Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

I've rediscovered how wonderfully usable AmigaDOS is, and had some fun exploring real world usability in 2023 and now 2024.

An Amiga 3000 with the original 25 MHz m68030 / m68882 is barely functional, but I can ssh with it, I can load modern SSL sites, I can write, print, et cetera.

An Amiga with an accelerator and m68060 is comfortable, and it actually snappier than most modern Windows systems.

An Amiga with a PiStorm makes modern computers feel sluggish and drowsy. It's not easy to explain, but there's an immediate response to practically everything that's not from a floppy (although it's amazing how quickly things load) and isn't loading over the Internet (can't help the speed of light).

The more I play with these systems, the less I want to run a modern GUI OS. Give me the AmigaDOS GUI on a NetBSD machine, and I'll consider using a new machine.

Reading this made me (very) sorely miss my A1200, which I used as my daily driver all the way up to 2003. I was shocked at how much difference in speed a 4MB Fast RAM expansion and 68881 FPU made.

You might like Photon of Scoopex's Amiga Hardware Programming tutorial[1], in which he creates an Amiga Demo using assembly from scratch in ASMOne/ASMTwo

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10&list=PLtjBEWQ66x...

Input latency is famously short on an Apple IIe. Something like 5ms from key to screen. That is far, far faster than modern computers.

I'm interested in "new architecture, retro capability" myself, so devices like MiSTer or Agon Light have interested me lately, although I haven't jumped over to getting one. Along the same lines, I decided that I would just run my entire dev environments(including the editors) in VMs or emulators, and even though that's slower, it greatly clears up the distinction between the dev workspace and the desktop.

I've also become a little warmer to terminal apps since they seem to be rather timeless; my Android phone now uses Termux with yt-dlp and cmus when I want to download and play back portable music, and this is both a grossly mismatched UX and also a very stable music experience, unlike all the Play Store apps I've tried. I might have to put F-Droid on there and explore those apps as well.

>but I can ssh with it

From AmigaOS? What implementation are you using?

I am not aware of any that can connect to defaults-configured, present time openssh servers.

On netbsd, yes it works as it's just openssh. I use it regularly.

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