Greg & Rachel Olson wrote:
Its OS is more *nix based than windows or mac preX, so if you are familiar with *nix or osX, then go for it!
Greg
<snip> Amiga rant for sanity ;-)
Yeah, you got a point there about Memacs, hadn't thought of that for awhile! I worked with a guy at AntiGravity who had been running a HAM mode workbench 1.3 A2000 for years. Now THAT is a gluttony for punishment ;-)OK, Amiga rant over :-)
Bolton
I was just referring to the general constructs of the CLI (aka shell), some of the naming conventions and usage. AREXX, memacs, etc have more of a *nix foundation than windows or macos. I worked my way through 13 years of Amigas until I switched my primary platform to the mac. I, too, still have boxes of those amazing graphic demos as well as my own creations from DPaint and Sculpt3D.
Greg
FWIW German company Hyperion are continuing the Amiga OS line, having licensed 'the Name' from its license holders here in the USA, with a PPC native Amiga OS 4.0. It runs on the AmigaONE series of motherboards, from British firm Eyetech. From what I've seen it looks pretty good. Small, efficient and elegant like an Amiga style OS should be.
But as usual Amiga have inept management stateside, and there's a bitter feud between Amiga and its workalike competion, MorphOS, which is owned by Genesi, and run on their Pegasos II platform.
Spawned in the late 90s to run on Phase5 PowerPC accelerators for the Amiga 3-4000 line, MorphOS grew because there was no official Amiga migration path towards the much faster PowerPC CPU contained on the Cyberstorm. Amigans wanted a PPC native OS, there was no Amiga company able to give it to them. So, using the available RKM and other Amiga reference manuals, as well as the knowledge of the AROS team, the MorphOS crew back-hacked Amiga OS 2.0APIs and created a workalike OS which ran Amiga 68k exes, as well as PPC native exes, seamlessly with a lightning fast JIT based 68060 emulation, and their own custom microkernel architecture. Amiga, Inc claimed stolen source code but weren't apparently able to back their shit up in court, because the threatened lawsuit never materialized.
Initially available for the above mentioned Amigas, MorphOS had to be reworked further to run on the Pegasos-because the original MorphOS made use of ROM resources found in 'real' hardware Amigas, which of course the Pegasos doesn't have. The Pegasos is a PowerPC, CHRP based motherboard in micro-ATX form factor. It has built in USB1, firewire 400, sound, SPDIF, 10/100, and in the case of the PegII, Gigabit ethernet; AGP and 3 PCI slots as well as 'legacy' PC style PS/2, serial, parallel and joystick ports. That's one busy little ATX connector backplate!!
The PegasosI and all AmigaONE computers are based on MAI logic's Articia series of northbridges, the PegasosII is based on Marvell's DiscoveryII chipset. Marvell's chipset is notably superior. Both systems use VIA southbridges :-/
There is no valid technical reason why each OS couldn't or shouldn't be allowed to run on the other party's system. IMHO each board sold should be sold with a copy of MOS and Amiga OS 4. Minimal extra cost, no piracy=everyone wins. But that makes sense, so it won't happen around here anytime soon!
Its the usual 'superior technology snatched from the jaws of victory by inane management decisions' menagerie over here in Amiga land :-D
Bolton
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