AmigaDOS Command Reference | Hacker News Reader

AmigaDOS Command Reference

wiki.amigaos.net

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Apart from wondering where this sprang from, if anyone wonders why AmigaDOS was such an ugly fit with the rest of exec and written in BCPL not C:

They'd contracted a SV company to produce CAOS, to a spec of Carl Sassenrath - the creator of exec (OO multi-tasking kernel). As deadline got closer and closer it was clear it wasn't happening, or even close. It was meant to get resource tracking and some other features to integrate with exec.

Edit: Found the spec and story of CAOS: http://www.thule.no/haynie/caos.html

It got AmigaDOS - a port of Tripos from UK company Metacomco. It got that because no one else they asked believed they could deliver anything in the remaining time. That's why there was all the BCPL weirdness with DOS.

Thanks for that; that was so difficult for then young, untrained me to get my head around, as well as reading the Amiga Reference Manuals - it was all so foreign.

Tripos started on PDP11, but had already been ported to 68k - just needed the exec glue code. Don't think the story ever properly came out but you get the impression it was the week or weekend before. :)

The weird data thing was because of BCPL language - it only understood words, not bytes.

I hadn't realized how ahead of its time the Amiga was for a personal computer: TCP/IP, MIDI, SCSI, REXX, (screamtracker) MODs.

I suspect this is a reference for a much later version of the OS. You probably wouldn't see all of these commands on a machine from the Amiga's heyday.

There are definitely new commands and functionality in there, but a lot of the functionality was present in earlier versions. The shell, at least, is not wildly different in older versions. It's been a _long_ time so I can't quickly give a point-by-point comparison, but a lot there looks familiar (and the bulk of my experience was in Workbench 1.3 and 2.1).

The SCSI commands were there at start.

There was some unix and tcp commands that were part of the devkit if I remember right (pretty hazy these days). Gave uucp (for exchanging the developer newsgroups), a selection of unix commands, tcp/ip stack, and some other things I forget. They were fairly early.

Rexx came prerelease with devkit in 1.3, baked into OS in 2.0. MODS No clue.

The A2000 was in it's heyday, I think; you would see most of those commands (or their equiv) with an Amiga A2000 with the Amiga LANCE ethernet board A2065 and AS225 TCP/IP option, or maybe even the Amiga UNIX; there was even a DECNet stack which worked quite well... AREXX was always there, right? There were many SCSI commands as well to support the A2000 Zorro SCSI board. "bigroadshow"? it was apparently part of the TCP/IP stack. I guess it just depended on which system, boards, and options you bought at the time.

ARexx wasn't included with the OS until 2.0. You could buy it as a third-party add on for 1.3 and earlier.

2.0 was already in the amiga 500 plus and that was still very early in the life of the Amiga.

Agreed; I used them all back then. I connected my A2000 to my companies' DECnet and IP network, and used TCP/IP to move data to and from Japan and Europe. I used my machine to send UUCP, admin Silicon Graphics, Evans and Sutherland, DEC uVax and PCs, ran X11 (IIRC), as well as troubleshoot network issues. I could print to Postscript printers, even though Adobe was a real pain (you had to dump PS fonts from the printer, then convert them to Amiga as Adobe kept hinting a secret at that time and didn't support Amigas, just Macs and PCs).

Tomas Rokicki's AmigaTeX, with its previews, was a lot better than any other implementation of the time, too.

It's been quite a while (the ole 2500 is in storage) but it seems like a person could change directories without the "CD" command. Just type the path in the CLI, hit return, and you moved to that directory. edit: Likely thinking of the "implied CD" mentioned in the link.

That's true (I've actually got an amiga shell window open in an emulator on another workspace right now...) - the CD command is only needed in cases of ambiguity.

I hope you removed the clock battery from your A2500 before storing it. By now it would have started leaking corrosive gunk, a very common cause of death for these old machines.

Nuts. I don't think I removed the battery and it's been in storage for almost ten years. Then again if it can survive me naively washing the motherboard with a garden house and letting it dry in the sun, I think the Amiga gods will keep the battery intact for me. I hope so anyway.

If you have the opportunity, it's worth checking it and cleaning it up.

I didn't know about this problem at the end of the 90s when I stopped using my A4000 and the battery destroyed the motherboard.

I'm not sure why this is on the front page of HN. But I'm starting to mess around with Aros so this might come in handy I guess. Thanks!

many of us HNers were / are amigans. some still owe them or at least use an amiga emulator. the amiga community is still alive and kicking. don't mind the impact amiga had on computing

As a non-amigan but a huge fan of alternate OSes, I am constantly impressed by the enthusiasm and energy you guys still have for this system. It's contagious in a non-annoying way. I upvote interesting Amigan stuff whenever I come across it.

As an old-school DOS user, AmigaDOS, which I wasn't familiar with, looks fascinating. I'll have to see if it's available next time I boot Icaros Desktop.

welcome to the club! AROS does have a decent amigaDOS support

I've been hosting a similar site for years now, but in a more Amiga-Friendly browser format (basic HTML):

http://www.jaruzel.com/projects/AmigaDOS-Guide-Help/index.ht...

There's also a zipfile for download.

Someting is messed up on that page:

  COUNTLINES
  Binds device drivers to hardware.

  CPU
  Counts how many lines a file is made of.

Used to be a nice documentation site, until they decided to cover AmigaOS4, ditching 3.

I still have a couple boxes of Amiga floppies. Including the source to NewTek DigiView capture software in 68000 assembler hilariously enough.

Anyone know if there's a way to read them?

I'm sure Jason Scott from the Internet Archive would love to image them for you.

Here and ready to help. Jscott@archive.org

I'll dig 'em and out and see what I have.

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