Smart desktop: Amibian.js past, future and present

Had someone told me 20 years ago that I would enter my 40’s enjoying JavaScript, my younger self would probably have beaten that someone over the head with a book on hardcore demo coding or something. So yeah, things have changed so much and we are right now in the middle of a paradigm shift that is taking us all to the next level – regardless if we agree or not.

Ask a person what he thinks about “cloud” and you rarely get an answer that resembles what cloud really is. Most will say “its a fancy way of dealing with storage”. Others will say its all about web-services – and others might say it’s about JavaScript.

Old coders never die, we just get better

They are all right and wrong at the same time. Cloud is first of all the total abstraction of all parts that makes up a networked computer system. Storage, processing capacity, memory, operating system, services, programming language and even instruction set.

Where a programmer today works with libraries and classes to create programs that run on a desktop — dragging visual controls like edit-boxes and buttons into place using a form or window designer; a cloud developer builds whole infrastructures. He drags and drops whole servers into place, connects external and internal services.

Storage? Ok I need Dropbox, amazon, Google drive, Microsoft one disk, local disk – and he just drags that onto a module. Done. All of these services now have a common API that allows them to talk with each other. They become like dll files or classes, all built using the same mold – but with wildly different internals. It doesn’t matter as long as they deliver the functionality according to standard.

Processing power? Setup an Azure or Amazon account and if you got the cash, you can compute enough to pre-cacalculate the human brain if you like. It has all been turned into services — that you can link together like lego pieces.

Forget everything you think you know about web; that is but the visual rendering engine over the proverbial death-star of technology hidden beneath. People have only seen the tip of the ice berg.

Operating systems have been reduced to a preference. There is no longer any reason to pick Windows over Linux on the server. Microsoft knew years ago that this day would come. Back in the late 90s I remember reading an interview with Steve Balmer doing one of his black-ops meetings with Norwegian tech holders in Oslo; and he outlined software as a service when people were on 14.4 modems. He also mentioned that “we need a language that is universal” to make this a reality. You can guess why .net was stolen from Borland, not to mention their failed hostile takover of Java (or J#) which Anders Hejlsberg was hired to spear-head.

Amibian.js

Amibian.js is my, Gunnar and Thomas‘s effort to ensure that the Amiga is made portable and can be enjoyed in this new paradigm. It is not made to compete with anyone (as was suggested earlier), but rather to make sure Amiga gets some life into her again – and that people of this generation and the kids growing up now can get to enjoy the same exciting environment that we had.

From Scandinavia with love

The world is going JavaScript. Hardware now speaks JavaScript (!), your TV now speaks JavaScript – heck your digital watch probably runs JavaScript. And just to add insult to injury – asm.js now compiles JS code side-by-side with C/C++ in terms of speed. I think the browser has seen more man years of development time than any other piece of software out there – with the exception of GCC / Gnu Linux perhaps.

Amibian is also an example of a what you can do with Smart Pascal, which is a programming environment that compiles object pascal to JavaScript. One we (The Smart Company AS) made especially for this new paradigm. I knew this was coming years ago – and have been waiting for it. But that’s another story all together.

Future

Well, naturally the desktop system is written from scratch so it needs to be completed. We are at roughly 40% right now. But there is also work to be done on UAE.js (a mild fork of sae, scriptable Amiga emulator) in terms of speed and IO. We want the emulated Amiga side to interact with the modern web desktop – to be able to load and save files to whatever backend you are using.

 

For those about to rock; We salute you!

Well, it’s not that easy. UAE is like an organism, and introducing new organs into an existing creature is not easily done. UAE.js (or SAE) has omitted a huge chunk of the original code – which also includes the modified boot-code that adds support for external or “virtual” UAE drives (thanks to Frode Solheim of Fs-UAE for explaining the details of the parts here).

But, there are hacker ways. The dark side is a pathway to many abilities, some deemed unnatural. So if all else fails, i will kidnap the hardfile API and delegate the IO signals to the virtual filesystem on the server — in short, UAE.JS will think it’s booting from a hardfile in memory – when in reality it will get its data from node.js.

There are some challenges here. UAE (the original) is not async but ordinary, linear C code. JavaScript is async and may not return the data on exit of the method. So i suspect I will have to cache quite a lot. Perhaps as much as 1 megabyte backwards and forwards from the file-position. But getting data in there we will (and out), come hell or high water.

We can also drop a lot of sub code, like parts of the gayle interface. I found out this is the chip that deals with the IDE interface — so it has to be there, but it can also host memory expansions – but who the hell cares in 2017 in JavaScript about that. More than enough fun via standard chip/fast/rtg memory – so the odd bits can be removed.

So we got our work cut out for us. But hey.. there can only be one .. QUARTEX! And we bring you fire.

Ok. Lets do this!