We talked about how there was a big animosity between Commodore and Atari. Their leaders mutually hated each other and wanted to destroy each other. In past centuries, they would have challenged each other to a duel and it would have come down to cords or pistols. The twentieth century was only more civilized in this respect, so the heathen should have been washed away not by blood, but by the development of the computer.
From the beginning, the Amiga developers on the Commodore team only sang their praises. Commodore by Amiga Inc. he not only bought, but invested in renting new, much better offices, equipment, suddenly money was no problem and everything the team wanted, he also got. Commodore was drowning in money in 1984, but like many times in the history of this company, it was a beautiful but very short period. The problem with the failure of the Plus/4 series caught up with the company very quickly and everything changed.
But we’re not that far yet. It’s 1984 and the Commodore Amiga is hard at work. The hardware is being finalized and the original Lorraine prototype is being reworked into the new Velvet prototype. It was supposed to offer 128kB of RAM expandable to 256kB (but later the RAM stabilized at 256kB, because the creators realized what Steve Jobs did not understand, that a computer with too little memory 128kB and a graphics system was unusable), the cartridge slot was released, which was a remnant of the original game console, still counted on the internal 1200 baud modem (thankfully it was eventually dropped) and changed the floppy drive. Few amigists have any idea that the Amiga was originally expected to be 5¼”, the standard size at the time, but the Macintosh showed the way, so the new 3½” was chosen, and the creators saved themselves the mistake of a single-sided model – the Amiga was always supposed to have only a double-sided floppy disk with an above-standard capacity for its time 880 KB. In contrast, both early Macintoshes and the Atari ST struggled with a half-capacity single-sided drive, causing software compatibility issues of those early years.
In parallel with the finalization of the hardware, the development of the operating system took place. While the Exec, Graphics and Intuition libraries, i.e. the basis of the multitasking window system, were quite complete, work had not yet begun on the Dos library – i.e. the layer ensuring work with files on the diskette. The developers were pressed for time and did not want to rush such an essential part of the system, therefore the path of buying a license for Tripos was chosen. This operating system was once developed by Dr. Martin Richards, a venerable Mr. University Professor and the capacity of the field, the creator of the BCPL language, the predecessor of the later C. Unfortunately, the problem was that Tripos was intended for minicomputers with a hard disk and was already quite outdated. The Amiga was supposed to work with a floppy disk that – unlike a hard disk – could be removed at the most inopportune time. Amigists therefore enjoyed a lot of problems with unsealed files, and the Discdoctor utility was one of the cursed and unfortunately often used ones.
Overall, the Dos library – the original Tripos adapted for the Amiga by MetaComCo – was universally hated by the development team because it was extremely slow and unreliable to work with floppy disk, but there was no time for anything better. Remembrancers will surely remember how the original and terribly limited OFS (Old File System) was later replaced by the FFS (Fast File System), significantly faster, the entire library was gradually rewritten from the BCPL language to the C language (which was the language in which it was written the rest of the Amiga OS), but it took a very long time before working with files on the Amiga became tolerably fast and relatively reliable.
A killer solution
Despite very hard work, it was clear by early 1985 that the operating system would not be completed on time. Fixing bugs took a lot of energy and was endless. What with this? A solution was found, but it was a downright murderous option. Since the system was not stable, the team decided not to burn it into a ROM that would be difficult for users to change. Instead, a RAM board called a Writeable Control Store (WCS) was to be left in the computer. This board was used by developers to test system modifications, so that it was not necessary to constantly burn new and new versions of firmware. It was inserted in sockets intended for future ROMs and contained 256kB of classic DRAM.
Therefore, loading the system on the Amiga meant two steps for the user – first, he loaded Kickstart, i.e. the computer’s firmware, from one diskette, then from the second his own Workbench, i.e. the disk part of the operating system.
Not only was this a terrible waste of time, but this solution obviously meant a significant increase in the price of the computer. The user actually paid for an additional 256kB of RAM, which he could not use at all, as it served as ROM. It’s probably quite incomprehensible, but the creators finally praised this solution. While ROM bugs were a problem on other platforms, on the Amiga all you had to do was distribute new floppies. Yes, it is true that this was an advantage. The only one.
2024-01-04 12:40:23
#Amiga #History #Birth #Commodore #Amiga
