This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
When did AmigaDOS become AmigaOS? It's a long time since I used an Amiga and I'm sure it was AmigaDOS in those days. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mintguy ( talk • contribs) 2003-05-11 00:47:24.
http://www.mtb.ee/~mac/museum/amigados.gif http://www.nepots.org/~a-rec/shots/adosbeg.gif http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/adosinout2bk.jpg (paste this into your browser, it doesn't allow you to go to this page via a hyperlink) http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/adosqck1.jpg (paste this into your browser, it doesn't allow you to go to this page via a hyperlink)
More terminology: I don't believe the phrase "Workbench is the native graphical user interface for the Amiga computer." is correct. The Workbench is the desktop environment, to put it in standard terms. I have rarely, if ever, heard people who know anything about the Amiga call the GUI anything else than Intuition.
The part that without Workbench "...the application will lose the ability to multitask with other applications" is just plain wrong. It might be difficult to launch other applications though.
Oh yeah, and the IPC efficiency is more due to the lack of memory protection and nothing else. (you can pass around pointers to any area of memory as long as you can coordinate things somehow, so no need to copy memory.)
Comments? I assume the article is written this way for some reason, and I'd like to know it before I start changing things.
Some day I'd like to write something about the separation between kickstart and the disk-based part of the OS too.. Magetoo 13:33, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Some explanations
No problem you too. There is a little confusion but I will try to explain it all.
AmigaOS was the original name of the OS.
Due to a mistake of marketing of Commodore in printing vaste amount of labels of OS disks, the first release of Disks were labeled just "Kickstart" and "Workbench" and so the OS was sold on the market. People who bought Amigas believed that the name of the whole AmigaOS was WORKBENCH because they read Workbench on the disk label. Other people referred to AmigaDOS 1.3, because unexperienced people beliee that AmigaOS WAS AmigaDOS, beacuse they were influenced by MS-DOS and its way to indicate releases. Even Commodore employees sometimes referred to the AmigaOS with same terminology. But to be correct in definitions, the AmigaOS is a well balanced mix of different components. All this common consents in using incorrect names ended when Commodore released AmigaOS 2.0 (and more 2.04) and decided to re-introduce proper names to any installation disk (Fonts, Kickstart, Workbench, Tools, Extras), and to refer to all OS with its right name.
@ Magetoo:
Workbench is the GUI of Amiga. Intuition is the ENGINE of this GUI. AmigaOS components are strictly tied each one and Workbench is strictly tied with intuition. With introduction of BOOPSI (Basic Object Oriented Programming System for Intuition) Object Oriented System, Workbench could be improved or replaced by other GUI interfaces such as ScalOS. AmigaDOS is only the part of entire OS which deal with filesystems and commands, and DOS commands of AmigaDOS can be accessed thru CLI or SHELL interfaces. Amiga CLI windows are always named with "AmigaDOS" on the titlebar of the windows. This explains one of the images that user Mintguy linked to. Hope I was plain clear and get you away of your doubts.
-- Raffaele Megabyte 09:47, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
I reverted Lumpbucket's edit.
One of the main features of Amiga, Inc is that it's a software (and IP licensing) company, and one of the main features of AmigaOS 4 which ultimately is controlled by Amiga, Inc is that it's meant to run on third party hardware. Unless Amiga, Inc, who (allegedly) owns the "Amiga" trademarks, have ownership of or control over hardware development, it's not only entirely meaningless but also confusing and possibly dishonest to talk about "new Amigas". Amiga, Inc has no such control whatsoever.
The current marketing of hardware as "AmigaOnes" is a logical result of Amiga, Inc's third party hardware direction. The "AmigaOnes" may or may not be the only hardware to ever become licensed, Eyetech may or may not be the only hardware distributor that applies for and/or is granted a licence, and the Terons may or may not be the only hardware that this company decides to market under the "AmigaOne" label. There is no "official continuation of the Amiga line" of computers. "Amiga" today is the name of a corporation, and it used to be the name of a now obsoleted line of computers.
From Amiga, Inc's
Guidelines For Third Parties Who Use Amiga Trademarks:
Some of their own marketing material frequently shows inconsistencies here. But the purpose of Wikipedia is not to copypaste marketing material and pass it off as articles, even if that actually were consistent or even factually correct.
194.176.88.28 13:22, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
If PCMCIA support was only added in 3.0, as the article says, how come the 2.0-using A600 had PCMCIA slots? I used Workbench 2.1 with a PCMCIA CD-ROM device. --02:51, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think 2.05 was the first revision to support PCMCIA. A typical design move by Commodore to put the interface on upside down to the correct standard, thus rendering most pc devices useless. McGonicle 12:01, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
Please keep an eye on the stuff I'm writing, with some particular attention of terminology (like my use of "specifier": is there a better, standard, AmigaOS term instead?).
Also, if you plan to add to it, please consider that in my view it should be an AmigaOS overview: a detailed overview maybe, but without going into details that are not strictly related to the OS. For example, I don't think one should talk about draggable screens there, because (besides the fact that it's mostly a hardware feature) it's not quite an inherent feature of AmigaOS -- and in fact, screens are not draggable on most today's screen. Should one even talk about screens (or stuff like that, of course this is just an example) at all? I'm not sure, but I think not. The concept of a screen is part of AmigaOS, yes, but it's more specifically part of Intuition, and for reason of length, it would possibly be better to talk about it in a separate chapter or in a separate article.
This is obviously all just IHMO since "anyone can edit", but my hope is to have an Overview section that's coherent, interesting and not unnecessarily long, and I'm sure that everybody agrees with this.
LjL 13:24, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I don't recall the recoverable ramdrive (RAD:) being dynamically sized. I know the plain ramdisk (RAM:) was, but not the recoverable. Am I just misremembering? -- I just checked, RAM: is dynamically sized, RAD: was of a fixed specified capacity. Dynamically-sized RAD: disks were available as add-ons (found some on aminet), but weren't included as stock.
I have been reading a little about this AmigaOS 4.0. Is it available to normal non-computer people like myself? Is it free? How can I try it out?
"New CDFilesystem with Juliet and HFS support, DVDRW support"
Should this not be Joilet?
Most all other articles on particular operating systems that I have explored include a right-hand infobox with standard infomation about the OS (developer, OS family, closed/open source, latest stable release, etc). Check out Mac OS, OS/2, Windows CE, etc. for examples.
Maybe I will get to this, but thought I would put up a proposal in case someone already knowledgable about AmigaOs or those other OS-info boxes could whip it out.
I made some technical corrections to the overview. Amiga libraries are dynamically loaded on demand and relocated - static libraries are "link libraries" and are not often found on users' machines, only developers' machines. They're not dynamically linked (SAS/C had an option to automatically work out the functions/bases you needed and open libraries as necessary, but this was not inherently part of LoadSeg()), but they are dynamically loaded.
I added an infobox.
What the article needs, imho, is a good overview that describes the main components (kickstart, exec, amigados, intuition, workbench, autoconfig), but without resorting to the deeply technical facts (which i renamed "technical overview"). It can then point down the page to explain the concepts of libraries, devices, handlers, amigados naming conventions and so on. I wanted to trim the amigados/handlers section because there's too much, but it's all great stuff and very relevant to AmigaOS.
Please see OS comaprison talk pageand add some more on AmigaOS4 here (last realise date,screenshot, feautures etc.). Great page! -- Rastavox 11:05, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I decided to undo (not quite revert) an made by Chris Chittleborough, because it, in effect, stated that exec.library is a microkernel. I believe this is not strictly correct. The old statement, "can be considered microkernel as well as a library" is probably not strictly correct in everyone's opinion either, but IMHO at least it comes closer.
Anyway. Are there any stong opinions on this either way? exec.library obviously is microkernel-inspired, and performs message passing, the mark of a microkernel. At the same time, though, I'm not sure you could say that AmigaOS really is MK-based, with the direct calling into various libraries, etc. But I'm no expert.
I believe the official documentation (RKRM:Autodocs? Libraries?) in at least one place called the operating system microkernel-like and nearly realtime, or something similar. Now people are calling it microkernel and realtime, without any real justification that I can see. And this seems like the best place to finally resolve the issue, so let's do that. -- magetoo 22:17, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Here's something interesting I just found: Linus Torvalds has written that AmigaOS
To understand what he is really saying here, you will need to read this comment to find out what he means by "access spaces". Linus's point, as I understand it, is that (1) AmigaOS differs from "real" microkernel systems by having only a single, shared access/address space and (2) that makes AmigaOS radically different. For example, Amiga tasks can exchange messages containing arbitrary pointers, whereas true microkernels have to serialize data and/or provide object references of some kind. (See Solaris doors for an excellent example; they're powerful, fast and (IMHO) much harder than Exec messages to program with.)
Linus is using a particular definition of Microkernel here, which not everyone would agree with, so I don't think we should change the article's description of exec.library. In fact, I would say that Linus has just agreed with the article as it stands. Cheers, CWC (talk) 18:54, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
I believe AmigaOS is a microkernel, neither hybrid nor monolithic. There must be a direct source (NOT Linus Torvalds) of what AmigaOS is. There has been many edits back and forth of what AmigaOS, MorphOS, AROS, etc. are and there should be proof of what type of kernel it is, or leave the kernel type infobox section completely empty. In-Correct ( talk) 00:36, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps the description of AmigaOS by its designer, Carl Sassenrath, would settle the question of AmigaOS kernal type. See the Wikipedia article, "Carl Sassenrath," section 2.2, Amiga Computer. Please pardon any violations of Wiki formatting rules, etc. I thought I would add what I know from the past 26 years of my experience and knowledge of Amiga computers as a user and Amiga technician. Deneenb ( talk) 06:19, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
User 68.36.192.168 ( talk · contribs) (thanks!) has added some interesting material under the heading "Future". Here's a copy (after I edited the last bit):
Some thoughts:
Cheers, CWC (talk) 15:33, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
I think readers might be interested on the background of the AmigaOS. I'd write something myself, but I'm one of those that know little about it. -- Saoshyant 17:09, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
When did AmigaDOS become AmigaOS? It's a long time since I used an Amiga and I'm sure it was AmigaDOS in those days. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mintguy ( talk • contribs) 2003-05-11 00:47:24.
http://www.mtb.ee/~mac/museum/amigados.gif http://www.nepots.org/~a-rec/shots/adosbeg.gif http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/adosinout2bk.jpg (paste this into your browser, it doesn't allow you to go to this page via a hyperlink) http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/adosqck1.jpg (paste this into your browser, it doesn't allow you to go to this page via a hyperlink)
More terminology: I don't believe the phrase "Workbench is the native graphical user interface for the Amiga computer." is correct. The Workbench is the desktop environment, to put it in standard terms. I have rarely, if ever, heard people who know anything about the Amiga call the GUI anything else than Intuition.
The part that without Workbench "...the application will lose the ability to multitask with other applications" is just plain wrong. It might be difficult to launch other applications though.
Oh yeah, and the IPC efficiency is more due to the lack of memory protection and nothing else. (you can pass around pointers to any area of memory as long as you can coordinate things somehow, so no need to copy memory.)
Comments? I assume the article is written this way for some reason, and I'd like to know it before I start changing things.
Some day I'd like to write something about the separation between kickstart and the disk-based part of the OS too.. Magetoo 13:33, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Some explanations
No problem you too. There is a little confusion but I will try to explain it all.
AmigaOS was the original name of the OS.
Due to a mistake of marketing of Commodore in printing vaste amount of labels of OS disks, the first release of Disks were labeled just "Kickstart" and "Workbench" and so the OS was sold on the market. People who bought Amigas believed that the name of the whole AmigaOS was WORKBENCH because they read Workbench on the disk label. Other people referred to AmigaDOS 1.3, because unexperienced people beliee that AmigaOS WAS AmigaDOS, beacuse they were influenced by MS-DOS and its way to indicate releases. Even Commodore employees sometimes referred to the AmigaOS with same terminology. But to be correct in definitions, the AmigaOS is a well balanced mix of different components. All this common consents in using incorrect names ended when Commodore released AmigaOS 2.0 (and more 2.04) and decided to re-introduce proper names to any installation disk (Fonts, Kickstart, Workbench, Tools, Extras), and to refer to all OS with its right name.
@ Magetoo:
Workbench is the GUI of Amiga. Intuition is the ENGINE of this GUI. AmigaOS components are strictly tied each one and Workbench is strictly tied with intuition. With introduction of BOOPSI (Basic Object Oriented Programming System for Intuition) Object Oriented System, Workbench could be improved or replaced by other GUI interfaces such as ScalOS. AmigaDOS is only the part of entire OS which deal with filesystems and commands, and DOS commands of AmigaDOS can be accessed thru CLI or SHELL interfaces. Amiga CLI windows are always named with "AmigaDOS" on the titlebar of the windows. This explains one of the images that user Mintguy linked to. Hope I was plain clear and get you away of your doubts.
-- Raffaele Megabyte 09:47, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
I reverted Lumpbucket's edit.
One of the main features of Amiga, Inc is that it's a software (and IP licensing) company, and one of the main features of AmigaOS 4 which ultimately is controlled by Amiga, Inc is that it's meant to run on third party hardware. Unless Amiga, Inc, who (allegedly) owns the "Amiga" trademarks, have ownership of or control over hardware development, it's not only entirely meaningless but also confusing and possibly dishonest to talk about "new Amigas". Amiga, Inc has no such control whatsoever.
The current marketing of hardware as "AmigaOnes" is a logical result of Amiga, Inc's third party hardware direction. The "AmigaOnes" may or may not be the only hardware to ever become licensed, Eyetech may or may not be the only hardware distributor that applies for and/or is granted a licence, and the Terons may or may not be the only hardware that this company decides to market under the "AmigaOne" label. There is no "official continuation of the Amiga line" of computers. "Amiga" today is the name of a corporation, and it used to be the name of a now obsoleted line of computers.
From Amiga, Inc's
Guidelines For Third Parties Who Use Amiga Trademarks:
Some of their own marketing material frequently shows inconsistencies here. But the purpose of Wikipedia is not to copypaste marketing material and pass it off as articles, even if that actually were consistent or even factually correct.
194.176.88.28 13:22, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
If PCMCIA support was only added in 3.0, as the article says, how come the 2.0-using A600 had PCMCIA slots? I used Workbench 2.1 with a PCMCIA CD-ROM device. --02:51, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I think 2.05 was the first revision to support PCMCIA. A typical design move by Commodore to put the interface on upside down to the correct standard, thus rendering most pc devices useless. McGonicle 12:01, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
Please keep an eye on the stuff I'm writing, with some particular attention of terminology (like my use of "specifier": is there a better, standard, AmigaOS term instead?).
Also, if you plan to add to it, please consider that in my view it should be an AmigaOS overview: a detailed overview maybe, but without going into details that are not strictly related to the OS. For example, I don't think one should talk about draggable screens there, because (besides the fact that it's mostly a hardware feature) it's not quite an inherent feature of AmigaOS -- and in fact, screens are not draggable on most today's screen. Should one even talk about screens (or stuff like that, of course this is just an example) at all? I'm not sure, but I think not. The concept of a screen is part of AmigaOS, yes, but it's more specifically part of Intuition, and for reason of length, it would possibly be better to talk about it in a separate chapter or in a separate article.
This is obviously all just IHMO since "anyone can edit", but my hope is to have an Overview section that's coherent, interesting and not unnecessarily long, and I'm sure that everybody agrees with this.
LjL 13:24, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I don't recall the recoverable ramdrive (RAD:) being dynamically sized. I know the plain ramdisk (RAM:) was, but not the recoverable. Am I just misremembering? -- I just checked, RAM: is dynamically sized, RAD: was of a fixed specified capacity. Dynamically-sized RAD: disks were available as add-ons (found some on aminet), but weren't included as stock.
I have been reading a little about this AmigaOS 4.0. Is it available to normal non-computer people like myself? Is it free? How can I try it out?
"New CDFilesystem with Juliet and HFS support, DVDRW support"
Should this not be Joilet?
Most all other articles on particular operating systems that I have explored include a right-hand infobox with standard infomation about the OS (developer, OS family, closed/open source, latest stable release, etc). Check out Mac OS, OS/2, Windows CE, etc. for examples.
Maybe I will get to this, but thought I would put up a proposal in case someone already knowledgable about AmigaOs or those other OS-info boxes could whip it out.
I made some technical corrections to the overview. Amiga libraries are dynamically loaded on demand and relocated - static libraries are "link libraries" and are not often found on users' machines, only developers' machines. They're not dynamically linked (SAS/C had an option to automatically work out the functions/bases you needed and open libraries as necessary, but this was not inherently part of LoadSeg()), but they are dynamically loaded.
I added an infobox.
What the article needs, imho, is a good overview that describes the main components (kickstart, exec, amigados, intuition, workbench, autoconfig), but without resorting to the deeply technical facts (which i renamed "technical overview"). It can then point down the page to explain the concepts of libraries, devices, handlers, amigados naming conventions and so on. I wanted to trim the amigados/handlers section because there's too much, but it's all great stuff and very relevant to AmigaOS.
Please see OS comaprison talk pageand add some more on AmigaOS4 here (last realise date,screenshot, feautures etc.). Great page! -- Rastavox 11:05, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I decided to undo (not quite revert) an made by Chris Chittleborough, because it, in effect, stated that exec.library is a microkernel. I believe this is not strictly correct. The old statement, "can be considered microkernel as well as a library" is probably not strictly correct in everyone's opinion either, but IMHO at least it comes closer.
Anyway. Are there any stong opinions on this either way? exec.library obviously is microkernel-inspired, and performs message passing, the mark of a microkernel. At the same time, though, I'm not sure you could say that AmigaOS really is MK-based, with the direct calling into various libraries, etc. But I'm no expert.
I believe the official documentation (RKRM:Autodocs? Libraries?) in at least one place called the operating system microkernel-like and nearly realtime, or something similar. Now people are calling it microkernel and realtime, without any real justification that I can see. And this seems like the best place to finally resolve the issue, so let's do that. -- magetoo 22:17, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Here's something interesting I just found: Linus Torvalds has written that AmigaOS
To understand what he is really saying here, you will need to read this comment to find out what he means by "access spaces". Linus's point, as I understand it, is that (1) AmigaOS differs from "real" microkernel systems by having only a single, shared access/address space and (2) that makes AmigaOS radically different. For example, Amiga tasks can exchange messages containing arbitrary pointers, whereas true microkernels have to serialize data and/or provide object references of some kind. (See Solaris doors for an excellent example; they're powerful, fast and (IMHO) much harder than Exec messages to program with.)
Linus is using a particular definition of Microkernel here, which not everyone would agree with, so I don't think we should change the article's description of exec.library. In fact, I would say that Linus has just agreed with the article as it stands. Cheers, CWC (talk) 18:54, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
I believe AmigaOS is a microkernel, neither hybrid nor monolithic. There must be a direct source (NOT Linus Torvalds) of what AmigaOS is. There has been many edits back and forth of what AmigaOS, MorphOS, AROS, etc. are and there should be proof of what type of kernel it is, or leave the kernel type infobox section completely empty. In-Correct ( talk) 00:36, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps the description of AmigaOS by its designer, Carl Sassenrath, would settle the question of AmigaOS kernal type. See the Wikipedia article, "Carl Sassenrath," section 2.2, Amiga Computer. Please pardon any violations of Wiki formatting rules, etc. I thought I would add what I know from the past 26 years of my experience and knowledge of Amiga computers as a user and Amiga technician. Deneenb ( talk) 06:19, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
User 68.36.192.168 ( talk · contribs) (thanks!) has added some interesting material under the heading "Future". Here's a copy (after I edited the last bit):
Some thoughts:
Cheers, CWC (talk) 15:33, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
I think readers might be interested on the background of the AmigaOS. I'd write something myself, but I'm one of those that know little about it. -- Saoshyant 17:09, 3 August 2006 (UTC)