mark_round

Modern systems ? I dunno. I wouldn't use anything like Linux, Mac or Windows - there's just way too much indirection and the system as a whole is just too opaque for a beginner. I think the A500 could make a fantastic platform for systems programming teaching. I mean, it's probably going to be AmigaOS 1.2/1.3 so very basic compared to later releases but there's enough in there to hold attention and create something interesting. Plus it's always nice to have something like the original beige "wedge" to hack on, it's a lot more interesting and "real" than working on an emulator.

I think the thing that would hold you back on an un-expanded A500 would be choice of programming language; a C compiler is probably just too heavyweight to use on a basic machine, particularly if you don't have a hard drive fitted. Assembler would be OK, although possibly a little too low-level. Something like AMOS would fit the bill perfectly though: Would run find on older systems and very quick to create something that would hold the attention like a game or demo. Although that's not really "systems programming" as such.

CygnusEd was the absolute business back in the day. I still love it, but my muscle memory just isn't there anymore after years of PC/Mac editors! I guess I've also become too spoiled by modern conveniences. LiteXL runs on pretty much anything and writing extensions is also pretty easy. But maybe I should get back into the habit of using CygnusEd some more...

Ha, good eye :) Nah, you see an A1200 that I am constantly fiddling with, and I frequently take the SD and CF cards out to clone! I do have a set of backup scripts that clone content to a CF card in a PCMCIA adapter but I always feel safer with a full "dd" backup or similar. Because I keep opening it up I just leave the screws removed for easier access and make sure it's kept dust free every so often.

Author here, thanks for posting! Happy to answer any questions or chat Amiga stuff in general. Bear in mind - as I said in the article - I'm more-or-less a total newbie when it comes to all this stuff. I have been involved in the Amiga scene since I got my first A600 in the 90s, but really just observed the coding side of things from the sidelines although I did enjoy a brief stint as a Graphics Artist using DeluxePaint for a UK Scene group. My C code will probably make your eyes bleed, and I'm sure I've got some factual details wrong but diving back into this platform again (and discovering all the little details that made it so advanced for the time) after a long absence has been a lot of fun!

If you want to get really obscure, someone has implemented a substantial amount of VMS commands and related userland stuff for classic AmigaOS! http://aminet.net/package/misc/emu/AmiVms

Great stuff! Like many here, my blog/website seems to have been started at that magic ~20 year-old point. I also went back through the Internet Archive and revisited the different phases in my site's "life" at https://www.markround.com/about

It started off as static HTML - built in a tool called "AOL Press" I think I got on a CD from a magazine -and uploaded to the shared FTP space we got with our family's dial-up internet package. Under construction gifs and rainbow spacer bars galore...

Since then, it's moved to the various platforms of the day (Remember PHP Nuke ? Serenity ?), become virtualised, moved into the cloud, and now exists amongst various other things deployed to my public k8s cluster.

Having your own slice of the internet is a great experience, and I can't recommend it enough. Apart from the nostalgia trip of looking back through the various cheesy site designs and "fads" of the day, it's also fun to revisit the various tech stacks that have come and gone that I wrote about. There's still one of my earliest articles (a review of Solaris 9 - https://www.markround.com/blog/2002/07/02/Solaris-9-initial-...) online and I've tried hard through various migrations - eventually coming full-circle and back to static HTML with Jekyll - to keep the content presentable and avoiding link-rot.

It's an investment of time and money (domains, SSL before we had LetsEncrypt, hosting etc.) for sure but well worth it. I also take a certain amount of pride in stubbornly avoiding the trendy centralised blogging/content platforms that have come and gone over the last few decades - I miss the "old" Internet a great deal and I love that there's still a bunch of us preserving that spirit by running our own websites and tending to them over the years.

Here's to the next 20 years! Maybe we should start a HN webring :D

-Mark

It's a Haiku thing. Added around 2018 if I recall correctly - see the linked lobste.rs thread in another of my comments where a Haiku developer gives some (really interesting) background on the development and effects on the community.

I highly recommend it! Even if you haven't had the experience or attachment to BeOS it's a refreshing and fun take on a desktop system. It just "clicks" with me in a way that Linux/Windows/Mac never did. It's truly impressive that they've been going for over 20 years now (I still remember the first screenshot of app_server drawing a window in the early 2000s) and have accomplished so much from scratch. Can't wait to see where the project will go next!

Author of the article here. Thanks for posting this! There's also a really interesting thread on lobste.rs [1] where a Haiku developer talks more about some of their less user-visible innovations, compares the Linux development model to Haiku, and gives some background on the drama[2] caused by the adoption of their package management system.

Well worth a read and fascinating (to me, anyway!) to see new ideas and approaches from the Alt-OS scene.

[1]=https://lobste.rs/s/j9decl/haiku_package_management

[2]=https://lobste.rs/s/j9decl/haiku_package_management#c_owqi3t

Author here - thanks for posting! There's also a really interesting discussion thread about this on lobste.rs where a Haiku developer gives some of the interesting background (and drama!) behind the development of their package management system and other innovations: https://lobste.rs/s/j9decl/haiku_package_management#c_owqi3t

https://direnv.net/ possibly ?

I wrote about this a few years ago on my blog when I re-fitted my old Commodore Amiga with a floppy drive after years of using SD-card floppy emulators: http://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy/

There really was something special about labelling the disks, the deliberate act of sorting through your collection and selecting one... To me, it feels much like picking out a vinyl record to enjoy rather than having everything "on tap" with Spotify. And then there's the scene it generated which reminds me of the tape trading days of the 80s:

"...Later on, when I eventually got involved in The Scene, floppies brought us together in a way I think is now sadly long-gone. Because we traded disks with each other - and groups typically had members whose sole “job” in the group was as a “trader” or “swapper” - we also wrote to each other. As a particularly awkward teenager (with a bunch of the usual teen issues and a healthy side-order of angst), some of the closest friendships I formed during those years were with the other members of my group. Alongside the floppy disks we’d write long, rambling letters to each other full of everything and nothing. We’d fill our envelopes to each other with “Jiffy Junk” - little trinkets we’d collect and swap: Kinder surprise toys, trading cards and the occasional mix-tape... Even though I think I only ever met one of the guys from my group in person, I still think about them often to this day and wonder what they’re all doing now.

As the Amiga scene gradually died and the BBS (and later, the Internet and FTP sites) became the primary means of obtaining software I think a lot of those friendships were broken. Even though The Scene is still a very close-knit community, I’d be interested to know whether those same bonds exist today when most communication is probably electronic in nature..."

Thank you for posting that. It came at a surprisingly opportune moment and I needed to read that. I'll be checking it out later tonight.

Oh wow, that's seriously amazing! It's great to see others enjoying my crazy ideas :) These old systems sure can be a lot of fun. You definitely get your moneys worth!

Mine too. Eventually got a +3,a Plus and even a ZX81 for the sake of completion before I moved onto the Amiga.

Other systems of the day like the C64 could run rings around the Speccy, but I always loved it's quintessentially British "crap" aesthetic and charm, colour-clash and all :)

YS forever. SU had some good covertapes, but YS was a way of life.

Thanks! Looks like it's just been submitted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31134121

I'm glad you liked it, the whole project was a labour of love and a huge amount of fun to put together. Particularly the whole "running unit tests through an emulated zx printer" thing!

Hi, author of the article here! Great to see this posted today on the Speccy's 40th birthday :) Happy to answer any questions or reminisce about the Good Old Days!

I grew up with the Speccy and it's what kick-started my interest in computers and ultimately led to my career. I still have a +3, which is connected to the internet [1].

It's amazing to see that there's still a sizeable scene devoted to this humble little box, and there's new hardware and impressive hacks being built to this day. In the words of one of the messages from a user of my site: "It’s mad being online with a 40yr old computer designed around a tape recorder."

Part of it's longevity and appeal is how simple the system was - even 11 Year-old me could grasp the memory layout and experiment with writing assembler. I expect I'll still be hacking away on it in another 40 years!

[1] - I wrote a series of blog posts on how I mashed up a modern GitOps/k8s dev environment with 1980s Sinclair BASIC to build a community site: http://www.markround.com/blog/2021/12/21/devops-for-the-sinc...

As others have written, you can either download your config from an external host, or pass in environment variables to your container and generate a configuration based on them.

Lots of people write their own scripts to do this; I wrote Tiller (http://github.com/markround/tiller) to standardise this usage pattern. While I have written a plugin to support storing values in a Zookeeper cluster, I tend to prefer to keep things in YAML files inside the container - at least, for small environments that don't change often. It just reduces a dependency on an external service, but I can see how useful it would be in larger, dynamic environments.