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Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

My dream is to buy up the Commodore / Amiga IP and make a "true" successor (as I have stated in the past several times!).

People are growing increasingly jaded with OSX and Windows, both of which lack a passionate visionary and are becoming increasingly bloated and making weird UX choices.

I do not mean making a retro device, or even playing off of some modern variant of AmigaOS, I mean rethinking/resurrecting the brand the same way Jobs did when he returned to Apple.

It would not necessarily mean completely reinventing hardware or software. Apple's switch to a BSD-based OS and Intel chips was an example of how you can build a great computer on top of existing hardware and software.

The Mac has no "real" competitors - that is, companies which manufacture both their own hardware and software to produce desktops (other than consoles, which are not really desktop replacements).

Anyhow, it is obviously no small undertaking, but I refuse to believe there should only be two mainstream choices out there for desktops, or that the space for innovation is dead (more so on the software/coding/UX side).

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Have you thought through the first principles? What is it about the Commodore/AmigaOS brand that is worth resurrecting? Is it hardware? Is it software? Will this redesign be a competitive advantage to current OSes? Does the world need another OS?

I'm not raining on your parade. I'm just trying to help in the thought process. Don't let anyone get in the way of your dreams.

Thanks - all very important questions. A large part of marketing is perception. There was nothing radically different about the Mac when it got to the Intel/BSD revision - other than the overall user experience. Everything felt very clean and precise - from the hardware to the software.

That said, I think there is huge room for improvement in a couple areas. One is rethinking the programming environment - how easy it is to get into, how fragmented it is by a hardware ecosystem, how can you gain C-level performance while making the environment less rigid, how can you make dependencies a no-brainer, how can you make a UI system so good that nobody will want to use anything else - the list goes on and on. I would love to rethink hardware but realistically that is the difference between a million dollar startup and a billion dollar one. That said, the superficial aspects of hardware have room for improvement or niches that can be attacked. For example, I would love to have a portable device (like a laptop) that is able to compete with the comfort of my desktop (and yes, I regularly use the best laptops - they do not compare to my desktop in my experience :) ). I.e. something that can be ported around easily, but does not necessarily have to rest on my lap.

Does the world need another OS? Technically not - because need is a very strong word. :) Does the world want a better OS? To be honest, I am not sure how strong the demand is or how great the apathy is there - I think only the real-world market could tell.

In a way, its really similar to the question "do we need any more programming languages?" We can make do with what we have, but I would be arrogant to say we could not produce anything better. :)

What I expect as a user? A "plug and play" computer, where you can play games or "program" easily. Maybe there is a place for a product like that, similar to apple iOS playground for iPad. Not sure about the form factor, but should be kind of mobile

Yes, this is very close to what I envision. It would be very cool to get a computer where you can instantly boot up and program on with the same ease as PET BASIC or QBASIC, yet have all the power of modern hardware at your disposal.

You mean something like Oberon?

Probably that or maybe TempleOS. TempleOS comes with a C-compiler and it's own C like shell language. All the work of one man. There is always HaikuOS too.

Carl Sassenrath, the Amiga OS architect has been working on a new language for the last 20 years:

http://www.rebol.com

It has been cloned:

http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html

Both are open-source. Red has a Windows GUI and the OSX GUI is close. The language ranges from high-level DSLs to system programming.

A footnote to those interested: REBOL never really made it because it was closed source and cost some $ back when Perl was super popular even though the language had some amazing DSLs. Making a GUI is a built in one-liner. It was also slow (only interpreted). Red is that language, plus ability to JIT, and do native code. You can mix and match native and interpreted code too. Use types when and where you want. It has no installation. Just an exe that is a few MB. It can create super tiny executables too. I cannot wait for it to get to 1.0.

Rebol and Red are both interesting to me for their given purposes. My desires for a language are somewhat self-contradicting.

On one hand, I want a language as simple as possible, with as few paradigms as possible, and as close to the metal as possible (or at least the ability to compile it down to something with C-equivalent performance). This would encompass the core of the language.

On the other hand, the language would have a wide variety of built-in libraries for UI, access to graphics hardware, networking, input, etc. The language's paradigms would also be easily extensible, perhaps as an added layer of compilation / meta programming.

Take a look at http://terralang.org (low-level) and http://ebblang.org (DSL), both related to Lua, via meta-programming and LLVM.

I've toyed with both languages, and they are only slightly off from something I have been looking for. One of my pet projects right now is a language that can be compiled to and/or simultaneously interpreted within C++, with minimal overhead or dependencies (just a small single header file). No need for LLVM, although I debated using it myself.

I wrote about this half a year ago:

https://bjoernkw.com/2016/03/13/load81/

"Because the C64 boots directly into BASIC the main user interface of the machine is an easily accessible programming environment."

Though I only realised it on a subliminal level back then, booting your computer and being able to program it right from the boot prompt with immediate feedback was one of the magical properties of the C64 and to some extent the Amiga. In a way you could say these computers offered the first general purpose REPL.

This property is severely lacking from every mainstream OS nowadays, which of course is intentional because for the most part these operating systems target consumers and hence quite understandably try to hide perceived complexity at all costs. Ironically, the environment that comes closest to these early desktop programming environments is Microsoft Excel. In fact, my father (whom I'm incredibly grateful for introducing me to computers at a young age) although not a programmer by profession used to develop business applications on his C64 while just a few years later he resorted to Excel for the same tasks, which in some ways of course made things easier but also was limited in what you could do with it.

I'm quite sure a modern, well-designed programming environment in that vein would be conducive to both business application development and education.

I remember reading your article when it was first published. :)

Sometimes in attempting to hide complexity we introduce further complexity. For example, many modern IDEs make some tasks more difficult than they need to be, when editing a text file would suffice (and provides more programmatic flexibility).

I think that it probably is too harsh to boot into a terminal, but to make a terminal readily available for users with a friendly programming interface would not hurt - and this exists in some form today but still lacks the magic of QBASIC/etc.

> Does the world need another OS?

The answer to this question, and other variants like it -- "does the world need another ____" to me boils down to ethics and vision. Maybe we don't need another version of this product, but maybe we can have a product just a good with a better vision and supports making more ethical decisions, and then we can expect over time the technology or the engineering, or the manufacturing process to catch up.

Another thought I have is deeply experienced operating system developers seem to be fading away. I could be wrong, and maybe the world doesn't care but we shouldn't take forgranted that OSes have gotten as good as they will get. Maybe a new OS will help inspire another generation of OS developers. (I would be one. Would love to hack on some low level, hard computer science problems instead of the same, mundane, line of business apps I build every day)

You are correct about OS developers fading. The need simply is not there any more and the demand now revolves mostly around high-level jobs. Even in my case, I noticed that the vast majority of companies do not need someone who has written their own X - it is far more valuable to be versed with mainstream implementations of X.

It is also something I find worrisome. Programmers spend their lives building up unique knowledge, only to have it fade into oblivion. We keep reinventing the wheel but don't care to invest in keeping the wheel rolling. :)

>What is it about the Commodore/AmigaOS brand that is worth resurrecting?

Nostalgia, and you can't really resurrect nostalgia. I loved my Commodores when I was growing up, but times have changed. The BBS software that I ran and modded are long gone, the friends I would post with are long gone, the doors would be fun for about 5 minutes.

It was great, but it's like meeting a great childhood friend that you haven't seen in 20 years. Most of the time, it's fun to reminisce, but there's nothing new there. We've both changed.

Yep, it is like trying to make new Star Wars films. The magic is just gone. Still, the Star Wars brand remains strong, even if just by virtue of magic long past. :)

I agree that there is nostalgia involved, but it is only part of the picture.

From a software developer's point of view the Amiga is worth resurrecting because the operating system design represents a promise that you can get great power and flexibility out of modest means, by keeping complexity at bay.

It wasn't always so rosy, but you could pack quite a punch by developing products for the Amiga. The system gave you a lot of leverage, which architect Carl Sassenrath rightly referred to as "empowering the user". The development environment (a 'C' compiler, a debugger and a decent text editor would see you through) and the operating system documentation were solid enough. You could comfortably hold the entire design of the system and its APIs in your head. That kind of knowledge is rare these days, given how complex our platforms of choice have become.

I have been an Amiga software developer for more than three decades now, through the good times and the less good times (it used to be a hobby, became a business, now it's a hobby again). It does give you perspective, and not everything that came around in these last three decades measured up so well: how much of the power of the hardware platform ends up in the hands of the user?

The (for lack of a better word) "thin" Amiga operating system layer allowed you to squeeze a maximum of performance out of the hardware. I recall that during the late 1990'ies Amiga networking software, tested against a HP-UX based logic analyzer's networking performance in the lab, came out on top.

This reminds me of an old George Carlin trope:

How many big oil companies are out there: Three. Big banks: Three, four. Presidential candidates: Hillary or "The Donald". Visa or Mastercard. Red or Blue.

But: 32 ice cream flavors! 50 different types of noodles!! 250 varieties of sneakers!!!

Everything important is laid out for you.

Everything unimportant: endless, meaningless choices.

(I miss him so much. What would I give to see what he'd do with the material a Donald presidency would hand him?!)

I for one am happy with Apple. But still, it would be nice to have another good player out there. You wouldn't even need to be visionary. Just not-creepy would be nice already!

Not-creepy would be a good start. :)

I am happy "enough" with OSX and Windows, in that they are sufficient for my needs. Maybe a 7/10 or 8/10. I am looking forward to that 10/10 experience. A perfect, painless experience. A system that does not cripple its ambitions with backwards compatibility, but rather boldly attempts to lead a new path. Is it even possible? I don't know. :)

> My dream is to buy up the Commodore / Amiga IP and make a "true" successor (as I have stated in the past several times!).

Honestly, good luck and success! I owned a C64, and I remember a lot of fun I had with this thing at young age.

I wish such a revival would also happen to Atari ST. I owned this thing myself, and I remember how incredible performant it was. It was the first affordable workstation. There was software like Turbo-C (the harbinger of Borland C) and Tempus Editor. Tempus Word was a word processor that was more performant and responsive than today's MS Office on a 4 GHz workstation, despite lack of coprocessor and GPU, and despite the fact that the 68k cpu operated with just 8 MHz. Can you imagine that? I am not exaggerating. You have to see it in action to believe it. Only BeOS was performant like that.

That was possible because the ST didn't have all the bloatware of the current PC generation. I am really sick of all the Mac-only and UEFI/SB Win10-locked hardware, and I don't have much mind anymore to be continually aware of rootkits, ransomeware and all the nonsense on Android and PC. Even iOS devices have been hacked already. I don't have the mind to purchase a new device every year or two just to have a rather secure OS version.

It seems that we have no other options than to go back to the roots if we want get rid of all this trouble.

By the way, my personal dream is a workstation which is completely based on open hardware and software. RISC-V would be a good foundation.

> By the way, my personal dream is a workstation which is completely based on open hardware and software. RISC-V would be a good foundation.

The Free Software Foundation has a hardware certification program for this: https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-f...

I would love to write a new version of the GEM AES to run on RISC-V, on top of some kind of lightweight realtime OS.

As someone who keeps having the same thoughts and Amiga flashbacks, take my modernized wish list, in case you ever set out to actually do something like that:

Hardware: Smallish form factor, not with an integrated keyboard like the A500 but maybe a flat elongated box that can sit between the keyboard and the display (or wherever people want to put it). It needs to be absolutely silent, or at the very least silent at idle. It needs good audio and a decent, modern GPU. It should have easy user access to RAM, SSD, and other upgradeable parts if applicable. It doesn't absolutely have to be an Intel/AMD CPU, although that would not be the worst idea, but it can't be a low power ARM - it has to have reasonably good performance. USB 3, Wifi, Bluetooth are mandatory! User-controllable GPIO pins would be a huge bonus. So would multi monitor support, preferably up to 3.

Software: a minimal BSD or Linux base stack would be nice, and a sane and tight GUI on top of it. No mandatory cloud shenanigans. Come to think of it, sane and tight should be the overriding software theme. Ship compat libraries so it's easy to recompile existing software for it, especially web browsers and game engines. People who want to ship software for it shouldn't be made to jump through hoops (looking at you, Apple). Choose a single minimal but powerful GUI toolkit (or invent one), and build all the OS GUI with that, make that the default choice for your IDE. No insane plethora of background system services. Fast startup time, under 10 seconds minimum. No console-based tweaking should be required of the user for anything that is within the standard usage envelope, but all system management APIs should also be usable from a text shell if necessary.

My ideal would be that it can easily be turned into a single piece for portability - even if these pieces ultimately separated, like with a mouse/keyboard. I used to own an iMac (~2011) and loved that it just had one coord, although porting it around was awkward (I once took it on a flight!!).

I now use a single 4k TV in place of my former 4-monitor setup, so I wonder if the mutli-monitor trend is on the way out? Having discreet desktop spaces is a must though, and most OSes don't handle this well on a single monitor.

Anyhow, I agree with pretty much everything you say :)

I think Be tried this?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

Yep I remember the BeBox :) Many more will probably try and fail, as it is not an easy thing to accomplish. That's why I'm leaving it "dream" territory for now. :)

I always felt like Amiga had a weird factor about it that kept it from being ubiquitous and mass-market. They had the whole co-processor fetish, even in the re-envisioned hardware platforms after all the acquisitions. Amiga always felt painfully fixed in time.

Part of piling all the features into the CPU is it gives old software a chance at longer legs. Modern PC's have the GPU, which seem to have morphed into special-purpose general processors through herculean API and driver efforts. I do wish the GPU could fade into the main CPU though, it feels like a sidecar concept until it does. CPU vendors and OS vendors need to do a better job at adding features to new software while supporting old hardware. The planned obsolescence of hardware in newer operating systems seems foolish to me.

A ruthless productivity UX is my "dream". I envision taking a non-mainstream OS like Haiku or the open source Solaris and building a new desktop environment for it. Standard hotkeys for actions across applications that go far beyond copy/paste, a very specific and detailed User Experience Guidelines that ONLY target desktop/large screen applications, and a fixed, standard desktop theme and look-and-feel that will only be updated once per decade. I would strongly encourage users to choose not to reskin the desktop or customize their keystroke mappings. Productivity demands that a standard interface is presented to all users who sit down at the machine. I would be accessibility-first, and all standards and conventions would work magnificently with screen readers and magnifiers.

No chasing fads, no reporting user telemetry back to the mothership, privacy is a given. My unparalleled stability and north star vision will be my only real selling points. I'd charge good money for my OS, and my slavish fanboys would pay up for every upgrade and t-shirt I put on offer after my yearly mock turtleneck pitch. That's my dream, at least, hehe.

> I do wish the GPU could fade into the main CPU though,

Like this, maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Uni...

Yeah! I want that kind of design to win.

Maybe it wasn't so in the US but in the UK, Europe, Australia and NZ the Amiga WAS mass market. It was an affordable home computer (when 'home computer' was a phrase). The transition to business computers is where they lost the plot and got out commoditized by pc box makers.

Sorry, I didn't mean to denigrate the platform by saying it wasn't mass market. Obviously, it sold millions of units, and was successful in its time.

I'm probably viewing the Amiga through too much of a contemporary lens and just being too critical. But, at the time the Amiga was out and selling, I recall thinking it was a wacky piece of kit. It was brilliant but weird hardware with rough edges on the software side, and that wasn't what I was looking for in a computer.

"Maybe it wasn't so in the US but in the UK, Europe, Australia and NZ the Amiga WAS mass market."

While I know of quite a few people (at least 4) who owned, used Amiga, the Amiga was always the rich-mans computing option. Most home computing at that time was Commodore, PC even Trash-80s.

Amiga's real death blow was a frivolous patent lawsuit IIRC.

Still, your ideals mirror mine quite a bit.

I have long been against discrete GPUs and specialized APIs/units, which have led to fast triangle rasterization at the cost of the beautiful and creative flexibility pure CPU coding once allowed. In fact, I'd be happy with a step backwards in graphics for this cause. I don't think gameplay has advanced significantly from the days of Doom and Duke3D (at least with regard to graphical improvements), and the more advanced graphics have led us down a rabbit hole of production costs and complexity. Quite a few people enjoy coding on the Pico8 for this reason. (http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php)

I'd really like to build a cohesive UI/UX experience with fairly rigid standards and an eye towards elegant programming implementation, data-binding, fluid layout, etc. Distributing an application should be a no-brainer, but at the same time programmers should not be handcuffed by over-the-top security constraints. Rather than go nuts trying to satisfy every hardware combination, take a more console-ish approach with a sane set of limited hardware.

You could not please everyone, but they are trusting you to make the hard decisions. Which is another Jobs thing (I swear I am not a fanboy, more of a Woz guy, but many of his philosophies are relevant here) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65_PmYipnpk

Annual turtleneck pitch mandatory :)

You are my people!

Are you familiar with Alan Kay's Viewpoints research on KSWorld and OMeta?

What do you think about Qubes on a Skylake Skull Canyon NUC (small desktop with Iris Pro and Thunderbolt) as a desktop research platform? Qubes/Xen would allow existing Linux/Windows to run in parallel with an experimental OS. There is a cross-OS compositing graphics stack (like VMware Workstation Unity) in Qubes that tries to balance security with usability - could be extended.

Qubes also has hardware-rooted measured launch ("anti evil maid") to verify the integrity of the TCB, with keys under user/owner control. As systems get more complex, we need boot-and-runtime integrity measurement to ensure components have not been unexpectedly modified.

An interesting area of research is "data sovereignty" as a counterpoint to "surveillance capitalism". We need a modern storage API that shares the data portability goals of the EA/Amiga Interchange File Format, http://www.martinreddy.net/gfx/2d/IFF.txt & http://www.fileformat.info/format/iff/egff.htm.

As new data rendering capabilities are added to the OS, apps get support for free, as IFF delivered on the Amiga. In exchange, apps cannot lock user data into proprietary formats. This data interoperability then enables multi-app data analytics and UX compositing, with OS enforcement of user ownership and policy, rather than vendor or cloud policy.

Since app/service vendors are impermanent, standardize data interchange APIs with OSS implementations, ensuring the survival of user data. Combine this with KSWorld/Rebol ideas about DSLs for OS-enforced user extension of apps (think Excel declarative programming), and "apps" become data pipeline components, instead of fixed-function GUIs where users have to plead for changes.

I am familiar with pretty much everything related to Alan Kay (in fact, he was an advisor to OpenAI, where I had a brief contracting stint). :)

I like the form factor of many NUCs but would be willing to go even bigger (maybe up to the size of a tactical suitcase, something like this but with user-friendly design: http://www.governmentvideo.com/Portals/0/IMT%20Suitcase%20Re...).

I am the least qualified person to comment on security, but I'll give my viewpoint for what it is worth: For me, there are two types of security: passive and reactive. Passive being that secure measures are in place to prevent foul-doing. Reactive being that threats are identified as they are created and appropriately eliminated. In the real world, our law system is passive and reactive. We are allowed to buy guns (but only by going through a passive security process [1]), but (severe) punishment is issued for misusing them (reactive security). In a way, reactive security functions as passive security - i.e. people do not steal because they are afraid of going to jail.

I believe in a little bit of both. I do not like security that obstructs users from doing what they want to do, especially if there are ways to circumnavigate that security anyway. A large problem I see in the software world is that we are too afraid to enforce security reactively, or the laws are simply not in place to be able to effectively do it.

([1] unless via a blackmarket/etc)

If you spend enough time with a system like Qubes, you realize there's no need for a tradeoff between freedom/experimentation/learning and security — everything is contextual. There is a natural lifecycle where tasks move from experimental to predictable.

In the experimental phase, you want security to create strong isolation between the open area and the rest of the world, to maximize freedom within the protected area. As experimental code matures and wants to interact with external systems, and (possibly) the entire world via public internet, we can whitelist expected behavior and impose contextual limits, to regulate transitions across the biological system/world membrane.

One question is, who determines policy for non-experimental systems that interact with the world? Centralized app-stores are a blunt policy instrument, not to mention their propensity for business conflicts of interest. On the one hand, we want to encourage reuse of known-good policy defaults, which have been proven by other users against known threats. On the other hand, the long tail has many corner cases and even non-expert users can search the web to tweak config/policy settings to manage their own policies.

One techno-political precedent is CSS style sheets which at least tried to model a separation between "publisher" and "user" style sheets, acknowledging (a) the conflict of interest, (b) that users can override publishers.

What if every policy layer in client systems involved late-binding runtime negotiation among different stakeholders? An unplanned variation is happening with ad-blockers and anti-adblockers and anti-anti ... what if we developed DSLs for the purpose of efficient runtime and contextual policy negotiation? That would move us a lot closer to behavioral and contextual policy rather than semantic central policy.

If you ever do it, I promise I'll be one of your first 10 customers.

If you ever do it, I promise I'll be one of your first 10 employees.

:) :)

Just merge AmigaOS with Linux the same way Jobs merged Classic MacOS with BSD Unix.

Make new video and sound chips based on SVGA and Soundblaster chips to run Windows if the user wants. Make the Intel the main CPU and add in a 68K chip and PowerPC chip that can run old code in a Window. When not running legacy software the 68K and PowerPC chip can be used for coprocessing. Add in an ASIC Bitcoin mining chip as well to mine bitcoins.

One "problem" I've observed with initiatives to make new kinds of computers is that eventually you want software on them. Some sort of x-nix compatibility layer will inevitably creep in and then the computer and OS just seem to become yet another compilation target for every popular GNU/Free/Open Source project in the world and then you're basically just using a weird window manager with weird compatibility issues and slightly out of date builds of the software everybody else is using (or local clones of the same).

Systems like the Amiga existed when the complexity and economics of making software for one kind of computer (thus making it unique or special) really worked out -- and even then most things were ported between a variety of platforms. It's very hard to create a differentiated platform and keep it differentiated long enough that it doesn't just get overwhelmed with the rest of the world.

What do you think about MorphOS? It looked beautiful and featured last time I checked:

http://www.morphos.de/intro

MorphOS continues to look really cool. I've never taken the time to dig further into but might have to take a look.

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