Bernie
@deFrisselle @slashdot Didn't the Amiga 2000 already have ISA slots already? They were only connected to each other, but not to the 68k. The idea was that people would buy a bridge card for PC compatibility, but Commodore's A2088 cards were crap: 9.5 MHz 8088 in 1990, really?
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a2088t
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a2088xt
Bernie
@slashdot I loved the Amiga, and I loved Amiga OS. It's where I learnt C, system programming and assembly.
Bernie
@slashdot *but*... Now I see that it was too much of a closed system: custom chips made by Commodore, proprietary OS, even the TCP stack was commercial and closed source...
Bernie
@slashdot When I started using UNIX -- initially NetBSD on the Amiga, then Solaris, and finally Linux -- it was like a breath of fresh air.
Bernie
@slashdot It's sad that the glorious #Amiga died, but I think it was a necessary step to make room for the much more open ecosystem of hardware and software that we have now with Linux and free software.
Bernie
@slashdot Still, I miss the modularity of #Amiga OS. You could replace any part of it at runtime, including filesystems, core parts of the windowing system, and even the task scheduler!
Bernie
@slashdot Yes, there was a shareware thing called Executive that would replace the simplistic round-robin code in exec.library with a full blown time sharing scheduler and a suite of UNIX-like commands to tweak nice values, etc.
A must have if you were running large batch jobs for your BBS while trying to play videogames 🙂
Bernie
@slashdot and there was also this other thing called Multiuser Filesystem (MuFS), which wasn't just a filesystem. It was a huge kernel patch and a suite of CLI tools adding UNIX-like uids and gids to AmigaOS. I can't believe this could be done at runtime, without access to the source code of the OS. It was not the hack that you'd assume, because the entire OS was designed and documented to allow replacing individual functions, or entire system libraries.
Bernie
@slashdot Then came the Internet, and Commodore didn't notice. They had some proprietary network file sharing called Envoy, just like SMB and AppleTalk.
But the Amiga shareware community filled the gap by providing competing TCP stacks along with the usual suite of tools: ping, route, ifconfig, traceroute... along with PPP and a nice GUI on top to dialup and configure the interface.
Bernie
@slashdot You could literally upgrade the TCP stack implementation of your system or switch to another implementation on the fly (after closing all apps using bsdsocket.library).
This architecture enabled competition and fast evolution of system components. Too bad that developers would rarely share the code, and popular products would become abandonware without a warning.
This proprietary ecosystem also slowed down porting AmigaOS to other PPC and x86.
Bernie
@hhardy01 @slashdot I read that initially the Kickstart was cross-compiled from SunOS, which explains some similarities. However, AmigaDOS was a retrofit of TRIPOS, a preexisting OS for m68k machines developed in BCPL by the University of Cambridge. It compared well against MS-DOS, but was definitely not up to the same standard of UNIX systems a decade older: the shell was slow and very limited, no pipes, no symlinks, no sockets...
#amiga
Bernie
@deFrisselle @slashdot ah, there was also a 386 card released in 1991... Never saw one of these. It was probably more expensive than an equivalent PC motherboard from Taiwan, CPU and RAM.
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