Amiga NG - The Amiga Renaissance!

Work on the new generation (OS5) Amiga is underway. In the year 2000, expect to be as stunned by this new machine as we all were by the original Amiga when Andy Warhol and Deborah Harry presented the launch in 1985. Amiga has been in the doldrums for a few years, but with the giant Gateway company as the new owner they are now realizing a dream that could benefit us all - Digital Convergence. Because in the future, even your shoes will have an internet address...

I think Gateway were quite surprised to find that, along with an aging but efficient multitasking OS, they had acquired a bunch of creative/passionate/nutty folk: the Amiga user base, including many developers. With their help and inspiration the new machine is being developed, based on a secret MMC chip. Dr. Allan Havemose, in charge of Development of the new Amigas, has promised the machines will have "a fully protected OS with processes and threads", "browser and Java as standard", "transparent networking with full 128 bit addresses - we can build both flat and hierarchical networks", a high performance 3D engine capable of calculating "hundreds of millions tri-linear mapped 3D pixels per second", enough to fill a 1920x1200 24bit screen (HDTV!) with fluent framerates...

There is speculation - and considerable hope - that the TransMeta company, where the Linux guru Linus Torvalds is now working, may have something to do with the mystery chip. TransMeta, despite their prestigious HQ, do not have a website yet... Other possible candidates include Equator, VSIS, Exponential Technology or Billions of Operations Per Second, Inc.

The memorably-named Fleecy Moss of Amiga recognizes that the future is not about bigger desktop machines: "We are about defining a new market, a market in which desktops are at home with intelligent TVs, games consoles, servers and workstations - where it isn't the size of your hardware that counts but its ability to do the work you need it to do", "for the old Amiga market of just desktops, workstations and servers, then PPC makes sense." (PPC is the PowerPC from Motorola/IBM that many Amigas now run at up to 233 MHz as a second processor.) "we are after a much wider market... in which devices across the scale speak the same langage and run the same code... we need a processor that offers great price/performance/functionality - this is what the superchip offers."

What about industry standards like CORBA? Fleecy talks about "transparent connectivity to any remote or distributed datasource - rewriting the vocabulary". Industry Support? "PC companies are beating our doors down wanting to write for a nice OS - we invite them in, show them around". I just hope Micro$oft and Intel don't get to hear about this!

OS5dev boxes, running on the ancient x86 technology (basically PCs with Amigas on a PCI card), will be out in late 1998 so that developers can get up to speed on OpenGL, FireWire, USB, Java, the new kernel and all the other OS5 standards that will be new to the Amiga market. These "November Boxes" may be out as late as January, but they are not intended for users, merely for developers to access OS5 software tools rather than OS5 itself.

Firm news is emerging slowly. A company with partners such as IBM, Phillips, Dupont and VISA has been named as Amiga's Next Generation OS partner. QNX is the source of the Neutrino microkernel on which Amiga will build their own OS with GUI, graphics, 3D, OpenGL, multimedia, video and user interfaces. QNX will also provide the file system, device drivers etc. You can get a demo of their software (for Unix or Windows) from the QNX site.

The QNX architecture is very stable, as used in nuclear powerplants, Cisco routers, the NASA space shuttle and it is revolutionary in distributed terms. A single instance of a program can be run on several computers simultaneously, or a program can target its output to windows on another person's machine. They have a GUI called Photon: it's novel too, you can look at windows sideways? Apparently a 2D window looks like a thin line from the side. Um... well, at the Demo in Cologne, they started a game of Doom and moved the window to the left, whereupon the left half of the Doom window appeared running on another screen on another machine! You can also take over the mouse and screen of another system on the network. Amiga will be building the API for all this good stuff, using the industry-standard OpenGL where possible and setting their own standards for the new wild stuff. "We will use elements of Photon - we will NOT use the look and feel of Photon" (Dr. Allan Havemose).

Carl Sassenrath should be producing the revolutionary REBOL for Amiga OS5.

No-one else has got this technology - no-one else is even close. The Amiga Renaissance has started!

With acknowledgements to the Amiga Web Directory, AmigaWorld and others from whose sites this news was condensed. Thanks, JVK. 16.11.98.