Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

syntonic_comma sent me the URL of a review of the new Amiga and AmigaOS 4 (developer), which I found simply interesting and nifty and fun until I hit the "performance" section on the last page and started thinking about what it implied WRT solving a problem I'd muttered about before...

Because the OS is so small (About 60MB on disk for a complete install), it fits very nicely in 256MB of RAM, with room for several applications, most of which have a similarly small memory footprint. This means that you can run the OS and multitask between several applications without ever swapping to the disk. In fact, although the new ExecSG kernel in OS4 supports virtual memory, it appears to be turned off in this build.

Running the OS and all its apps completely in memory provides a very different user experience than one is used to from modern operating systems. Switching applications is instantaneous, as is switching screens (providing you are running separate screens at the same monitor resolution, otherwise you have to wait for your monitor to resync).

Scrolling is about as fast as on my 2.4GHz P4 PC. While the PC clearly blows away the AmigaOne on pure CPU performance (for example, unarchiving files, or ripping to MP3), for general use they "feel" about the same. The A1 feels much faster than my 733MHz Pentium 3 running XP, and makes my poor 500MHz G3 iBook running OS X feel like a pig stuck in molasses.

(Note that the system he reviewed has an 800 MHz PPC CPU.)

Small. Snappy. Hmm. Maybe bloatware isn't inevitable after all. Maybe my perception of so much modern software as being bloatware isn't mere curmudgeonliness after all. I wonder whether it'll still be small and snappy ifwhen it gets to a "ready or prime time" version. Reading about it has gotten me interested in the Amiga again, in any case, if only for curiosity and an interest in a high perceived-performance:hardware-oomph ratio. (Way back when, I wanted an Amiga for the things that PCs and Macs just didn't do well (or in some cases, at all), starting with preemtive multitasking and hot video. Other platforms have caught up on those fronts.)

I also found the author's speculation interesting:

The AmigaOS is small (tiny, even!) fast, and Internet-ready, yet already has a large library of supported applications, exactly what is needed for the next generation of cell phones and other handheld devices. I have been playing around with Compact Flash to IDE adapters, and have installed the OS (as you can see from the screenshots, the OS plus all the applications and data I was testing took up only 377 megabytes) onto a 512MB compact flash card for a prototype wireless tablet I am developing.

[...] as cell phones, PDAs and living room set-top media boxes become more prevalent in the future, there is a chance that the A1 and OS4 could find a profitable niche. I have used PDAs that have similar CPU and RAM capacities as my AmigaOne and they do not provide the same speed and functionality that is already available in OS4. OS4 feels like a full desktop, yet has the resource requirements of a handheld. There is a chance, albeit a small one, that the Amiga might play a small role in this arena.

(That could be a lot more interesting than just allowing you to compose custom ring tones in Deluxe Music Construction Set, but I couldn't help thinking of that...)

A long time ago I told people that my ideal computer setup would have a PC, a Mac, a Unix machine, and an Amiga under the desk. I never did get that Amiga, but I've currently got Mac classic, not X yet), Windows, Linux, and BSD within easy reach (either physical keyboard or telnet). It's probably not yet time to put Amiga back on the wishlist for completeness-of-toolkit reasons, but it's creeping back on for coolness-and-curiosity reasons.