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Comment by tombert

2 days ago

Very tangential, but Amiga has been a recent fascination of mine. I've been playing with a few AROS distributions in QEMU; a part of me wants to take the plunge and run it full time as my primary operating system, but the lack of a decent web browser is a pretty hard limiter in 2026. I guess my brain has sort of fetishized the platform; I didn't grow up with an Amiga, but I did get to play with one when I was a kid and I always thought it seemed cool, and as a grown-up who roughly understands how operating systems work I do think it was somewhat ahead of its time. Yes, I realize that there was a lot wrong with the design as well (e.g. no protected memory and programs being able to modify each others pointers), but even still I think it was pretty neat.

It's fun to think of the alternate universe where Commodore had been competently managed, and we wouldn't have the codified mediocrity of POSIX driving everything today.

It would be hard for me to justify the time sink, but I would like to port over the most recent Firefox/IceWeasel and bring Amiga into the 21st century.

7 comments

tombert

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phate  2 days ago

Replace Amiga with BeOS and you're describing me.

  • tombert  2 days ago

    BeOS is pretty neat, Haiku too, and I wish them the best, but never quite had the same appeal to me, primarily because I hadn’t really heard of it until I was in my 20’s. As such I never got to mythologize it in my brain like Amiga.

    I do hope Haiku does catch on though; I heard they have a decent browser now, so there’s a shot.

  • MisterTea  1 day ago

    I was a big BeOS user and have my R4 and 5 CD's somewhere. It was impressive to open a bunch of videos or the video cube thing as a demo and watch pulse peg to full CPU while the system and UI remained snappy. Another cool thing was the universal codec where you drop a PNG codec into the codec directory and now all your image programs can open PNGs. I really enjoyed it but the magic died when Palm bought it and I never looked back.