Linked by paolone on Fri 20th Jul 2012 19:21 UTC
The AROS distribution Icaros Desktop has made its next step towards compatibility with legacy Amiga workbench applications, including an entire AROS enviroment compiled for the classic Amiga platform, which is almost binary compatible with the original Amiga OS 3.1 (and its extensions). When the user needs an old program, he or she only has to fire up the AROS M68K environment and run the application. The Amiga virtual machine can optionally be set to run at startup like a system service.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Putting the blame on Commodore misses the reality of the situation (well, not uncommon in later ~Amiga movements...) - look at this graph http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ (and the next 6), there was nothing C= could do against such onslaught (except maybe adopting large part of Amiga tech for the PC, as an add-on card for gfx & audio; but that would be heresy to many Amigans)
The Amiga architecture, what gave it its strengths in the heyday, also severely limited its progress - the tightly integrated hardware made the improvement process more expensive (and it wasn't spread among many companies), slower. Plus, with software mostly targeting the configuration that everybody had, hardly anybody saw reason to upgrade - Amiga never really managed to move beyond the A500 generation of hardware, it remained the baseline for most of its users till the end.
Complicating things was how this very console-like dynamics didn't have a matching economic model (like with Atari 2600, video game crash of 1983 - curiously, C= largely brought this one, seems they didn't really realize what they did in 83). The hardware prices were expected to go down, profits were falling, and meanwhile C= wasn't able to extract money from dev houses - because they didn't have control over them as a gatekeeper, what for example Nintendo did back then. So yeah, with how Amiga was, there perhaps was a way to keep it afloat - but you probably wouldn't like it (copied games collections were so much nicer...), and it would need to be done at the very beginning anyway: by early 90s, the cat was long out of the bag.
PC started off worse, but could be more readily expanded, and it swamped everything else with its economies of scale - it just turned out to be a more optimal model of doing things, a more sensible approach (look at present "Amigas" - they are just PCs really, only with weird CPU for no good reason)
It tells me something has really gone way, way off track when it's OK if an OS can't reliably recover from misbehaving applications. Or has no security model to speak of (yes, various ~Amiga operating systems are virtually immune due to being maybe few thousand active users; still, it was more the qualities of design).
And, meanwhile, most of the present useful software are ports from the PC operating systems... (which can be also very small, if you care about it and don't include many goodies which aren't strictly part of the OS)