Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!

Amiga users are the longest-suffering technology loyalists that the computing industry has ever seen. Though once the best solution for 3D and special effects work, the operating system has long since been superseded as mainstream options, such as x86 hardware and new Mac and Windows operating systems, have become more powerful.

For instance, AmigaOS only gained support for memory paging in 2008, with AmigaOS 4.1, and USB 2.0 in 2011, with AmigaOS 4.1u3. That's over a decade after the USB standard was released, and three years after its successor, USB 3.0, was finalized. Amiga support for modern operating design and peripheral hardware is, to say the least, beyond hope.

On top of that, AmigaOS only supports dead, 32-bit processor architectures. AmigaOS 3.9 supports the Motorola 68k series up to the 68060 (released in 1994). AmigaOS 4, while slightly more modern, only runs on older P.A. Semi PA6T, Freescale e600, and IBM 750 parts. At best, AmigaOS is a decade behind.

So what is an Amiga user to do? If you're at all familiar with Unix or FreeBSD, there is one option out there that Amigans can look to—as long as they're okay with rock-hard stability, modern operating system design, and pervasive 64-bit support.

AmigaOS: Dragging Ass into the 21st Century

Fourteen years before Apple released iMovie, Amiga offered video editing for the masses. But no matter how vociferously studios and hobbyists swore by their favored platform, Amiga failed, hard, almost overnight.

Today, the Amiga community is a church of zealots praying desperately to its dead saints of outdated hardware and a primitive operating system using two-dozen year old technology. So what went wrong? What caused Amiga to go from the top of the computing heap to the bargain basement practically overnight?

The answer to that is long, complicated, and slow, just like the course of the Amiga's operating system, which is exactly at the heart of the issue.

How QNX Failed Amiga

The Amiga platform has exhibited amazing longevity for something so plagued by problems. And for a platform with such problems, it's been an excruciatingly slow march to resolve matters. Amiga is still running a twenty-year old operating system on chips that haven't been updated in over eleven years, and is only able to use anything modern through emulation or as an add-on card. What other platform offers accelerator cards faster than the main CPU by a factor of ten?

Accordingly, the sorry state of Amiga lays mostly to blame in its many sponsors over the years, from Commodore to Escom to Gateway and finally to Amiga, Inc. Each and every one of these companies have fumbled the ball in directing Amiga, burying it further and further every year. Third parties have stepped in to alleviate this, but can not push the platform ahead, only offer it short-term boosts that allow applications — and not the operating system — speed-ups and modern features.

Enter QNX Software Systems, contracted by Gateway in 1997 to create a desktop operating system based on its embedded QNX Neutrino micro-kernel environment. QNX was a significant player in the embedded industry and had a reputation for efficient, real-time systems that oversaw everything from medicine drips to auto-assembly robots. It looked like such finely-honed technology would be the proper bridge to the second coming of the Amiga. Appearances, however, can be deceiving.