Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mister_Snuggles | Hacker News Reader

I never used an Atari computer, nor did I know anyone who did, but I always wonder what the world would be like if Windows and macOS didn't "win".

If Atari and Amiga had won instead, what would the world look like?

What would the server world look like? Would there be some weird "Amiga Server Enterprise Edition"? Would servers just be Linux without any meaningful competition?

Would Atari have shook the world by introducing a new CPU that resulted in amazing battery life compared to the Amiga competition? Would some of us be using AtariPhones? Would Android be a thing?

Would retrocomputing folks talk about their Windows 3.1 boxes the way that Ataris and Amigas are currently talked about?

View on HN

I'd assume it would have been pretty similar but we'd be running on Motorola CPU's (or a descendant of them)

The platforms would have needed to be opened up to clone builders to reach critial mass.

Amiga was a lot like DOS/Classic Mac OS, single user, unprotected memory...we would have seen it added on to like Windows 3.x/9x, until a re-written version with the right stuff took over (like Windows NT/2000/XP did).

Someone like Linus would have still likely written a UNIX clone and open-sourced it.

The minicomputers and UNIX servers/workstations would have still hung around for a while. The real trick is the Amiga CPU and the rest of the hardware would need to keep getting improved, catch up in speed, reach 64 bits, SMP...

> Amiga was a lot like DOS/Classic Mac OS, single user, unprotected memory

AmigaOS was actually implementing real preemptive multitasking and was much more "modern" than MacOS and Windows from the same era, and a lot of things were actually unix-alike ! Comparing it to DOS is like an insult :) But yes, memory was unprotected because mot Amiga CPUs didn't have an MMU (but if you did, you could use this https://www.nightvzn.net/portfolio/web/amiga_monitor/archive... ).

Amiga engineers were quite found of UNIX, most of its design was them searching better ways for graphical systems.

The initial game focus was the outcome of various factors during Amiga's transition from idea into a shippable product.

There are some vintage Q&A sessions that go through this.

> The platforms would have needed to be opened up to clone builders to reach critial mass.

Not that much. More standardization on the Unix side and we'd all be happy.

It would have been a very different place.

In the IBM compatible world, the clones drove down the price then drove forward progress. It is doubtful that much of a clone market would develop in the Amiga/Atari world since the parent companies were already competing against IBM compatibles on price. Without clones to break free (as happened in the IBM compatible world), there wouldn't be clones to drive forward progress. I'm not even sure cloning the Amiga would be practical. Apparently Commodore had enough trouble "cloning" the Amiga (i.e. developing higher performance, yet compatible machines). Without the clones driving progress, companies like SGI and Sun would likely still be in the picture.

If Amiga/Atari domination somehow did happen, I suspect the CPU situation would be flipped around, with Motorola having both the incentive and finances to continue on with a fully compatible 680x0 line of processors and Intel chasing after its own equivalent of an 680x0-to-PPC transition.

As for the retrocomputing thing: DOS/Windows 3.x nostalgia is very much a thing in today's world. In that alternate reality, they would likely be higher profile (as Amiga/Atari are today).

If nothing else, it would have been nice to see Digital Research and Gary Kildall get the last laugh via Atari computers taking off.

What a terrible loss it was when he died. He was the Bill Gates we needed.

I think if Atari and Amiga won the world would have a lot more focus on the media side of things, the playful, graphical, musical expression would be more evident. I don't think we'd have spent as long in the beige-box era, and maybe we'd still have little colorful imacs running something Haiku-esque, with enlightenment on top and some breakcore tracker music on bootup.

This is my fantasy, you're welcome to enjoy it while you're here and remember, no shoes on the couch.

the playful, graphical, musical expression would be more evident.

This was also the Mac's distinguishing feature at the time. It still is, so some extent. A lot of what drove mass adoption of home computers was that everyone wanted to bring the same computing environment, i.e. OS, they used at work or at school at home as well. This was DOS/Windows or System 7.

One reason was being able to bring home "free" software from work.

This was also OS/2 but this one didn't work so well.

> Would there be some weird "Amiga Server Enterprise Edition"?

I suspect Commodore's SVR4 port would have played a role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix

Likewise, Atari had a Unix port on the TT workstation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TT030

We also had (well, have) a Unix-like extension for the shipped TOS/GEMDOS/GEM OS in the form of MiNT/FreeMiNT, which went on to form the foundation of the official MultiTOS which unfortunately died along with the ST when Atari Corp died.

It had/has a POSIX(ish) API, device files, mountable filesystems, pre-emptive multitasking, TCP/IP, etc. while still being able to run classic TOS binaries.

You can run this in an emulator or on hardware still today and it still gets active development, under the GPL.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOkDuLmgWFo

That looks like it would be a ton of fun to try. I wonder how that would run on my MiST!

quite well. Though it benefits from a faster machine with an 020 or 030 and more memory.

Atari HATED to share anything with people outside the company. The couldn't even help developers build software for their machines, let alone let someone copy & commoditize their hardware. The Apple II was incredibly open and extensible, and successful. Macs where not and never more than a minor player until computers shifted to a mobile, general consumer product and Apple out executed and leveraged their single ecosystem.

> If Atari and Amiga had won instead, what would the world look like?

If the PC didn't establish itself, Commodore might have opted to release the 900 as a Unix workstation. With any luck, they'd port Coherent to the new Amiga and it'd be a Unix machine from day 1.

From watching Youtube, Ataris may have been the best computer to be exposed to in one's teenage years for so many reasons. It was very capable and efficient for it's CPU. Still might be to learn to build with constraints.

Windows became big because it was the successor of MS-DOS, the OS for the IBM PC, which architecture became popular because of cheap clones.

This wouldn’t happen with Atari or Amiga.

> This wouldn’t happen with Atari or Amiga.

Atari machines were cheap. Amiga not so much, but, eventually, they would catch up.

The server would still be UNIX, but the big iron UNIXes, not GNU/Linux with some BSDs and Windows on the mix, there would be no reason for Linux.

ARM was introduced by Acorn, even if there was some Apple money.

As for the rest, we would keep having nice graphical desktop environments, with interesting paradigms instead of trying to fit GUIs into UNIX clones.

And vertical integration, plenty of it, as it has become the norm again nowadays.

> And vertical integration, plenty of it, as it has become the norm again nowadays.

Except, not really. If you work at a startup or business that has to deal with "vertical integration" at-cost, your first goal is to get rid of it. Fly.io, Datadog, managed K8s, all of this stuff is literally first-to-go when scaling a business that needs to be profitable. Business-conscious users know they're being fucked over whether it's Apple, Microsoft or Oracle - you can't market it as "integration" to people that see the monthly bill.

And in the EU, vertical integration from large companies that can EEE their competitors is under extreme scrutiny now. Many execs have exploited it to engender themselves an unfair advantage and deserve the same scrutiny Microsoft got for their "integration" case.

If American governance shows the same competence, "vertical integration" will be the most feared business model of the 21st century and innovation will be put back on the table. For everyone.

The only PCs left that aren't subject to vertical integration are gamer PCs, and even lose are losing to consoles, as people focus on other devices for their daily computing activities.

Large majority of the population is using unupgradable laptops, where at most memory sticks, hard drives, battery can be changed.

I haven't touched a desktop at work since 2006.

Some even make do with a tablet for their computing needs.

Likewise those that have servers in-house, those are no longer PC towers under a desk, rather slice of pizza boxes in server racks.

> The server would still be UNIX, but the big iron UNIXes, not GNU/Linux with some BSDs and Windows on the mix, there would be no reason for Linux.

Linus would still get frustrated by the AIX'es and Solaris'es of the world, AT&T would still try to get rid of any BSD being publicly offered and Linux would still be invented under the GPL and get the GNU userland for free.

The biggest difference is that it would be currently used on more architectures than the two it's mostly used on these days.

Without PC as it was, most likely Linus would never had Minix to play with, or be frustrated with its MS-DOS compatible PC, so the genesis wouldn't have taken place.

Without a free and open Unix, Linus would be frustrated on whatever platform he would be using.

I am a huge Amiga fan, but the Amiga was going nowhere and was never going to win. The OS is just as terrible as classic Windows and MacOS from a reliability standpoint; yes not using a message pump for timeslicing was a really nice property but in most ways the design was _worse_ in terms of any hope of eventually getting memory protection in place.

I love the Amiga - it represented a unique point in time that coalesced a lot of interesting technologies and people together trying to do something interesting - but it was as far from a technology that had long term potential as you could get, pretty much in every way.

Ironically, the Atari ST's OS -- much maligned as 'primitive' by Amiga users -- was not like this. It had a proper syscall mechanism through TRAPs -- so proper 68000 architecture memory protection entirely possible with user/supervisor separation etc etc -- and an event loop with message passing (tho rarely used). Later extensions to add unix-like multitasking (MiNT -> FreeMiNT) actually ended up fairly elegant, and memory protection is a possibility for some things.

My understanding is that AmigaOS syscalls were basically JSRs?

The original shipped OS was basically a fork of CP/M and PC-DOS-ish but GEM overtop of it showed more attention to cleaner architectural concerns, though it was never really used to its full intent.

I was a die hard Amiga fan and I agree. The way to memory protection on some “what could have been” Amiga, would have been running a copy of the OS for every application and change the IPC if you wanted two programs to talk to each other

Reply on news.ycombinator.com