OpenEuphoria

RE: Mi Amiga (was RE: How about GNUphoria - was PEU CVS)

• Posted by Ron Tarrant <rtarrant at sympatico.ca> Nov 24, 2002
• 497 views

jbrown1050 at hotpop.com wrote:
> I'm young. What was an Amiga? (/me thinks about getting an Amiga 
> emulator for
> Linux and trying out out ...)

It was a hardware/software combination based on the Motorola 68xxx 
family of CPUs. Some of the things the Amiga offered long before anyone 
else (and some things Intel and Microsoft _still_ don't offer):
- unified memory space
- true multitasking
- 'open' API standards
- direct access to programming the hardware (a la DirectX)
- multiple simultaneous screen resolutions (imagine an 800x600
  display with a 1024x768 display partially overlapping it)
- true plug-and-play with dynamic (and automatic) resource assignment
- expandable, dynamic interrupt list (no hard-coded IRQs and no real
  limits to the number of IRQs)
- a truly 'active' desktop (put a floppy in the drive and an icon
  appears on your desktop)
- reconfiguration of most anything without reboot
- a spectacular way of crashing that gave unable information to 
  prevent the next crash without being an 'insider'
- output to NTSC/PAL/SECAM

I could go on, but my keyboard is getting wet. In short, just about any 
nifty 'invention' by Microsoft, et al has its roots in the Amiga. There 
are still a number of Amiga sites around the net, so if you're curious 
enough, there's no shortage of information.

-Ron T.