are refering to, but I measured the RAM used by IBrowse on my A1200 when loading the page at https://www.howsmyssl.com/. The first load used 1.04MB (1095352 bytes), which was mostly taken up by AmiSSL. Opening the page again in a second tab only took another 0.1MB (108760 bytes). Loading it from local storage took less than 20kB. With 32MB of FastRAM my A1200 never gets close to running out, even with huge web pages.

On my Windows XP machine (which like your laptop has 1GB RAM) Firefox needs over 200MB just to get started. It is not unusual for a single web page to take up all the RAM and more, though not appearing to have a lot of content. But of course Windows never runs out of memory, it just slows down to a crawl and becomes unresponsive while trying to swap all that memory onto the hard drive (another fantastic 'multitasking' feature of Windows!).

Most 'modern' websites have so much stuff going on it makes you dizzy, but the useful content is often hard to access. You can't tell what's clickable or not, and nothing works anyway because the script that renders everything is sucking up all the memory and CPU time. But of course it works fine on an I7 with 16GB (most of the time at least). Why? Because they can!

Assembler means that you're hardly ever done. Yes, did that, still do from times, but it is far from practical.

Amiga game developers and demo creators might disagree, but it depends on what you mean by 'practical'. Porting from C++ to assembler isn't (I tried) but sometimes porting stuff is impractical without some assembler to improve performance.

Bottom line is - those of us who wish to continue using our classic Amigas need an OS which works on them, and despite being 'insane' the OS we have is far more practical for this purpose than anything resembling Windows or Linux.

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Nobody types letters anymore, nor are they programmers. You are talking about an insignificant market.

Many people want to run a different browser, or even no browser at all. But Microsoft's browser is part of the OS so you are stuck with it. Though since it's part of the OS you shouldn't confuse it with a GUI (even though Microsoft famously used the browser as the GUI in their 'Active Desktop'.)

To me a web browser is an app, like a word processor or paint program. I run it when I want to browse the web, else it stays out of the way.

Oh sure, just like Notepad and AmigaBASIC were 'part of the OS'. Not to be confused with a GUI of course, which isn't.

Not just not OK, insane - according to you. Personally I think the current state of PCs is insane, but perhaps I am the insane one for thinking an OS shouldn't need gigabytes of RAM, even more gigabytes of hard drive space and an insanely powerful processor to do anything useful. But hey, why not? The whole World is insane anyway...

Linux makes me happy since it does the one job I need it for, but I prefer programming on the Amiga. But then I also prefer programming in assembler, which proves I must be insane!

I know a lot of people who still type letters

In business world a lot of people use computers and have to

And I program so I would never use a smartphone or tablet for that

Might be that most young people no longer use computers at home but in business world computer are alive

And because Thomas is a experienced developer so I assume he knows the difference between applications (apps) and GUI or toolkit

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

On my Windows XP machine (which like your laptop has 1GB RAM) Firefox needs over 200MB just to get started. It is not unusual for a single web page to take up all the RAM and more, though not appearing to have a lot of content. But of course Windows never runs out of memory, it just slows down to a crawl and becomes unresponsive while trying to swap all that memory onto the hard drive (another fantastic 'multitasking' feature of Windows!).

I can definitely understand not liking all the swapping, so I have to ask a question here:

You do know you can disable virtual memory on Windows (or any other OS that supports and uses it, such as Linux), right? Sure, that can cause programs to fail (like they do on the Amiga if it runs out of memory), but it does stop all the HDD thrashing.

[spudje]

Didn't Mike promised that public release statement to follow the interview soon....

[malko]

The adage says: "one person, one opinion; ten persons, ten opinions".
And that's without mentioning what the developers think, because "one desired action, ten different codes possible" .

My two cents don't share the whole argument here but Bruce convinces me more with his vision of the OS.

Amiga doesn't need a "gas factory" OS (I like to add the application that are of some need for the task I have to do. In this regard, AOS3.9 is already a "gas factory" OS).

Android & Win are the best example of "gas factory" OS with all the crap-apps that are difficult/impossible to uninstall/deactivate without possibly breaking the stability.

[number6]

Originally Posted by spudje

Didn't Mike promised that public release statement to follow the interview soon....

He had mentioned using the Amiga.com domain for offering some detail.
Unfortunately, the use of that site has been mentioned for months now without any result.

#6

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by roondar

You do know you can disable virtual memory on Windows (or any other OS that supports and uses it, such as Linux), right? Sure, that can cause programs to fail (like they do on the Amiga if it runs out of memory), but it does stop all the HDD thrashing.

That's what I used to do in Windows 95 and 98, but the problem is modern programs will fail because they assume there is 'unlimited' RAM available. And why shouldn't they? Why bother trying to be memory efficient when you don't have to be? A fundamental difference between modern PCs and retro platforms like the Amiga.

This is why it's pointless to even dream about having a 'modern' browser on the Amiga - the operating systems are just too different. But that doesn't mean we should give up on making Amiga OS work better while keeping its original character - including the 'insane' parts.

And who decides what's insane anyway? Here's what happened when I viewed a certain web page in Firefox. Starting at 200MB before running Firefox, then going up to ~400MB as it loaded the webpage. The page was displayed and memory usage was stable for a few seconds, then it suddenly (for no apparent reason) jumped to 926MB! Too bad if other apps were using that memory...

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by malko

Android & Win are the best example of "gas factory" OS with all the crap-apps that are difficult/impossible to uninstall/deactivate without possibly breaking the stability.

What stability?

[malko]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

What stability?

I thought it was a nice term to talk about a BSOD