Amiga Demonstration Helps Win Against Patent Troll 239
Amigan writes "Over on Groklaw, PJ is reporting that an actual demonstration of the Amiga OS (circa 1988) on an Amiga A1000 may have been the turning point in the lawsuit of IP Innovation v. Red Hat/Novell."
Ahead of the curve (Score:5, Interesting)
I always loved the way the Amiga offered functions other computers of the same era never came close to matching..
I love the quote from the owner who produced the working model.. "My Amiga Killed a Troll!"
Re:MORE (Score:5, Interesting)
More prior art plskthx.
But that's the problem in itself right there. Yes, chances are that there is little "new" being done in software for the most part, and that someone has done [patent idea] before, but just imagine trying to find just the right bit of software, or just the right platform to show it's been done before.
The patent office couldn't instigate a "Prove no-one has done it before" process as that would be just ludicrous, but at the same time, having the right people on hand to show "just exactly where it HAS been done before" may not be 1) cheap, 2) practical and 3) possible.
There simply isn't an easy solution to this. If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc. If you don't abolish patents, you still end up with the farcical joke that we have now.
Here, it really is a lose - lose scenario. Except if you are a patent lawyer.
Re:Say what? (Score:5, Interesting)
The success is all very nice and all, but what was the disputed issue?
The actual dispute is irrelevant ... Linux won a patent suit and that's all we care about. A patent troll lost and will have to pay court costs. Double bonus points!
Here's the slashdot story [slashdot.org] about the court victory
Here's a link to the post that details the patents [slashdot.org]
OS-9 (Score:5, Interesting)
Let us not forget that OS-9 was doing it before Amiga.... and that was also submitted by someone as prior art from 1983:
http://www.post-issue.org/prior_art/83/detail [post-issue.org]
OS-9 was my first "real" OS, before eventually switching to Unix, then Linux. Back in the day, it was extremely impressive.
Re:It's True. (Score:3, Interesting)
There's nothing that Amiga demos cannot accomplish.
I recall the first tyme I saw an Amiga demo IRL. It was set up to run the Mac OS and not just Workbench. Next to it was a new Mac running the same Mac OS. The Amiga ran the Mac OS faster than the Mac did. Another Amiga was running MS DOS and Windows 3.x.
Falcon
Re:It's True. (Score:1, Interesting)
First computer porn I saw was a digitized picture that could only be printed on 3 pages of wide line printer/green bar paper using multiple overstrikes to get the shades of grey for each 1 character 'pixel'.
Re:OS-9 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:MORE (Score:1, Interesting)
Exactly.
No company spends millions of dollars researching the idea of using multiple fingers on a touchpad. They spend millions implementing the interface to be touch friendly.
I could throw reverse engineer an ipad, throw together a few chips and make one. But you wont get that slick look and feel that Apple has spent so long perfecting.
Not only that but even if my device looked nearly identicle to the ipad i wouldnt be violating a patent. But as soon as i implement, in software the ability to recognise "Gestures" it becomes an infringement. Its stupid. Its stifling innovation. I think their should be an abolishment of software patents. Just get rid of them. Keep copyright.
Re:OS-9 (Score:3, Interesting)
The C=128 could also do this; you could hook up a split composite (now called S-video) and RGBI monitor at the same time and have an app display different outputs on each screen.
Re:MORE (Score:5, Interesting)
(Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. {10} Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. {11} There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.
citation [globalchristians.org]
/I'm not prone to cite bible verse, but there you go. All your software patents are invalid. It sez so in the Good Book. The verse itself is an uncited theft of the work of Sophocles c. 429 BCE - himself a synthesist who didn't cite the vast realms of prior art from which he distilled his digests of the written and performed arts into their purest forms. Sophocles was a hack, but we don't have records of the prior art he stole, or today he'd be a pirate. His synthesis though? Timeless art in and of itself. It's good thing for us ancient Greece didn't have DMCA, DRM, and eternal copyright or he'd be Sophowho? To most he already is.
If only ancient Greece, or modern Phoenix, had a sort of distributed Library of Alexandria where one works could not be forgotten - where the wisdom of our fathers and their fathers (and their foolishness too) might be preserved and so remain available to our children and their children. Something like a Google for books. Alas, copyright prevents it and copyright is now eternal in every practical sense. So it is that each new generation, constrained by previously patented and copyrighted art has diminishing realms of imagination to work with - until the lawyers finally abolish imagination altogether and we reach the asymptote where creation ends. So then we lay upon our children the duty to rethink the thoughts we've had, to re-invent our inventions, and to do so in peril of the trolls who lay claim to a third degree ownership of any potential perceived reference to characters or invented places in a brief manuscript published in 100 copies only, 200 years before - and upon their children we lay a logarithmically greater burden.
As patents are the death of invention, copyrights are the death of art. A pity our children must climb these mountains we've built for them without the benefit of a culture, but culture itself is deprecated in this regime in preference to whatever mindless new drivel can escape lawsuits long enough to become popular - and then is itself extinguished in a flurry of lawyers and cocaine.
We might have stood on the shoulders of giants, but now we huddle in fear of lawyers.
Re:Ahead of the curve (Score:4, Interesting)
Man, that brings back memories. I remember in the early 90's when I heard that wuarchive was being upgraded to have a... wait for it... a 14GB hard drive (although in retrospect it was probably a RAID array rather than a single spindle) and I was simply dumbfounded by that amount of storage and wondered how on earth they'd ever fill it.
Now, my phone has more storage than that...
Re:"Fake" (Score:4, Interesting)
If they know it's not a fake, then ultimately they will face the same situation.
They will be spending more of their own time and money, and possibly be liable for the additional court costs of the winning side.
That sounds like a potentially large risk to them.
Re:It's True. (Score:3, Interesting)
I was a fully-initiated member of the Church of Amiga, but truth be told... the good old days weren't really as great as we like to remember them. I remember my endless frustration over software (mostly European, but that was because American Amiga games totally sucked and were basically warmed-over ports of their EGA PC versions) that crashed and burned if you had anything besides an Amiga 500 with no fast ram and a floppy drive. 2-8 megs of fast ram? Guru. Hard drive? Guru (but less wait to get to it). 68020/30/40 accelerator card in a 2000? Meltdown. A3000? smoking nuclear crater.
In 1986, the Amiga's graphics were the best, bar none. In 1990, they were looking a little rough. In 1992, they were old news. The only reason PCs weren't blowing away Amigas in 1990 was because PC programmers hadn't adopted the Amiga culture of chucking the OS (what little OS a PC running DOS actually *had*) and hitting the bare metal. You know the neat penguin display Linux shows when it boots? Pretty much every PC with "VGA" graphics back as far as 1988 or so had the raw hardware to do that (switch from graphics mode to text mode mid-display)... it just Wasn't Done, because it wasn't officially supported by the BIOS. It wasn't until the Amiga finally went tits up, and Amiga programmers were forced to write PC programs to make a living, that PC programming jumped ahead by almost 10 years literally overnight, because former Amiga programmers were determined to treat PCs like the 32-bit powerhouses that traditional "PC" programmers were afraid to do themselves.
Remember Comanche: Maximum Overkill? It's not a coincidence that it was a groundbreaking PC game... it was REALLY an Amiga game that happened to be running on PC hardware that the programmers were treating like an alien Amiga instead of a BIOS-shackled realmode antique that happened to be running at 66MHz instead of 4.77MHz. Oldschool "PC" programmers were too afraid of losing buyers with creaky old 286 PCs with CGA cards to deviate from their standard formula. Former Amiga programmers realized that even if you wrote off every PC with less than a 33MHz 486, local-bus video card with VRAM, 4+ megs, and an Ultrasound or SBpro, your potential market was STILL 2-4 times as big as the entire Amiga market was on its greatest day. And so, the PC Hardware Arms Race began, that continues to this day.
It was the Amiga programmers who learned that you really COULD forcibly rewrite VGA registers mid-scanline... well, ok... as long as the videocard had VRAM. But by 1993, everyone who mattered had a videocard with VRAM anyway, so life was good. It was former Amiga programmers who were determined to discover what you really COULD get away with in "Mode X" when you threw away IBM's developer notes and went straight to the chipset datasheet for inspiration. The truth is, every real Amiga programmer had a destroyed, worn-out, dog-eared copy of the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual. And most had a crisp, nearly-untouched virgin copy of the RKM that rarely got looked at except out of an occasional sense of guilt ;-)
The Amiga didn't die, it just became the first platform to switch to Intel-architecture hardware. No, it wasn't official... but it happened, developer by developer, as the Amiga Elite grudgingly sulked over to the PC camp and decided to make the best of an unfortunate situation by treating PC hardware the same way they used to treat Amiga hardware. You can easily recognize the undercover Amiga refugees from the mid-90s... they all had Gravis Ultrasounds (and if they were programmers, their games had native support for it). It wasn't even that hard to do.
But back to the original complaint (wholesale hardware incompatibility if you had anything besides a bottom of the line A500)... if only Commodore could have been persuaded to make the 68010 the base CPU for the A500 instead of the 68000, 99% of our "move SR, EA" grief would have been avoided... because then it would have crashed the A500 too, and nothing after 1989 or so would have ever dared to use it again. Sigh. From what I remember, even in 1989, the UPS shipping on a 68010 was probably more than the cost of the 68010 itself.
Re:Say what? (Score:5, Interesting)
You could slide each screen down by grabbing the bar at the top of the screen with your mouse, to reveal those beneath. So at times, and quite commonly, you would have different visible parts of your monitor displaying parts of screens with different resolutions (and, if I recall correctly, their own color depths as well).
That really was super-cool. I believe you are correct about the different color depths, too. There was just something compelling about that mechanism, it was like peeking behind a curtain to see backstage, perhaps? Maybe the youngsters would say it would be like seeing the matrix or something. It just had this incredible fluidity to it. Editing a document or program, and want to take a peek at how your 3D render in the background is going? Oooh... nice, just 8 more hours to go, looking good so far.
Re:It's True. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait a moment. MacOS and Win 3.1 in their time being able to run on the same hardware?
Win 3.1 has always been restricted to x86 processors.
Back in the olden days, it was possible to buy an expansion card for several types of non-x86 system that had all the x86 hardware necessary to run DOS and Windows.
I had one for my parents' Apple IIe - the Applied Engineering PC Transporter. IIRC, it was similar to the Atari 2600 module for the ColecoVision in that it really just used the Apple for its keyboard and monitor (and for best results a separate monitor was necessary). Separate disk drives were needed, for example.
I believe the Amiga equivalent (which I heard referred to as a "bridge board" at the time) was more integrated into the Amiga hardware/OS and the x86 software could be run inside a window within Workbench.
Re:MORE (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's True. (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>Euro games that crashed and burned if you had anything besides an Amiga 500 with no fast ram and a floppy drive. 2-8 megs of fast ram?
My Amiga 500 has 1 megabyte of RAM (half chip/half fast) and runs everything just fine. The only time I get a Guru is when I'm doing something stupid, like trying to run two games at once. The MMU in the 68020 eliminates most of those conflicts, by stopping programs from overwriting one another.
Perhaps the problem you had was trying to run those 50 hertz games on a 60 hertz machine? Even today with modern hardware like a PS3 or Wii, that won't work properly. The console will work for awhile, but eventually it will crash.
As for Amiga versus PC versus Mac, it took them about 10 years to match Amiga's hardware and preemptive multitasking ability (Win95 and OS X). I'm glad I owned an Amiga during that period (1985-95) and had a chance to enjoy an awesome computer, rather than be stuck with a PC that went "beep" and only displayed 4 or 16 colors.
IMHO if Commodore had moved-over to a PowerPC + addon cards structure like Apple did, they probably would have survived to the present day.
Re:It's True. (Score:5, Interesting)
Former Amiga programmers realized
Look I was a game programmer back then, I worked on PC, Apple //, and Commodore 64-series products among others ... and you're just wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. I never did anything for the Amiga, and I find it kinda irritating that you believe programmers like me required Amiga experience in order to be good at our jobs. Geez, you Amiga guys sound like Mac fanboys sometimes. You just make shit up. I spent seven years before that failed attempt at a personal computer ever hit the market, hacking high-speed graphics code on a number of different microprocessors, and neither I nor my employers ever felt that I needed to learn to study the Amiga to write graphics an animation code for other systems.
... pretty much bare metal and raw assembler all the way through. That's because the CPU had to do everything, except maybe sound if you had an early Soundblaster. No fancy graphics or sound chips, no sirree.
// lines. That's because many things that were easy on the Amiga took some very sharp, largely ex-Apple ][ programmers to do well on the PC.
You're giving all the credit to ex-Amiga coders for driving the game market forward and that's just ridiculous. Most of the guys I knew that bought into the Amiga hype went over to the Mac because they didn't want to be dealing with the bare metal. Most of them hadn't a clue what an I/O port was, much less how to screw around with refresh timing or anything else on a VGA card. They let the custom ASICs do all the work. Arcade game development on the IBM compatibles of the era was a lot like it was on the Apple ][
The Amiga had many hardware and other advantages, and the reality is that experience with the Amiga's custom chips didn't count for SQUAT when it came to coding for what passed as video on PCs at the time. Matter of fact, the Amiga's hardware support spoiled the typical Amiga developer and put him at a distinct disadvantage when it came to working on the PC or Apple
That's the real history. You can assign credit any way you like, but those of us who were there will likely go all Guru Meditation on you.
Re:It's True. (Score:2, Interesting)
It wasn't so much about learning Amiga hardware technique as it was about the Amiga's hardware *culture*. PC programmers used realmode, because everyone used realmode, and it was just the way you did it. Amiga programmers looked at realmode, said "fuck this shit", and spent their first month as a PC programmer learning how to use DOS4GW so they could kick the PC into 386Enh or supervisor mode and write games with flat memory maps.
You're totally wrong about Amiga developers embracing Macs. Remember, the only computer Amiga owners held in greater contempt than the Atari ST was (drumroll...) the Macintosh. A.k.a. the Apple Etch-a-Sketch. Amiga owners thought PCs sucked, but recognized in the early 90s that the problem wasn't the underlying hardware, it was the software running on it. If you get down to it, an Amiga 500 was analogous to a PC with a high-end (but DRAM-based) videocard that ran everything, including software, out of that videocard's memory. Programmers who take the ability to hit hardware directly as a fact of life aren't going to take kindly to a platform that prohibits programmers from doing anything not Officially Approved by Apple (hmmm... the more things change...)
Sadly, our prejudice was one of the main reasons we didn't embrace Linux. The only thing Amiga owners were less interested in than Macs was Unix, because back then Unix == boring VT100. If Linus Torvalds had gotten some friends to do a kick-ass megademo for Assembly94 that booted a Linux kernel and took advantage of the S3 chipset's then-nascent blitter and had a 32-track modtune running throughout (showing that Linux could be used for graphics and sound as well as boring corporate-productivity software)... well... things might have turned out a bit differently.