The Micro-AmigaOne and Amiga OS4 Developer Prerelease (Update 1) (original) (raw)
Biz & IT —
It lives! Ars looks at new Amiga hardware and the Amiga OS4 Developer …
Introduction
The Amiga computer was a machine ahead of its time. When it was released in 1985, its color screen (4096 colors in HAM mode!), four-channel sampled stereo sound, preemptive multitasking GUI, and custom chips to accelerate both sound and graphics made the year-old Macintosh seem antiquated and the PC positively Paleolithic. Steve Jobs was reported to be extremely worried about the Amiga, but fortunately for him and Apple, Commodore had absolutely no idea what they were doing.
Many jokes have been made about Commodore being unable to sell water to a dying man in the desert, and sadly, these jokes were not that far from the truth. After a showy introduction at the Lincoln Center, which included pop star Deborah Harry and artist Andy Warhol, Commodore stopped all production and advertising of the Amiga 1000, in anticipation of the imminent release of the new 2000 and cost-reduced 500 models. These didn't appear until 1987, and much early momentum was lost. Commodore continued to make terrible mistakes, suffered financially from declining C-64 sales, and eventually went bankrupt in April 1994.
The Amiga, by this time, had carved out a small but devoted niche, especially in digital video. The Video Toaster, closely tied to the Amiga hardware, replaced hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of TV editing equipment for under US$8,000. Bundled with this hardware was Lightwave, a 3D modeling and rendering program that was used to make the pilot and first season of Babylon 5 (in the remaining seasons, they continued to use Lightwave, but this time on Alpha and Intel computers).
Third-party developers, not willing to wait for the protracted Commodore bankruptcy to resolve itself, developed add-ons for the Amiga giving it access to the new 24-bit SVGA graphics cards coming from the PC world, freeing the dependence on the now-aging custom graphics chips, as well as PowerPC upgrade cards that worked like massive coprocessors for applications rewritten to support them.
However, the lack of a new Amiga computer hurt the platform greatly. Commodore was bought at liquidation by Escom AG, a German PC firm who wanted only the Commodore brand name and logo, and had no interest in the Amiga. Escom itself went bankrupt a few years later, and the Amiga was briefly bought out by set-top manufacturer VISCorp, before they too filed for liquidation.
Its third owner was none other than Gateway Computers, who were interested mainly in Commodore's old patent portfolio, but claimed to be interested in resurrecting the platform. However it became increasingly clear that Gateway was never going to do anything with the Amiga, so a consortium of investors calling themselves Amino Development bought out the rights to the Amiga hardware and OS in 1999. The new company was called Amiga, Inc., the same name as the original group headed by Jay Miner that had started the computer company in 1982 before Commodore bought them out. Amiga had come full circle!
In the heady days of the dot-com boom, Amiga Inc. had all sorts of grandiose plans for resurrecting the platform. A new OS based on QNX, then Linux, as well as a Java-like "Amiga Anywhere" development environment or AmigaDE were proposed. Of these three, only the last ever came to fruition before Amiga Inc. ran out of money when the bubble burst. There had been some talk of a new, PowerPC-based version of the classic AmigaOS, version 4.0, but as Amiga, Inc. had no more resources, everyone assumed it was dead. WIRED magazine even gave OS4 a special vaporware award, beating out even Duke Nukem Forever!
But an amazing thing was happening. Three companies were actually working on a new Amiga platform. One, bplan Gbmh (formed from the ashes of Phase 5, an Amiga accelerator card company) was originally going to be a licensee of Amiga Inc. and produce hardware to run OS4. They had a falling-out with the moribund Amiga Inc., merged with Thendic to became Genesi, and decided instead to produce both the hardware and an "Amiga-like" OS themselves. These were released as the PegasosPPC motherboard and MorphOS in late 2001.
A second company, Eyetech UK, was to be the second licensee of OS4. Eyetech had been an Amiga hardware and add-on distributor, and formed a partnership with a Taiwanese company to produce modified Teron PowerPC motherboards. The third company, Hyperion Entertainment, was hired by Amiga, Inc. to write OS4 itself. As Amiga, Inc. had no money, Hyperion signed a contract that would give them the rights to OS4 if Amiga, Inc. went bankrupt. Hyperion was a small company that produced ports of Windows games for the Macintosh, Amiga and Linux market.
The first AmigaOne motherboards were released in 2002, but there was no OS4 to go with them, so they shipped with Debian PPC Linux instead. Was Hyperion too small a company to manage this massive task, the first operating system project they had ever attempted? While MorphOS gained a small but dedicated following, AmigaOne owners anxiously awaited any kind of news. Finally, after an agonizing 18-month wait, the first Developer Prerelease CD of OS4 was shipped to AmigaOne owners worldwide. Eyetech, meanwhile, had announced a new batch of AmigaOne motherboards, this time coming in the tiny mini-ITX form factor. An update to OS4 was delivered to coincide with their release. The prospect of exploring a brand new operating system plus the possibilities of doing hardware design around a tiny, low-power motherboard were too much for me and I bit the bullet and ordered an AmigaOne Micro with OS4 on November 2004.
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