The history of the Amiga can be divided into three eras.
In 1985, the Amiga was, conceptually, a Unix-like workstation that could run on custom, inexpensive hardware while still offering cutting-edge multimedia capabilities. It could be scaled from a floppy disk based, basic model, plugged into the TV of a lucky teenager all the way up to a professional class graphics workstation. For the hobbyist user, the most important element of the Amiga design was the use pattern that it engendered; a typical user would read some text files, check on the rendering which was taking place in the background all while listening to some .mod music. Sound familiar? The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that it offered its users a genuine glimpse of what a average geek's leisure computing experience would consist of 20 years later.
The rival platforms started to catch up but the Amiga arguably held its own throughout the middle period of its history. The platform didn't stand still: chip giant Motorola kept putting out faster 680x0 series chips while, at the same time, Commodore made incremental improvements to the OS and hardware.
From the perspective of any Amiga fan, the third, current period is the bleakest. The pressure from the rival efforts of Microsoft became absolutely intense while at the same time the Amiga suffered a series of setbacks as the result of mismanagement and simple bad luck.
I would challenge any fan of the Amiga to discuss what happened to the platform next without getting angry. For the purposes of this article, it will have to suffice to say that Commodore went bust, the Amiga properties went on the market and then a succession of companies promised a great deal and delivered very little. The set pattern of events became that a new company would purchase the rights to develop the platform, they would then... actually, I'm not quite sure what they were actually doing... but at the end, they would have nothing to show for it. And then the pattern would repeat again.
Prospects for revival - The bad
The Hardware Advantage
Much of Amiga's performance superiority came from its incredibly powerful custom chip-set. Needless to say the capabilities which were jaw-dropping in 1985 couldn't hope to power the typical flash-based banner ad now. If an effort were made to re-create a similar hardware platform that was orientated around a unique graphics architecture like the original Amiga was, its difficult to see how any custom architecture could beat the output of mainstream graphics accelerator chip-sets such as NVIDIA and ATI. In other words, the Amiga regaining the multimedia hardware superiority that it enjoyed upon release is unlikely.
Memory Protection
In its current form, AmigaOS has the dubious distinction of being one of the few OSes based around a micro-kernel but operating without memory protection. A typical micro-kernel implementation keeps all of the programs and all but the minimal, low level hardware drivers in their own protected memory. OSes such as Linux, MacOSX and Windows use a type of kernel called monolithic. In a monolithic kernel, drivers exist within the kernel or execute at the same level of privilege; this means that if a driver crashes, the whole system crashes. The micro-kernel design also has security advantages over the monolithic.
Unfortunately, the micro-kernel has a performance cost. On the original 1985 hardware a 20% performance hit was unacceptable and for this reason, AmigaOS uses a micro-kernel but without memory protection. In fact, it makes far less use of memory protection than most monolithic kernels do. If one application crashes, it can bring down the whole system.
Because of the way that the API is designed, a choice has to be made between breaking source and binary compatibility with current software or accepting that the machine is going to crash a bit more than average. One possible, hybrid solution would be to loose standard native app compatibility yet, at the same time run the old applications through a compatibility emulation layer.
- "OS Recreation, 1/6"
- "OS Recreation, 2/6"
- "OS Recreation, 3/6"
- "OS Recreation, 4/6"
- "OS Recreation, 5/6"
- "OS Recreation, 6/6"
