Amiga`s Past and Future.

Amiga 1000 perplexed the computing industry when it was released in 1985, it was the world`s first multimedia computer which could show up to 4096 colors simultaniously, it was plug-and-play and had many dedicated processors taking the major workload of the main CPU similar to recent graphic cards today. People in the computing industry couldn`t believe how the designers could have put so much power in one computer. Other special abilities were genlockable graphics, shared libraries support, long file names support (for over 100 characters with spaces, etc.), stereo sound and a flexable and fast Graphic User Interface (GUI) with true 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking. And still the entire operating system came on just one 880kb disk! IBM and Mac clones had none of these features and are still lacking some features of the orginal 1985 Amiga today. For example it`s flexibility with it`s resolutions and color modes thus allowing to display mutiple resolutions and color depths within one screen. The original designers sold the Amiga technology to Commodore which in 1987 released the A500, a computer aimed at home usage, though Commodore mainly marketed it for the many thousands of games available. Some examples of my personal favorites for it were Alien Breed, The Defender of the Crown, Lemmings, Moonstone and The First Samurai . These demanding games all ran easily at full speed and glory on 1 MegaByte 7,14 mhz Amigas.

The A2000 was also released in 1987 and was aimed at professionals. It was a highly expandable machine i.e. Processor/Graphic Boards, Soundcards, Modems, Video Toasters, etc could be added. Amiga`s special graphic features as well as NTSC/PAL support as standard were important reasons why it became hugely popular with graphic artists (i.e. Disney Studios and Warner Bros) and special effects companies (i.e. later movies include milestones like Total Recall, Terminator II, Jurrasic Park and TV series like Babylon 5 and SeaQuest). But Amigas were and still are used today for critical tasks at for example NASA due to it`s special multitasking abilities and stability. Commodore made much money with it without doing major marketing , most of the money was spent to the frustration of the fans and orginal designers on IBM emulators for the Amiga and support for their IBM clone branch. The professional A3000 with a full standard 32 bit architecture was released in 1990 with higher resolutions and a faster CPU as standard. In 1992 the A1200 and A4000 were released which allowed to display more than 640,000 colors simultaniously from a 16.8 million color palette.

Meanwhile Commodore`s PC branch began to make major losses which resulted in a bankruptcy in 1994, eventhough Commodore never made a loss with their Amigas. Their last product was Workbench 3.1, which was a very good and stable Operating System, though it was a bit naked and a trip to Aminet was advisable. Finally in 1995 Escom bought the technology in a court settlement but went broke due to over-expansion before it could do anything. Then in 1997 Gateway bought the Amiga and promised to bring back the Amiga, but strangely the Amiga`s President resigned and sold all his $11 million worth Gateway shares when the current Amiga president and enthusiast Bill McEwen was fired. The project was cancelled but on 1 januari 2000 Bill McEwen announced that he bought the Amiga company and products!

Now the Amiga company is finally controlled by the people who love the Amiga and idealism, The Amiga Community! Amiga Inc hired many leading figures, great hardware designers and famous programmers from the community. Many will only remember the Amiga as an 1mb RAM 7,14mhz computer running WB1.3, mainly due to many IBM clones companies doing massive marketing for their machines and making the Amiga close to invisible to the mainstream public.

Though things have changed much, even through many years of not having proper support from an owner company, Amigas today are mostly highly expanded machines running on decent 68k and fast PPC CPUs and booting the current powerful non-bloat OS3.5 which is unparalled in flexibility and can be easily expanded with many free programs from the World`s largest library of Public Domain and Shareware for any platform Aminet. Amiga Inc is working with various hardware partners to soon release new G3/G4 PPC processor upgrade boards for classic Amigas as well.

Professional and Games developers stayed loyal to the Amiga and this also resulted in great Amiga only games, some of my favorites are Napalm , OnEscapee , Genetic Species and T-Zero but also many good Professional and essential applications like browsers, mailers, IRC clients, newsreaders, etc are available. But the real strength has always been Amiga`s Public Domain and Demo Scene which during the years produced thousands of free applications, games and utilities. The AmigaOS can be changed the way it suits you, add not only backgrounds to your background, but each Window separately and Window borders as well, add buttons to windows for special tasks, a start bar, menus, drag&drop and powerful CLI features ala XTerm, etc. If you can imagine it, you will likely find a suitable utility on Aminet!

Today it is estimated there are between 100.000 and 500.000 loyal Amiga users left worldwide, these people are mainly coders, graphic artists, hackers and computer professionals, who are proud owners of their machines but mainly use other platforms as well, there are even new markets forming like India where the classic Amiga is the best sold computer system. Some Countries with the highest density of Amigans are Germany , The United Kingdom and the Czech Republic.

According to statistics of polls found on the Amiga News Network 36% have an A1200 either in the orginal or towered case as their main machine, 35% an A4000, 11% an A3000 and 6% an A2000. (less used models are A1000, A500, A600, A1500, A2500, CDTV and CD32). Classic Amigas are still used for creating professional graphics, special effects and for video editing today. But mainly people use it as a hobby.

Although mainstream computer`s usage has become much more Amiga-like, Amigans despise how bloaty and unelegant mainstream Operation Systems are. Many of the surviving Amiga and ex-Amiga hardware and software developers have formed an alliance to create a new elegant next generation Amiga-like Operation System. Both QSSL and Amiga inc. are leading members of this Phoenix Platform Consortium. QSSL`s QNX Neutrino and Amiga`s Amiverse are the basis of this very large Developer Consortium`s efforts.

So what does Amiga have to offer Linux, you may ask. First of all Amiga Inc is developing a new superfast optimized multimedia RTOS together with UK based Tao Group who have their Roots with the Amiga as well. Their new compact OS is processor independent and already supports x86, SH3/4, MIPS R3xxx/R4xxx, ARM6/7, StrongARM, PowerPC and others. The foundation is Tao`s Elate RTOS and Intent Multimedia Toolkit. Tao writes:"Elate offers binary portable systems. It achieves its portability by compiling all code to a single virtual processor without regard to the target hardware platform. A translator tool is needed to convert the portable code to the native code of the target processor ready for execution. Translators exist for most of the microprocessors selected for appliance programmes today. New and efficient translators take just a few weeks to write." and "Elate's streamlined binary code, VP code, is based upon thousands of modular tools. Using these it is possible to program in an object-based manner. With Elate's object-based tool approach it is not necessary to load an entire class into memory in order to use a single method from it; tools can be dynamically bound as and when they are needed. Storage overhead is further reduced by the code density of VP code, which often takes up less space than the native code into which it will be translated." The same revolutionary techniques used in the new AmigaOS allowed Tao to create their Java engine which according to Tao is 6-15 times faster than any competitor! Amiga states:"The entire OS could be as small as 3megs including the GUI and Java. The kernel itself which will be supplied by Tao can be as small as 25k." and "Amiga plans to embrace Sun`s Java" The new GUI designed by Trond Werner Hansen (The maker of Birdie) will be able to change its look easily. One key feature is that the RTOS can run native as well as hosted transparently on top of any OS available, including Linux!

Redhat and Corel will include it so it will become the common consumer application layer for 26 different versions of Linux. The realtime abilities is dependent on the limits of it`s host though. The great thing for Linux is that it supports great 3D, 2D and sound tools similar to DirectX. Hosting Amiga/Tao`s RTOS on Linux gives Linux developers instand access to these tools. Making Linux a "virtually" viable alternative for great multimedia content. Amiga wants to become for Linux what DirectX is for Windows today!

Everything developed for Amiga`s RTOS or run-time engine is code identical across platforms including kernel, device drivers, libraries and applications! Amiga`s main target will be Linux developers, with their new OS hosted on a Linux based developer`s machine which was presented some weeks ago Amiga hopes to get support from the creative pool of Multimedia developers. IF you want to develop for either the Amiverse (Elate RTOS) or the fully POSIX compliant QNX Neutrino contact greenboy.

A version of Amiverse for PPC powered Amigas is also being worked on and currently at least 117 titles including personal oldtime favorites like Scala are being developed. It is expected to be the first platform ever to have hundreds of programs ready when released! Espial will be providing the new OS their Java browser escape which supports all Popular multimedia browser plug-ins. Amiga plans to have their first end-consumer product ready before the end of this year for partners to build around it their new computers, mobile appliances, digital TVs, game systems, etc stay tuned and check amiga.org for the latest developments. Amiga Inc will soon release details about their development support program!

Sincerely, Mike Bouma.

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