Hi. On Thu 2002-09-05 at 12:16:15 +0100, Alastair Scott wrote: > Mark Weaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > (09/05/2002 11:55) > > >James Sparenberg wrote: > >> Over 10 years on computers.... not always nix (I miss my Amiga *grin*) > >> > >> James > > > >I've been hearing a lot about Amigas and invariably the people always > >say they miss them. What was so special about them that they're so > >sorely missed? I wouldn't know an Amiga computer if I fell over one. > > They were way ahead of their time and, in some ways, still are: [...]
good list.
One addition, that I still miss today:
- There was AREXX (which James already mentioned in short), a
scripting language designed to control applications. Every serious
software package supported that and you had access to every internal
function of that software package. Imagine writing shell scripts
which steer Mozilla simply by telling which menu entries or which
key presses to execute.
You have that with some software to some extend (e.g. gimp), but the
advantage was that it was standard and you could steer almost anything.
E.g., if your editor would not support it yet (we are talking about
10 years ago), it was a 5-liner to extract the URL on the cursor
position and send it to your browser for viewing. Or want to toggle
JS without going into the menu and there is no button or keybinding
for it? Simply define a key binding (in Linux it would be with the
window manager) which calls an AREXX macro which toggles the
preferences. And so on.
This was really cool and easy enough for a non-programmer to figure
out.
Ah, and another thing:
- The best of Windows and UNIX: A nice and easy (to start with) GUI
and fine-grained control for those who care. I like philosophy of
UNIX, but I hate it if I have to read docs for an hour to find out
to do a one-time thing that I will never need again. (Just installed
9.0 beta3... and I must say, Mandrake meanwhile comes close to the
ideal: e.g. it was a 20 second point-and-click action to share a
directory via Samba with a Windows system. Cool.).
Regards,
Benjamin.
--
Benjamin "Philemon" Pflugmann [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Software Developer voice: +49 941 942 77- 0
SPiN AG - http://www.spin.de fax: +49 941 942 77-22
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