The Micro-AmigaOne and Amiga OS4 Developer Prerelease (Update 1) : Page 1 — via Steve DeKorte.
Steve asks: “But why call a new OS running on new hardware ‘Amiga’. What would that mean?”
Well, the version Ars reviewed would actually run classic Amiga programs, so that’s a strong point in favor of is being “the same.” But things always grow and change. Not only was Mac OS X not the same as MacOS 9, MacOS 9 had fairly little in common with the first versions of Mac’s System software. Identity is trajectory, a path through time, not always a straight line.
This Ars Technica review fascinated me because it’s the most credible movement I’ve seen in the direction of a New Amiga. I would love the Amiga to return, if for no other reason, to bring some diversity to the world of operating systems, which have been reduced to two: “Windows variants” and “Unix variants.” Amiga was more Unixy than the Mac back in the day, but the Mac is much more unixy than it once was, and the Amiga’s latest incarnations are about as un-unixy as they always were.
I’m not gonna hold my breath, of course — the Amiga is always “just about to come back.” But the fact that you can plop down x number of dollars and get real hardware with a real operating system and you can read in this review just what it is like, is pretty darn cool.
From day one all of the hardware was “just about to be released.” At 16 I worked at a store that sold them, and I remember waiting forever for the Frame-Grabber and the Sidecar and whatever else they were talking about.