aNeXuS

volume 1 Amiga Nexus Magazine Online # 1 - June 1998

Dedicated to explore and define aspects of Amiga Gestalt, Culture and Philosophy

The Open Amiga, the Amiga Industry Council and Other Ramblings

by Dave Haynie

Shortly after the fall of Commodore, I think it was June of 1994, I went to a few Amiga shows as a guest speaker. Being nice guys all, they had asked me a few questions in advance, which gave me something to talk about. And given the then-dire straits of the Amiga industry (if only we knew), there was quite a bit of concern expressed in these questions. Commodore screwed the pooch, so to speak, and that was especially scarey to those who figured Commodore was murdered by the PC (of course, it was a suicide). So in answer to these questions, and some of my own, I pondered the state of the Amiga, what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what could be done to prevent it from ever going wrong again. The idea of an open Amiga, and the Industry council, were the result of this.

Keep Your Friends Close And Your Enemies Closer

Commodore failed, the Amiga's in decline, and the PC thrives. Why this is the case is the topic of several books, not this thin article. But the why of this is a critical question, and the answer to that question a big part of some solution.

On the surface, and certainly a big part of the puzzle, is Microsoft. They are an amazingly large company in the PC business, they can single-handedly make or break an operating system or computing platform, and their power is actually way beyond their size. In retrospect, they got there through some good ideas and some blind luck. The IBM PC was the first of that blind luck; IBM did about as lousy a job on the PC as Microsoft did on MS-DOS -- a match made in hell. But no one made computer all that great back then, and they were often used for just one job. IBM's bad design wasn't inherently worse than most CP/M machine or the Apple II, since it came later and could benefit from new technology. Now, at 4.88MHz, the 8088 was occasionally slower than Z-80 machines, which ran more optimized code up to 6-8MHz. But the 8088 had two advantages. The first was memory, the second was that empty socket; for $250 or so, you could get the 8087 chip. Enter Lotus 1-2-3, and an IBM PC could crank through spreadsheets that VisiCalc on the Apple II couldn't dream of, 100's of times faster. That launched the IBM PC, and Microsoft.

Microsoft's big break was actually based on how bad the IBM PC was (what to want for six months of the best average big-company engineering money can buy -- IBM was used to the idea that it just didn't matter, they were IBM, after all). Thing was, as we all know, anyone could make an IBM PC, it just look a few folks, like the boys at Compaq, to figure this out, and soon the floodgates were open. MS hitched themselves to this star by selling MS-DOS dirt cheap to you, the manufacturer, IF you put it in every machine you sold. Basically, they took a hit on short term profits, using that missing money to buy themselves dominance in the market.

That's the story, really. There were two critical elements set up here.

First, anyone can make the hardware. Once you have everyone making the hardware, magic things happen. I'm at no risk buying a computer from Compaq or Dell; if they die tomorrow, I'll get the same basic thing from some other guy. Contrast that with Commodore, Apple, Atari, or any other original system maker. The proprietary system hinges on the health of one company. Amiga fans not only know this now, they've lived it. So rule number one for a healthy Amiga market of the future: Everyone can make Amiga compatible systems.

Then we take a look at Microsoft themselves. They thrived because, unlike most of the early computer companies, they had Gates, who turned out to be a smart marketing guy. Most computer companies were started by techies, and it's quite possible you can't really understand programming and marketing in the same human brain. Gates was no software wiz, not even in the majors, but that wasn't necessary. While everyone else was stupid, Microsoft wasn't stupid. That was enough to make him rich. Occasionally they were really smart, if perhaps in a common-sense way, and they planned long-term. That, in this market dominated by technology companies that couldn't give away free food to starving Ethopians, Gates thrived. I heard he's currently worth 29 billion. That's like 4 million times more than my bank account. So much for knowing the technology without a stable marketing branch.

Which brings me to my second point. The industry needs a single OS, and that OS needs to be driven by a company with some intelligence and some thoughts for the next year and the next decade, not just the next quarter.

To sum that up: There's one well handled OS company.

The Open Amiga

So everyone can build Amiga compatible systems. On the PC, this was perhaps accidental -- nothing thrown together in a few months is going to be all that difficult to copy. Or maybe they jus didn't care; there was a longstanding tradition of copying IBM mainframe and minicomputer hardware, so they just assumed it would happen on the personal computer too.

Regardless, PCs could be copied. That architecture has been with us in the computer business, like it or not, ever since then. It changes gradually, thanks to a lack of central authority; it improves very quickly, thanks to competition. It's ugly as the south end of a northbound pig, but it's extremely functional. That doesn't mean it can't be done better. There's a great fear among Amiga users that any kind of improvement, any scheme that gets away from hard-wired software-to-chip interfaces, will cause an inferior, un-Amiga-like result. In a word: bullshit. Sure, it could be done wrong. But with a proper set of interface defintions, no problem. Anyone who's used a Cybergraphix or Picasso board in an Amiga knows it's still an Amiga, even if the graphics engine was designed by some group at S3, rather than Jay and the boys in Los Gatos many years ago. The Amiga's characteristics are based on its software architecture, not a particular way of building a graphics chip -- though the custom chips were certainly the only way to get that kind of effect back in 1985.

An open Amiga will be defined by a hardware independent OS. What this means isn't that there's no knowledge of hardware in the OS, that's of course absurd. What it does mean is that every hardware dependent bit is replaceable, and that the bits needed at boot time are stored in a ROM on the motherboard, the rest being installed on the hard disk. So as a hardware manufacturer, if I build the correct ROM, provide the right device drivers, etc. I can boot up the vanilla binary AmigaOS, at least for the processor I'm using, from a plain old off-the-shelf CD.

There's a real concern, again and again, that things like RTG graphics interfaces will kill the system performance. I spoke to this, but since I know many of the faithful will eventually read this, let me reiterate. This is not necessary, and very unlikely. One thing to realize is that when we speak of "device independent", we're really not talking about something like PostScript, where the output is so independent of device that it'll look dandy on a screen, my 600dpi DeskJet, or a professional's Linotype machine. What I'm talking about, primarily, are software layers to isolate control functions.

If you know the programming, think about talking to a serial chip on the Amiga. You open a device, make up a device message packet, and DoIO() or SendIO() that thing. All of the control functions here are abstract -- you have no idea if it's the Amiga serial chip, the A2232, or something else. The data format is important, and something other software figures out -- terminals, SLIP, or PPP, each use the same serial device driver, and they go very close to the practical speed of the system. Same goes with graphics -- control functions are isolated with interface functions, data must be known to the program, at least in some cases. If I want a 640x480 screen at 72Hz with 16-bit color and chunky pixels, I should have a graphic function that opens that, and either hands me a bitmap or fails. That bitmap could be virtualized (eg, if I had 16-bit planar, it's possible to let the OS translate it for me), or it could be real (eg, I have a framebuffer I can talk to). Low-level primitives functions can draw a circle into any bitmap type, using blitters if they're around. If it's rather, I could bang the bitmaps, as long as program understands what's available. But here's the low-level: control's abstracted, data isn't.

Higher level software functions. Take the Amiga of today as a queue; I can run PageStream in 1180x900 on my A3000, but I have to fire up a normal Amiga-chip screen to run Scala MM300 or most games. In a properly abstracted system, the games would write to the low-level graphics, PageStream talks to Intuition functions, just as before.

The New Owners

The new owners of the Amiga technology portfolio are, by definition, the one OS company, until they decide to sell the OS, or somehow subcontract its development. They have an amazing task in front of them, and no matter what, they will fail if they try to go it alone. Commodore couldn't keep the Amiga going as a 1 billion dollar company, Apple's many times that size and having toubles because they've been foot-dragging on the Open Mac. As I pointed out above, the openness is a critical factor for survival.

The AmigaOS company needs to think about the AmigaOS and the survival of the platform above all else. They also need to convince hardware vendors that there's value in the AmigaOS. Maybe they can do both hardware and software, as I presume they'll try, but that could prove difficult, as it has for Apple, Be, and IBM recently. The AmigaOS need upgrading, promotion, and porting, all in the light of the fact that the new owners, most likely, spend most of their money buying the Amiga technology. But that doesn't change things: the AmigaOS will not survive, much less grow, on the basis of today's technology, even if the fact of the new ower may tend to curb the attrition rate somewhat. AmigaOS 3.1 and the 68K are not the answers for most people in 1997. To survive, the platform needs new users who stick around, and new developers. That will require ports to at least one new technology CPU, it'll require OS advancements for user and developer needs, and it'll require evalangizing like the world has never seen.

The Industry Council

Because of the size of this problem, I don't think The New Owners are going to be able to handle even the administration of the Amiga Industry alone. And I've been there, done that, got a whole drawer full of T-Shirts -- in a time when there were 100+ people in Engineering, when CATS alone was about the size of PIOS today, there simply was not enough time available for Commodore to do half of what was necessary to maintain the AmigaOS.

Now, you may ask (so, g'head), "Dave, just what do you mean by 'support'". Well, glad ya asked. What I'm talking about here is essentially architectural management of the AmigaOS -- what's the standard for doing Thing X, what's the position on Thing Y, etc. The New Owners may well be able to handle these, but usually, they don't have the time to look into things they're not interested in. And when they do, they may not have the time to apply true vision to their solution.

Thus, an industry council. There's nothing quite like this in the computer industry right now, but there are few pieces. For example, in the general case of the industry, you have groups like IEEE or ISO, to put together standards. Some go into the PC, some don't. The next level up, you have VESA, which hammers out Video standards specifically for the PC industry. Lately, after it's win against Intel on NSP, Microsoft themselves have taken a lead on specifiying the hardware as well as the software, in their yearly WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference).

What I'm talking about goes a bit further. I kind of envision a sort of UN that helps coordinate the efforts of various different companies. The New Owners are probably the only "superpower", based on their ownership of the AmigaOS, they're naturally in the lead position. Based on my assertion that the job is too big for any one company, I would expect them to take a leadership position in "world affairs". But they won't have infinite resources, and there will be issues they can't immediately address.

One thing we have in the council is a way to create industry standards. Any company might submit requests for technological direction, or suggestions for technological direction. The council can discuss this internally, but also distribute it to all member companies as a council directive -- you don't know where it originated. Companies working on similar things can work through the council, again with anonimity if they want it, to show up what they're doing. The goal here, of course, is to establish a common standard for a thing, with as little repeat engineering as possible. Thus, it's possible to maximize the efforts of individuals and companies across the industry. This is a big missing piece in the PC industry, perhaps necessarily so. Amiga companies will find that, while they're certainly going to compete with one another, in reality it's the Amiga platform against the PC. Anything that benefits the Amiga as a platform ultimately helps them, anything that doesn't ultimately harms them.

The council should be composed of a relatively small number of people. It's likely there will be a permanent seat owned by the New Owners, assuming they're actively participating. Other members can be rotated through the other primary member companies, or via any other means set up in the council's constution. While I think the primary function of the council is a smart conduit between component companies in the industry, that's kind of where it starts, not where it ends. The council will meet some fixed number of times a year, and in those meetings, future directions may be set. While it's unlikely these will be binding on anyone, the member companies get the recommendations through the normal channel, just as if these technology requests or recommendations came from outside the council.

The council should issue approved specifications and recommendations for things, once it's come to that point. For example, the council may decide for good reasons to recommend the CHRP architecture, PowerPC processors, and Alpha processors. It would present a position paper on each one, as an official document available to any member, and perhaps those on the outside too. Other companies could sign off on such documents with a letter of intended support ("PIOS supports the PowerPC, and is building PowerPC systems", "The New Owners support SCSI, and are including SCSI drivers for chips X, Y, and Z in the standard OS release", etc).

Well, that's the basic idea. I don't claim to know all the mechanics, but the idea is a fairly simple one, and it would be useless to belabor the issue, or add complexity where it isn't needed. As this grows into something real, I believe others will trim the focus on the council's mission, and its relationship to The New Owners and the rest of the industry.

The Logo

Another thing I thought up is an Amiga industry logo. If you look around, you see these things on all kinds of equipment: "Compact DISC Digital Audio", "PowerPC", "MPC2", etc. There should be a logo, perhaps created by the council, that identifies a computer as AmigaOS-ready, whatever that comes to mean.


Copyright © 1998 Giorgio Gomelsky


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