People seem to like telling other people about their desktops so I thought I’d join in. A little history first though…
The first comaputer system I owned, all by my self (or near enough), was an Amiga 500+ with Workbench 2.04. It had windows, icons, menus, a pointy thing—okay, I’ve just described WIMP. I later got an A1200, then I thought it was broke, so I bought another. I still have both A1200s, and, while the one I originally thought was broke wasn’t, they are now both broken in different ways. I’ve had someone say they’ll have a look at them though, and I wouldn’t mind having one running if only to play around with. Anyway, broken nostalgia aside, the user interface was really ahead of its time, and I’d say this contributed a lot to my expectations of a desktop environment.
The things I remember are good are:
- Responsiveness: I don’t remember ever having to wait for a GUI to render. There were other things, like I/O, that were pretty slow, but in general the interface felt responsive.
- Clean, not cluttered: There appears to have been some thought put into the design of the interfaces, and things were easy enough to find. I want to do a pun on Intuition so bad.
Not‐so‐good:
- Consistency: Applications could have been consistent, and this improved over time, but they weren’t. This wasn’t helped by the proliferation of alternative UIs, mentioned in the next point. Thankfully AmigaOS 3.5 and newer chose one of them to become the standard for applications.
- Ugliness: Ok, it looked nicer than Workbench 1.3 and any of the competition, but when things are good you still notice the rough edges, possibly more so. Widgets and text didn’t scale well to different sizes. Text looking funny meant you had to use a font similar to the default Topaz if you wanted all of your applications to look nice (there was a nicer replacement font included with MagicWB). There were things like MagicWorkbench, MUI, NewIcons, ClassAct, whatever that thing was that altered window decorations, dock/panel‐type things and various other hacks that helped to make things pretty though.
Some applications I used:
- Shells: AmigaShell, KingCON. KingCON was a replacement for AmigaShell with history, and completion, and other nice things. I also had BASH, but it never became my primary shell.
- Editors: Ed and MicroEMACS, both of which may have similarities to tools on UNIX‐like systems, but I remember them quite differently.
- Word‐processor: Wordworth. A standard WYSIWYG affair. I hadn’t really come across any markup languages, other than AmigaGuide and RTF. I quite liked AmigaGuide as a hypertext markup actually.
- Media player: HippoPlayer, definitely some MOD players, and AlgoMusic which randomly generated house‐ish tunes.
- Desktop Environment: As an alternative to WorkBench, I also used a demo of Directory Opus 5, which I thought was quite good, and had features that I don’t see in modern Linux environments. I never did buy a full version.
I’ve likely missed out many other “serious” applications that I used regularly, and I’ve left out any mention of games because that’s not what this post is about. I’ll definetely have to brush the cobwebs off the boxes some time. In the meantime I can play with UAE (or rather E-UAE for some more features), and AROS.
For those who are interested, Ars Technica are currently running a series of articles on A history of the Amiga. Hyperion Entertainment are still working on AmigaOS 4, Amiga, Inc still seem to be about (and litigating), there may even be new hardware on its way (we shall see).