What's so great about AmigaOS?

Hi All,

The thread title sounds more accusatory than intended, so bear with me

When I had an Amiga back in the day (before I got my new A1200 this Christmas!), I really only used it for games. Sure, I messed about a bit with AMOS, and Workbench, and Octamed and a few other things, but mainly it was a games machine. An awesome games machine.

So, now I have my new A1200 and I'm getting back into the scene. I'm a programmer, so thought it would be fun to go back and program one of these old machines. Anyway, I've been lurking on these boards, and many others and reading as much as I can about everything - and it's all very interesting.

One thing that has surprised me, though, is how many people still love AmigaOS and hope for its return in some way, or just still use it on a daily basis. So, I ask you, faithful Amiga Scene - what was so awesome about the AmigaOS? Are there features that were in it that we don't have in modern OSes that you'd love to see resurrected? What in particular do you love about it so much?

I'm really interested to hear people's views on this. From my recent dealings with it (3.1), one thing I've loved is the ASSIGN command, and being able to assign any folder to some globally-accessible name. That's really useful. I love being able to have my programming: "drive", my currentProject: 'drive" and so on. Very nice. But what else? This, obviously, can't be the only thing...

Great board, by the way. Found LOADS of interesting and nostalgia-ridden stuff here!

Tinto

[alexh]

Personally, with the relatively new stability and ease of use of WinBlows XP and MacOS X I would say... nothing. Other than nostalgia.

RTG is pretty bad.
AHI is pretty bad.
Warp3D is pretty bad.
Networking is ok but configuration is pretty bad.
Printing is pretty bad if you want to use any features of your printer (Duplex etc.)

[IFW]

Back in the day it was way ahead of its time.
These days... not so

[StingRay]

What IFW said Plus, I always liked that it isn't bloated.

[musashi5150]

Originally Posted by StingRay

Plus, I always liked that it isn't bloated.

And I can understand what all the files are

I liked AmigaOS back in the day (especially compared to equivalent Atari GEM or Win3.1) but to be honest it doesn't offer anything anymore - just nostalgia. I just love the architecture of the machine as it's always fun to code for

[twizzle]

with the amiga, you have to mentaly interact with it to get it work,
if you dont type the right thing in the right place it just wont do anything
its like solving a puzzle, theres a great sence of achievement in your efforts to see the end result

and if it wasnt for all the young telent out there
to help us non/semi literate computer folk,
we would be up the creak without a paddle

so thats why i like the amiga

[DoogUK]

No BSOD for one thing

[Retro-Nerd]

But some Gurus.

[DoogUK]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

But some Gurus.

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by musashi5150

I just love the architecture of the machine as it's always fun to code for

Word! Even though that doesn't have much to do with the OS per se.

[musashi5150]

Originally Posted by StingRay

Word! Even though that doesn't have much to do with the OS per se.

Ahem. I love AmigaOS as it's easy to disable

[twizzle]

Originally Posted by musashi5150

Ahem. I love AmigaOS as it's easy to disable

dont you mean disasemble / take apart / dead ooooohhhh amiga No5 is alive

[Predabot]

Hey, now that we're at it... How does Amiga OS 3.1, 3.5 and 3.9 stack up against Win 3.1, Win95, and Win98?

I'm looking at Amiga.osworld.de and the 3.5 came out in 1999, more than 1 year after Win 98. Doesn't sound like a very clever thing by Commodore...

Obviously, I'm guessing AmiOS 3.1 was better than Win3.1? But was that the cut-off point in versions, and after that, the Windows platform made the quantum-leap to Win95?

I see here that Amiga OS 3.9 came out in the year 2000, a much better release-date compared to WinXP methinks. One full whole year ahead of WinXP and all.

But how do these later AmigaOS's stack up against their Windows-competitors?

Maybe you guys that know all this stuff, could run them down with these 3 primary versions.

[blackcornflake]

I always liked the system's robustness, the feeling of actually being in total control, and its transparency: no mysterious hidden system files or random disk accessing.

But as mentioned above, the more outdated it becomes, the more patches you install to compensate, the more fiddly and flaky it all gets.

To finish on a plus and answer the original question: I like the clever modularity of it all; the elegance. Tooltypes are cool, as are datatypes, as are the startup and startup-storage directories. I mean, how simple to change stuff?

[meega]

Originally Posted by Predabot

I'm looking at Amiga.osworld.de and the 3.5 came out in 1999, more than 1 year after Win 98. Doesn't sound like a very clever thing by Commodore...

Commodore were still going?

[klx300r]

cant say for programming but I love the fact that my machine boots up in 7 seconds and appears to be transparent unlike the big elephant in the room ala XP/Vista

[alexh]

Originally Posted by blackcornflake

I always liked the system's robustness

Eh?? AmigaOS has no memory protection makes it far too easy for applications to crash the entire OS. A major problem for a modern OS.

Originally Posted by klx300r

I love the fact that my machine boots up in 7 seconds unlike the big elephant in the room ala XP/Vista

Dunno what AmigaOS you've got but OS3.9 on my A4000D takes ages to load from cold. My XP system with 3-disk RAID5 loads much much faster.

[pubzombie]

Hi Tinto,
I am a gamer, I was a gamer when the very first electronic games arrived and have had em all over the years. The amiga and c64 were/are my favourites. I never did anything with my miggy's other than play games, I may have formatted a few disks back in the day, but thats all. Having a miggy again is great, but i hate the OS!! I can build a peecee and upgrade drivers and encode video etc but cant do diddlysquat with amiga, and its just not intuative either.
games, me want games
pz

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Predabot

Hey, now that we're at it... How does Amiga OS 3.1, 3.5 and 3.9 stack up against Win 3.1, Win95, and Win98?

All versions of AmigaOs (1.3+) completely destroy Windows 3.1 Win3.1 has crappy cooperative multitasking, and is 16 bit, where AmigaOs uses preemptive multitasking and is always 32 bit, because 16 bit modes don't exist on the Amiga platform.

As for Win95 and 98, as far as I know they too have cooperative multitasking, which is no match for AmigaOs, and both of these still have 16 bit components (again, as far as I know). Windows didn't become 'good' until Windows 2000 as far as I'm concerned.

Today, AmigaOs really does show it's age, and furthermore, it's not as efficient as it could be (not by a long shot).

[ppill]

- Different assigns (Add, Defer etc.)
- Appicons/windows (great idea!)
- The difference between 'drive' and 'volume'
- RDB (different file systems, you can create a 'hybrid' disk -- MBR+RDB)
- Boot menu (disabling drives)
- Devices (device+handler/filesystem+mountlist)
- Arexx
- MUI
- ToolTypes/Icon types (drawer, tool etc.)