This tweet from Tom Warren made me smile. So, it's 2012 and tablets are finally able to do what the Amiga did in 1985. Seems like a bit of a stretch to be excited about that, right? Sure, until I caught myself getting excited - only a bit, but still - by this piece of news. Update: removed me being an annoyed child.
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Member since:2011-08-18
Really? You make it seem like those dudes in 1969 that came up with UNIX used the Delorean (before it was built) to jump forward in time to 1985 to rip off Amiga... oh and Multics, which was already multi-user and over-the-hill when Unix copied some of its parts, must have had a *second* Delorean to go forward in time to 1969 to rip off Unix's copy of the ripped off Amiga multi-user support! Wow.. that's a lot of Deloreans!
Oh.. P.S. --> In addition to me questioning your dubious references... your reference to Amiga is also factually inaccurate since Amiga in 1985 did *not* support multiple users (in fact, much much newer versions of Amiga still don't support multiple users).
Don't believe me? Here's a quote from an article detailing the Fast File system that was not even available in the earlier versions of Amiga:
"There are many bright design ideas making the AmigaOS a very special thing, but the file system was not exactly part of it. It is prone to invalidation, holds redundant data, and its directory structure is comparatively slow to traverse. It also lacks any concept of multi-user environments." See: http://wiki.osdev.org/FFS_%28Amiga%29
If your filesystem doesn't support multi-user access control, then you don't have a multi-user OS, even if there is a stupid login screen for multiple users (which there wasn't BTW).
You seem to have confused *multi-tasking* with *multi-user*. While Amiga did have multi-tasking, that ain't the same thing as a multi-user environment. Oh, and multi-tasking wasn't all that unique since real Unix flavours had already gotten pre-emptive multi-tasking by 1985 anyway.
If you are going to pine for the fjords, why not whine about SkyOS or HURD or some other dead OS that was *really* out there. Amiga was a corporate sellout compared to those guys.
The Amiga in 1985 also didn't have usb support,an integrated display,ect,ect,ect.
It's really funny to see these Amiga and Beos fan boys running around acting like the Amiga and Be machines were the machines that most people wanted. They weren't.
In fact they were far from it. In fact if I remember right the Commodore 64 outsold the Amiga during the Amiga's production run.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2007-03-26
The Amiga in 1985 also didn't have usb support,an integrated display,ect,ect,ect.
It's really funny to see these Amiga and Beos fan boys running around acting like the Amiga and Be machines were the machines that most people wanted. They weren't.
In fact they were far from it. In fact if I remember right the Commodore 64 outsold the Amiga during the Amiga's production run.
Yeah, because USB was a killer feature on the C64
</sarcasm >
Member since:2006-01-10
It's really funny to see these Amiga and Beos fan boys running around acting like the Amiga and Be machines were the machines that most people wanted. They weren't.
In fact they were far from it. In fact if I remember right the Commodore 64 outsold the Amiga during the Amiga's production run.
Granted the original post was wrong, Amiga still doesn't have Multi-User support. But 1985? USB? You do realize that USB wasn't even around in 1985? The only ones who had integrated displays were the piece of crap Macs that weren't even color in 1985.
USB wasn't even widely adopted until version 1.1 came out in '98, which is 4 years after Commodore imploded.
For what it's worth, I could get a USB card in my Amiga 4000, and eventually will so I can use an optical mouse with a wheel (probably the one thing that REALLY kills on usability.)
The fact that Amiga and Be both died before their time, and that they still have a decent amount of fans after all this time, goes to show that they are extremely usable operating systems and the light weight approach does have advantages. I'd like to see anything Microsoft has made in the last ten years run with as little resources. Or even software written for a Microsoft operating system that isn't heavily bloated and requires at least 512MB of RAM within the last 10 years.
512MB of RAM is a crapload for AmigaOS, even for AmigaOS4.
I surely miss the days when programmers actually had to optimize their software, because they didn't have Gigabytes of memory to work with. Hell, the company I work for now... there have been rumors that their software is going to start recommending 8GB of RAM to run! That's just insane.
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2009-07-16
My reading comprehension is just fine, but the writing quality of the posters on this site leaves much to be desired. Any rational person who reads the actual words posted in the article in this site would come to the conclusion that Thom is saying that ancient Amiga's had multi-user support that is just now being implemented for the first time ever in a mobile device... which is wrong but not the point.
Thom also posted a link to some random guy's twitter account showing two windows on a Windows 8 tablet... So what....
1. Some idiot "twittering" that he managed to use Windows doesn't mean that earlier mobile devices couldn't multitask since they have been doing it for decades (yes, much much longer than Android or iOS have been around, and yes iOS *does* support pre-emptive multitasking even if Apple prevents garden variety apps from taking full advantage of it),
and
2. The useless Twitter post (aren't they all useless?) that is not part of the text of this story is a logical non-sequitur to the remainder of the story... it looks like you could use some work on reading comprehension and logical reasoning instead of me.
P.S. --> To everyone still holding irrational nostalgia for Amiga, please direct me to all the multi-touch-enabled Amiga devices that had high-speed wireless data connectivity, OpenGL acclerated graphics, and support for 1080p H.264 playback. Amiga was a completely proprietary platform that only worked because Commodore exerted a level of control that makes Apple look like a hippy open-source startup.
The Amiga platform was doomed from the start because it assumed that no improvements to hardware or software were physically possible after 1985, while the "primitive" PC was designed from day 1 with the understanding that technology would progress forward.
Edited 2012-08-04 05:14 UTC
Member since:2006-05-30
Context is important, there was no context here. Sorry, I'm with the masses - Thom messed up. What Thom did is the same as this:
"The king was in my home town today. He is an idiot. John is still my friend, no matter what."
Who is the idiot? John or the king? Sentences that rely on inside knowledge are unhelpful. Sentences that don't convey enough information are open to misinterpretation.
As another person said miles down a thread, add 3 words:
Let's also deflate the argument about links - I read the front page news in an RSS feed. There are no links in the body of the RSS feed text, so your argument, and Thom's, is pretty much moot. No excuses, terse is terse. And misleading is misleading no matter how much Thom thinks we should just understand what is in his head. As someone else mentioned, poor journalism shines through on this site recently. No neutral POV or reporting, no objectivity, and falling in to personal Blog territory. If there was another site that dealt with the OS topics in detail, I'd be off here for good. I've been trying to help by submitting as many stories as I can recently (and 3 or so have been featured), but it's like pissing in the wind sometimes.
Member since:2006-05-30
Sorry, but this is what we get int he RSS feed, exactly this, nothing more:
Where is the clear change of topic or any indication that the entire paragraph, save last line, is unrelated to the title? None. Doesn't exist. There's are no links, there is no other contextual information. Therefore it is misleading, end of story.
Member since:2006-07-14
There is a difference between a system being multi-user account, [one user at a time], and multi-simultaneous user account [multiple users using system at one time].
Amega a desktop operating system with one keyboard and monitor attached could not be used by two users at the same time, but did have support for multiple user accounts(Exactly like windows 7 Pro Home desktops today).
Tablets should be simular to that, where its unlikely that two people would ever be able to use it at the same time.
Member since:2007-04-23
No, it didn't... AmigaOS had no concept of users, and neither did the filesystem...
You had to use a third party addon like MuFS (multi user filesystem) in order to get any concept of users, and even then it was very easy to bypass the permissions system if you wanted.
It was a single user desktop OS, just like windows, dos, macos and tos were at the time.
Member since:2012-03-19
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The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
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"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
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Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
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Member since:
2009-07-16
So for multi-user operating systems you choose... Amiga?
Really? You make it seem like those dudes in 1969 that came up with UNIX used the Delorean (before it was built) to jump forward in time to 1985 to rip off Amiga... oh and Multics, which was already multi-user and over-the-hill when Unix copied some of its parts, must have had a *second* Delorean to go forward in time to 1969 to rip off Unix's copy of the ripped off Amiga multi-user support! Wow.. that's a lot of Deloreans!
Oh.. P.S. --> In addition to me questioning your dubious references... your reference to Amiga is also factually inaccurate since Amiga in 1985 did *not* support multiple users (in fact, much much newer versions of Amiga still don't support multiple users).
Don't believe me? Here's a quote from an article detailing the Fast File system that was not even available in the earlier versions of Amiga:
"There are many bright design ideas making the AmigaOS a very special thing, but the file system was not exactly part of it. It is prone to invalidation, holds redundant data, and its directory structure is comparatively slow to traverse. It also lacks any concept of multi-user environments." See: http://wiki.osdev.org/FFS_%28Amiga%29
If your filesystem doesn't support multi-user access control, then you don't have a multi-user OS, even if there is a stupid login screen for multiple users (which there wasn't BTW).
You seem to have confused *multi-tasking* with *multi-user*. While Amiga did have multi-tasking, that ain't the same thing as a multi-user environment. Oh, and multi-tasking wasn't all that unique since real Unix flavours had already gotten pre-emptive multi-tasking by 1985 anyway.
If you are going to pine for the fjords, why not whine about SkyOS or HURD or some other dead OS that was *really* out there. Amiga was a corporate sellout compared to those guys.
Edited 2012-08-04 02:43 UTC