Amiga 2000 – Codename: Tesseract (2021) (opens in new tab)

I think there is an opportunity to use modern microcontrollers to created a similar simplified environment. The lack of a virtualizing mmu constrains ram sizes, which in turn constrains the degree of abstraction level bloat that otherwise occurs. Like living in a tiny house, everything must earn its continued place. That enables the understandability we remember. And a modern microcontroller has about the same memory as an amiga 1k while using a tiny fraction of the power for several times the processing capability.

I suppose we could just use contikiOS, it has a browser of sorts even. But I think the thread model that allows premptive threads has some footguns to adopt as a general desktop system, and a browser for these systems needs a more elegant way to handle web pages that are several times its ram size than just grabbing text.

We are like space aliens from the future :)

Still, it's amazing to me that we can build stuff which is vaguely comparable to our current commercial capabilities.

Another similar observation... I loaded an LLM (local llama.cpp) on a 2015 laptop, almost a decade old, and had a coherent "conversation" with it.

If someone had time-travelled back in 2015 and started for me that very same program on the same laptop in 2015, it would have been confusing and downright scary. I would have started looking for network connections to the remote super computer which surely must be running this thing...

"Yes, the rubber ones!"

The Amiga custom chips are still simple enough that their functionality can be easily understood and emulated in software or FGPAs (arguably, they're conceptually simpler than the C64 VIC-II and SID custom chips).

I had SAS/C which came on 5 or 6 floppies and my A2000 had no hard disk at the time so compiling meant lots and lots of disk swapping and I used the RAM Disk a lot. Later, for a princely sum I recall being over a grand, I got a SCSI controller card and a massive 40mb hard drive which made the process so much more pleasant.

I too was and Amiga 500 nerd. Where I learned assembler and C.

I often think about what the computing landscape would be like if some of these other companies had been more successful. The hard thing though is that most of them died so early in computing history, that we can't really know how they would have evolved. It's like imagining Windows 11 while using Windows 3.1. It's a shame there isn't a windows 11 like version of the Amiga OS, or something like GEOS with 30 extra years of development.

The latest version has RasPi wifi support:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/02/rool_530_is_here/

It is more or less usable as a daily-driver OS except for the modern WWW.

Some users VNC to a Windows PC for the browser, and use RISC OS for everything else.