[Coco] Introducing myself - Carlos Bragatto - Now: OT Amiga / CoCo musings

[Joel Ewy]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Friday 06 April 2007, coco at yourdvd.net wrote:
>   
>> I used to remark that the Amiga OS was the greatest OS ever made. Got me
>> flamed alot.
>> ...
What would have been even better was the Amiga GUI over OS-9 -- and then
Open Source.  And something like that would technically have been
possible.  While it isn't as pretty, GEM is now GPL...  I've thought a
little about how that might be ported to the MM/1.  Might be a bit much
for a CoCo3.  But what about a 12-40MHz FPGA (or emulated) NextGen CoCo
with 4M RAM?
>>
>> Back in 1998 there was a company going to revive the Amiga (I think they
>> had bought rights to the OS at the time) but they canned the project and
>> continued to develop the OS. I lost touch after that.
Amiga was bought first by Escom, which soon fell over.  Gateway bought
the smoldering remains and kept it on life support for a few years, but
didn't do much more than that.  There were talks with Transmeta (of
Linus Torvalds fame) about doing the 68k on their Crusoe processor in
the same way Crusoe does x86 (something like caching JIT compilation in
hardware ?) but that never went anywhere.  Then Amiga was bought away
from Gateway by a group of private investors for its current
incarnation, which licenses the trademark to hardware and OS developers,
and sells a cross-platform development environment which has almost
nothing to do with the original Amiga computer.  Or something like that.
>>  Forgot about the
>> Amiga until last week. Thinking about buying one and an ATARI ST. Would
>> love to Get a SINCLAIR QL just to see if I could make OS-K run on it :-)
>>
>>     
I've always wanted an ST, just to complete my collection, if nothing
else.  Shares some hardware with the MM/1.  And a Sinclair -- well, that
would get points for obscure cool.  The Q40 and Q60 ( http://www.q40.de/
) are new (still produced?) Ql descendants that also run Linux/m68k.

> COCO FOREVER - r

Indeed!

>
> This is off-topic, more of a history lesson I think.
>
> I have to give the Amiga credit...
>
>   
I suspect there is quite a bit of overlap between CoCo enthusiasts and
Amiga enthusiasts.
> We still have 3 or 4 Amiga's including that one, an A2k with a fusion 40 
> card and a 1 GB scsi drive, we just can't quite bring ourselves to bin 
> them but they've not had power applied for quite a while.  Not just yet 
> anyway.  Maybe somebody would make us an offer?  os3.1 is in all of them 
> IIRC.  A couple of A4k's with video toasters, one with an 060 in it, and 
> a 1200 round out the list.  We would still be using the 1200+supergen for 
> animated station ID's, but the supergen tried to start a fire, so that 
> was the end of that, it wasn't salvageable.
>
>   
I wish I could afford to make an offer.  I hope somebody else makes you
a good one.  If not, I could probably scrape together the funds to ship
at least one of them to the computer landfill in my attic as an
alternative to the general purpose landfill in the ground...  :)  But
they do deserve a dignified retirement.
> Yeah, those were the days, and it seems like that period just 10 years ago 
> was back to forever.  In computer terms, it was.
>
> But I will to my last breath, always figure that the CoCo had an influence 
> on the Amiga, because it was the ideal demo machine that could show a 
> bunch of college kids in State College PA just what a properly programmed 
> Motorola CPU could be made to do.  And out of that grew the Amiga.  At 
> least that's how I see it, looking back on the last 20 years of history.
> In turn, looking at the timeline, I wonder how much influence the Amiga's 
> Agnus chip had on the GIME in the CoCo3?  Will we ever know?  Doubtfull, 
> but the influence has to be there in copycat effect if not in fact.
>
>   
Don't forget that the Tim Jennison of NewTek fame is the original author
of CoCoMax.  That, if nothing else, is some direct cross-pollination.

JCE