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AMIGA

Specialty Definition: AMIGA

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Specialty Definition: Amiga

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

The Amiga is a personal computer whose development started in 1982. The original Amiga Inc company was bought out in 1984 by Commodore, who marketed the Amiga as their intended successor to the Commodore 64, and as the competitor against the Atari ST range.

An Amiga A500 computer, photographed in 1988. To its right is a 9-pin dot matrix printer, the Star LC-10.
Larger version

The first Amiga computer was released in 1985. This would later be referred to as the Commodore-Amiga 1000 or A1000 for short, the number being added when the product range was expanded. A500 (low-end) and A2000 (high-end) followed in 1987. The A500 was the most popular Amiga computer at that time; today the most popular Amiga is the A1200. The last Amigas to be made were the A1200 and the A4000.

For its time, the Amiga had some of the most impressive sound and graphics (through several coprocessors) available for the home user. Indeed, it was also used for commercial entertainment production till the mid 1990s (Video editing, 3D graphics rendering etc). Newtek marketed a special graphics rendering solution of the Amiga, called the Video Toaster - Video Toaster were used to render the space ships in the first season of Babylon 5, and were involved in numerous other major movie productions without ever being credited. NewTek also created the Lightwave 3D rendering program on the Amiga, which they eventually ported to the PC and is still being sold today. [1]

The operating system, AmigaOS, was also quite sophisticated, combining an elegant GUI like that of the Apple Macintosh with some of the flexibility of UNIX while retaining a simplicity that made maintenance rather easy.

The Amiga chipsets, OCS, ECS and AGA, were more advanced than other architectures of their time.

The Amiga community contributed a lot to a computer subculture known as the Demo Scene. The Demo Scene was more or less a phenomenon inherited from Commodore C64 times.

The original Amiga was designed by Jay Miner. His machine was many years ahead of its time when it appeared, having features such as IRQ sharing, memory mapped IO, AutoConfig (today known as "plug-and-play"), and preemptive multitasking. Some of these features had been used previously in mainframe computers, but had never been used in a personal computer before.

Amiga models include:

• A1000, featuring 68000 processor, OCS chipset.
• A500, A2000, featuring 68000 processor, OCS or ECS chipset.
• A500plus, A600, CD-TV, featuring 68000 processor, ECS chipset.
• A3000, featuring 68030 processor, ECS chipset; the A3000UX shipped with Unix instead of AmigaOS.
• AmigaCD32 (68020), A1200 (68EC020) and A4000 (68EC030 or 68040), all featuring the AGA chipset.

In general, machines with 'thousands' numbering were marketed as 'quality' machines for business use, while the other machines (A500, A500+, A600, A1200) were 'mass market' machines.

Prototypes that were never released include:

• Amiga Nyx, 1994, with a prototype AAA chipset;
• Amiga Walker, 1996, with AGA chipset but a PCI-like expansion slot.

The following operating systems are available for Amigas: AmigaOS, Linux, and NetBSD. Commodore Amiga Unix was available for the A3000UX.

Software and hardware is available for the Amiga to emulate the Macintosh (MacOS), PC IA-32 (MS-DOS) and various 8-bit platforms like Commodore 64.

Unfortunately, although the Amiga was successful in Europe, especially Germany, it was a total flop in the all-important US market, with less than a million sold. Mass-market Amigas were considerably cheaper than PCs or Macs - this boosted sales in the more price-conscious European markets, but led to Commodore being viewed in the United States as a producer of cheap and nasty 'game machines' - this image was not helped by the fact that most retail outlets were toy stores, and by Commodore's marketing campaigns which were woefully mismatched with the status-conscious American public.

As a home computer, compatibility with ordinary household television sets was prioritized over professional grade graphics and memory management. Even "amenities" such as a hard drive (on a 500) or a device for ensuring a non-interlaced display (a 'flicker fixer') had to be bought from third party vendors. While it was the only multitasking platform in the consumer marketplace for several years, robustness left something to be desired (mainly due to the absence of Protected memory, resulting in frequent "Guru Meditation" errors).

In spite of being sold short, Amiga was originally supported by such prestigious software titles as AutoCAD, WordPerfect, Deluxe Paint, and Lattice C.

The history of Amiga owners is a colorful one, including two bankruptcies (Commodore International, ESCOM), two buyouts (Commodore buying Amiga, Inc. 1984, Gateway 2000 buying the Amiga IP from the ESCOM estate in 1997) and the licensing of the Amiga IP by Amiga, Inc., a new company founded by a former Gateway marketing employee in 2000.

The Amiga had a strong user community.

The current owner of the trademark, Amiga, Inc., is licensing the production of an updated AmigaOS ported to PowerPC, to the Belgian-German company Hyperion Entertainment. It also licenses an AmigaOne trademark to companies interested in selling hardware to users of this OS.

Numerous religious wars surround the technology implemented in the Amiga. Many Amiga users are of the belief that that the Amiga will rise again, to reclaim it's glory and cast the naysayers into the abyss of anonmity. See Amiga Religion.

The Amiga keyboard, is quite similar to today's Windows keyboards, but having a left and right "Amiga" key (bearing the "A" of the (former) Amiga logo in black on the left and outlined on the right). It also has a dedicated "Help" key. It doesn't have keys like "Insert" or "Print", though. It also only has 10 function keys, instead of the 12 common to IBM PC keyboards.

The Amiga Three-finger salute is Ctrl + Left Amiga + Right Amiga.

See also: Amiga Demos, Amiga Games, AmigaOS

External links

General:

• Amiga, Inc.
• Amiga Wiki

Emulators:

• The UNIX Amiga Emulator (UAE)
• WinUAE (a windows port)
• Fellow
• Amithlon - a just-in-time emulation for x86 PCs (commercial)

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Amiga."

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AmigaOS

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga. The DOS library and CLI was based on a Tripos port by MetaComCo written in BCPL.

It has:

• Preemptive Unix-like multitasking without 'nice' priorities
• Microkernel architecture
• Programmable real-time interrupts with very low latencies
• No memory protection
• 32-bit design
• Programmable filesystem devices
• Interprocess scripting language (ARexx) included as standard
• Incredibly efficient interprocess messaging

It always came divided in two parts:

• Kickstart

Amiga 1000 asking the user to insert the kickstart disk.

Kickstart is the name given to the bootstrap ROM. On the original Amiga (the Amiga 1000), this was loaded from disk, although later Kickstarts were on a ROM chip inside the computer. The Amiga 1000 could be modified to take these chips.

As well as containing the code needed to boot the computer, the Kickstart also contained large portions of the Amiga's operating system, such as Intuition (the Amiga's graphical user interface libraries), Exec (the multitasking kernel), Dos (the disk handling libraries).

Later versions of the kickstart contained drivers for IDE and SCSI controllers, PCMCIA ports and various other hardware that came with Amigas.

With third party hardware, it is possible to have two or more versions of kickstart in a single machine, selectable either by a switch or a keyboard shortcut when you first turn the machine on.

With third party software, it is possible to have a different kickstart loaded in RAM and to use it instead of the ROM one - for example Kickstart 1.3 may be loaded in order to run old games incompatible with Kickstart 2.0 and higher. These programs are called Softkickers.

• Workbench

Workbench is the native graphical user interface for the Amiga computer. As the name suggests, the metaphor of a workbench, rather than a desktop, is used. Directories are depicted as drawers, executable files are depicted as tools, data files are depicted as projects and GUI widgets are gadgets. Most Amiga application software has pull-down menus starting "Project Edit ..." rather than the "File Edit ..." typical on other platforms.

In many other respects the interface resembles Mac OS, with the main desktop having the drive icons, and a single menu bar at the very top of the screen. Unlike the Mac mouse, the Amiga mouse has two buttons - the right mouse button operates the pull-down menus, with a Macintosh-style 'release to select' mechanism.

A unique feature of Workbench is multiple screens. These are somewhat similar to X Windows virtual desktops, but are generated dynamically by application programs as necessary. Each screen can have a different resolution and colour depth. A gadget in the top-right corner of the screen allows screens to be cycled - as the OS stores all screens in memory simultaneously, redrawing is instantaneous. Screens can also be dragged up and down by their title bars.

Although, strictly speaking, Workbench is only the file-management part of AmigaOS, it is a commonly used term to refer to all the parts of the OS that do not reside in the Kickstart ROM.

The Workbench environment is not required for the machine to function, therefore a lot of old games boot directly from Kickstart, without loading it.

Without Workbench there is more RAM available, however the application will lose the ability to multitask with other applications. In this circumstance, the machine must be rebooted.

Each Kickstart version is tied to a particular version of the Amigas operating system software, so you should only boot Workbench 1.3 on a machine with a 1.3 Kickstart ROM. It is possible to boot incorrect versions (Workbench 3.1 will boot on Kickstart 3.0, with some problems). The only exception is Workbench 2.1, which was a software-only update based on Kickstart 2.04. Also, the latest Workbench versions, 3.5 and 3.9, use Kickstart 3.1 and load ROM updates at boot time.

AmigaOS versions

• Kickstart/Workbench 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3

This is the original implementation of AmigaOS. It had a distinctive blue and orange colour scheme. Versions after 1.0 consisted mostly of bug fixes. 1.x shipped with the A1000, A500, A1500, CDTV and A2000.

• Kickstart/Workbench 1.4

This was a beta version of the upcoming 2.0 update, but was released in very small quantities with early Amiga 3000 computers.

• Kickstart/Workbench 2.0, 2.05, 2.1

2.0 introduced a lot of major advances to the Amiga operating system. Gone was the harsh blue and orange colourscheme, replaced with a much easier on the eye grey and light blue. The Workbench was no longer tied to the 640x256 (PAL) or 640x200 (NTSC) display modes, and much of the system was improved with an eye to making future expansion easier.

Unfortunately, 2.x introduced some incompatibilities with old, badly written software, and so a lot of people were upset with this update.

2.x shipped with the A500+, A600, A3000 and A3000T.

• Kickstart/Workbench 3.0, 3.1

3.x was another major update. Updates included:

• A universal data system, known as datatypes, that allowed programs to load pictures, sound and text in formats they didn't understand directly, through the use of standard plugs
  CD filesystem support as standard
  PCMCIA card support
  Colour remapping for low-colour display modes
  Improved visual appearance
  Better support for background images

3.x shipped with the CD32, A1200, A4000 and A4000T.

• AmigaOS 3.5, 3.9

After the demise of Commodore, the later owners of the Amiga trademark granted a license to a German company called Haage & Partner to update the Amiga's operating system. Along with this update came a change in the way people referred to the Amiga's operating system. Rather than specifying "Kickstart" or "Workbench", the updates were most often referred to as simply "AmigaOS".

Updates included:

• Distributed on CD instead of floppy disk

Supplied with TCP/IP stack, web browser, and e-mail client.

Improved GUI, called "ReAction"

AVI/MPEG movie player

Support for hard disks larger than 4Gb (a limitation from 1.x)

HTML documentation

MP3 and CD audio player (OS3.9)

Dock program

Improved workbench

AmigaOS 4

A new version of AmigaOS 4 is being developed by Hyperion Entertainment under license for Amiga, Inc. It is a major update, comparable to the leap from Windows 3.1 to 95, or MacOS 9 to X.

The new version will be PowerPC native instead of 680x0, and feature many updates. It is the first version to finally completely remove the Tripos legacy code.

AmigaOS 4 will run on Amiga 4000 computers with PowerPC upgrade boards, and the new AmigaOne systems.

Some of the features promised for 4.0:

• Improved TCP/IP networking, and internet software

Greatly enhanced GUI

Virtual memory

Limited memory protection

CD/DVD writer support, including Mt. Rainer

Integrated GDB debugger

Included PDF viewer

Enhanced shared library model

Support for PowerPC (native) and 68k (emulated) applications

Improved input device support

Support for modern hardware devices

Although not strictly Amiga related, a recent fork of FreeBSD-4.8 called DragonFlyBSD has been created by a former FreeBSD developer and Amiga programmer Matt Dillon. DragonFlyBSD (although still a work in progress) aims to make the BSD core more like the Amiga architectually, featuring a message-passing kernel, allowing for a very efficient and virtually mutex free SMP design.

External Links

• The Workbench Nostalgia Page - Very detailed information on all known versions of AmigaOS.
• AmigaOS homepage
• DragonFlyBSD homepage

See also: AROS, MorphOS, Guru Meditation

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "AmigaOS."

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Modern Usage: AMIGA

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Commercial Usage: AMIGA

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Digital Photo Gallery: AMIGA
 

"El PunkRocker" by Laura Giraudo Commentary: "El cantante de una banda amiga, hay una interesante apología con el fondo de la foto.."

Source: photographs selected by the editor, with permission from the photographers.

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Non-Fiction Usage: AMIGA

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Usage Frequency: AMIGA

Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.

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Expressions: AMIGA

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Frequency of Internet Keywords: AMIGA

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Derivations: AMIGA

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Anagrams: AMIGA

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Alternative Orthography: AMIGA

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