Solène created a week-long personal computing challenge around old computers. I chose to use an Amiga for the week. In this issue I write about my experience, and what modern computing lost when Commodore died. I also want to show some of the things you can do with an Amiga or even an emulator if you’d like to try.
I’ve tried to get into the Amiga-like operating systems – MorphOS, AROS, Amiga OS 4 – but the platform just doesn’t suit me. I find them convoluted, incomprehensible, and frustratingly difficult to use. Not that it matters – I’m not here to ruin the Amiga community’s party – but if they want to sustain that community instead of having it die out as their user numbers dwindle due to old age, they might want to consider making their operating systems a little less… Obtuse.
It’s ‘different’. Once you understand the concepts behind it and think of it like a Workbench, it makes a lot more sense.
A cool, but painful for people used to modern operating systems, is the power of the Icon in Amiga Workbench. Like a bash script in Linux, you can set up environment variables with an icon.
For example, highlighting HDToolbox, then go up to Icon -> Information and then you’ll have a dialog where you can set things like the device that HDToolbox should scan for setting up partitions. Or with things like WHDLoad you can have it call other programs (for example to turn off your networking as it interferes with certain games).
I quite like Amiga Workbench, and find it to be a very powerful system. Certainly wish Commodore hadn’t died when they did, and wonder what a modern day Amiga built with loads of money would actually look like.
Commodore simply chose a different metaphor than Xerox/Apple did. At the time most people didn’t have any preconceived notions about how a graphical UI on a computer should operate and had probably never seen one, but most people would be equally familiar with a physical workbench or desktop.
It only seems obtuse to people today because they have had the last 30 years where the “desktop” metaphor became dominant and thats become ingrained in how they expect a computer ui to work.
What do you mean by obtuse? I found AmigaOS and its derivatives not terribly difficult to use. It has a reasonable UI, reasonable CLI, it’s fairly intuitive and has plenty of documentation available online. So long as you don’t approach it expecting a windows or unix clone, which it’s not – it has many of its own unique quirks.
On the other hand, the attitude among developers on the amiga has long been about trying to cash in, and this is extremely damaging to the community and the platform as a whole. Commodore were all about offering a highly competitive package – the Amiga models were affordable and highly capable relative to their competitors at the time. But fast forward a few years, and you have AmigaOS 4 being tied to hardware that is unobtainable, overpriced, under specced etc. You have developers trying to nickel and dime you – windows and macos shipped with a tcp stack and a web browser, but on the amiga you had to pay for a tcp stack, pay again if you wanted a web browser, pay again if you wanted a telnet client, or if you wanted an irc client etc. Even today you’re expected to pay extra for a tcp stack, and all you get is a legacy ipv4 stack – not even ipv6.
A niche OS like this is never going to make any money, it won’t make enough to cover paid developers, and the cost represents a barrier to entry which basically ensures the platform will never attract any significant number of new users. Buy expensive low spec hardware and an expensive niche OS just for fun, then find out you need to buy more things before you can even make use of it? No thanks, I’ll download and install some of the many free and open source niche OS that run on affordable and widely available hardware (x86, raspberry pi etc).
Same with the hardware, x86 and rpi are affordable, value for money, and the hardware can be put to many other uses if you tire of the niche OS you bought it for. The AmigaOS4 hardware on the other hand is underspecced overpriced PPC hardware, which can only be really used as an overpriced low performance Linux box. If you really want to play with PPC Linux, you can buy a used powermac on ebay thats much faster for virtually nothing.
Obtuse? Ooh that’s a zinger. I’d lay money on Thom waiting for years to find an excuse to use that word. “Obtuse” is the kind of word you cherish and cultivate and hog to yourself for years waiting for that exact moment where there is a lull in the conversation when you can dish it out and cause maximum indignation for the least effort. It’s one of those words used to dramatic effect in The Shawshank Redemption by Andy Defresne who calls the outwardly pious and convservative Warden Bob Gunten “obtuse” to much shouting and foot stamping.
I’ve only ever seen an Aiga beig used and have never used one myself. While alterative ways of doing things can be valid I don’t see the world rushing to the door of Amiga OS. Like many OS’s of that era they have lagged in keeping up with things. I have no idea whether Amiga OS is a good thing or a bad thing. I don’t know because I have never used it nor read anything which makes me interested enough to take a deeper look.
Is sticking to running the OS on overpriced none mainstream hardware a problem? Of course. Nobody is going to buy something which won’t run the stuff they come across every day apart from enthusiasts or developers.
RiscOS has lagged and ran on alien hardware but this has been recitifed by the various rights owners stopping their squabbles and a Raspberry PI port being created. OS/2 lived on because banks had systems they wanted to keep using and it had utility in the embedded system market with ATM’s. In the first insance RiscOS has been made accessible. In the second OS/2 fulfills a purpose. From what little I know Amiga platforms fulfill neither so “obstuse” is a good choice of word and perhaps a necessary word to provoke some re-examination and re-appraisal before the Amiga platform becomes as obsolete as the gramaphone.
My Amiga days are fond memories.
As others have mentioned, it comes down to familiarity. I use both Linux and Windows for my everyday computing needs, and find both of them pretty horrible, overcomplicated and intrusive. In particular, Linux typically needs a little bit of extra faff once in a while to keep it in shape. But on the surface, other than looking a bit different, as a user environment there’s very little to separate them.
I use my Amigas for a breath of fresh air. The OS is much simpler, more elegantly laid out and more intuitive than either of the two I mentioned above, but of course my familiarity comes from using Amiga OS for many years alongside Windows and Linux. And some of the UX elements of Amiga OS really appeal to me – hardly a day goes by that I don’t wish for some Amiga feature or other in Windows or Linux. Keyboard menu shortcuts are generally more consistent and intuitive, text editing shortcuts are nice, window and cursor behaviour all have positive aspects, the filesystem is simple and uncluttered, while also flexible enough to allow the user a great deal of control over things like where to put new applications (for better or worse), the Shell, while different, has some nice features like standardised command templates and, for the most part, user-friendly command and argument names.
Yes, different approaches are taken for many aspects, in that way it’s a relic of a time when computers (and their user experience) were far less homogeneous. But convoluted and incomprehensible are terms one could apply to any OS style they’re not familiar with. Using Linux for well over a decade, I still find myself reaching for user forums and blindly copying and pasting long, largely indecipherable lines into the terminal (and of course trusting the line’s author that it’ll do what they say) when things go exactly to plan. Your newly chosen screenmode setting doesn’t save? Here, throw this assortment of random characters into the terminal and you’ll be sorted.
It all comes down to familiarity.
Fundamentally, AmigaOS is less obtuse that the 1960s designed Unix, but we’re all used to using those convoluted, incomprehensible and frustratingly difficult to use filesystems and shell commands.
What Amiga lacks is the decades of refinements that other operating systems have seen. Other OSes have had sustained development to fix inconsistencies and bugs and add all kinds of user-interface niceties and helpers for users. At its heart it’s a fantastic OS, but by today’s standards it’s… raw.
Amiga OS 3.2 is a big step in the right direction. Simple things like being able to resize windows from all sides and corners doesn’t break the Amiga metaphor but it does make it more comfortable to use in 2021. That’s the path Amiga needs to follow assuming it can stay out of the legal courts long enough. Trying to change the fundamental nature of the OS to make it less ‘obtuse’ for mainstream users would destroy any value it has in the process.
Indeed, there are a number of small but very nice improvements in quality of life in 3.2. Many of them had already been introduced in OS 3.9 and/or OS 4 like resizing on any border, maximising, moving windows out of the screen, asynchronous Workbench, DefIcons, global help, but it’s nice to see them carried through to 3.2… Still some more to go though – personally I would have liked to see a dock and an archive handler included by default, but the 3.9 ones work fine on 3.2 so not a huge loss.
Unix began in 1969, and TRIPOS (which AmigaDOS is based on), began in 1976; so there is just a 7 year difference between their origins. So I don’t think age is a good basis for the argument.
I would argue that Unix, TRIPOS, DOS, VMS, etc etc are all obtuse; because there is nothing intuitive or normal about using a computer. They are just differently obtuse. Thom is used to Windows and Unix-like operating systems, so it seems to make sense, it seems logical. So you start using AmigaOS and the metaphors are differnt, the commanline/base OS is different, etc and so different becomes obtuse
jockm,
Yep.
Well, familiarity obviously helps in daily use, but honestly even the operating systems I use feel obtuse at times. Androids are obtuse, iphones are obtuse, macs are obtuse, linux is obtuse, windows is obtuse. They’ve all got annoying quirks and limitations.
Of the three modern Amiga operating systems – AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, and AROS – which one is the most and least likely to still be in development in, say, 20 years?
AROS is open source and runs on hardware you can actually obtain (or already have). Anyone can try it out, and there are developers/enthusiasts who contribute their spare time to it.
MorphOS runs on hardware that you can buy used on ebay, but which generally isn’t being manufactured anymore.
AmigaOS 4 runs on specialised hardware that is less performance and more expensive than the above, while being much harder to obtain.
Both AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS are commercial, but there is extremely limited market for these systems. Because of the cost, sales are basically limited to long term Amiga users who already know the platform and are willing to put money down. AROS on the other hand will attract some casual users.
Similarly AROS will attract some casual developers from the enthusiast community, whereas the other two platforms being commercial will only have their own paid developers. Given the extremely small market, there won’t be much budget to pay these developers so progress would be extremely slow and there would always be business pressures to drop an unprofitable product to concentrate on something that actually makes money.