AmigaOS was far ahead of its time and really a treasure trove of cool features. Not just on the UI side, most of its contemporaries didn't have loadable and unloadable drivers, pluggable file systems, etc. It's amazing all this even worked without memory protection, but almost all of it did work.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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I’d forgotten so much of this stuff. It really was amazing. The IFF file format and data types stuff was fantastic.
It's truly incredible. It was way before I was born, but I'm fascinated by it!
I was a teenager at the time so I got to play with it when it was new. I had the privilege of learning how to code on my Amiga 500. Sadly it was in AmigaBASIC and later AMOS Pro (I even bought the compiler for that) and I never got to using real programming languages until the Amiga was already defunct. I find myself going back now, though, and admiring the OS interfaces in context with much more knowledge. The UI APIs were very lacking compared to today's toolkits, but for the time they were really next level.
That's the same as me. I had Amos and the compiler too. Must have been around the time the company went under, perhaps just before. I didn't know they went under until years after. My parents would not have bought me an expensive PC anyway so I was stuck with what I had, and it was great.
Using the say command with the shell to have the Amiga 500 speak out the sentences you typed in was absolutely magical. The fact that this was just an add on to an already feature rich computer was awesome. PC users only gained this ability much later with the parrot function on the Creative Soundblaster which needed to be bought being extra expense for your PC.
I used to love this. I had some programming software, Amos I think it was called, everything I made had to have a talking voice in it, could even change pitch and speed. It really was amazing.
It's kind of sad how much diversity and uniqueness and interesting design we lost in software as well as hardware entering the modern age.
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