Amiga Workbench
| Workbench
|
|
|---|---|
 Amiga 500 with RGB monitor 1084S, mouse and an external, second floppy disk drive A1010. Workbench v1.3 can be seen on the screen. |
|
| Basic data
|
|
| developer | Commodore Intl. , Haage & Partner, Hyperion Entertainment |
| Publishing year | 1985 |
| Current version | 4.1.8 (December 2014) |
| operating system | AmigaOS |
| programming language | C. |
| category | Desktop environment |
| License | Proprietary |
| German speaking | Yes |
The Workbench is the desktop environment of the Amiga - operating systems .
Desktop and operating system
The Amiga operating system ( AmigaOS ) was delivered in several parts on floppy disks for the first Amiga (the Amiga 1000 ) . The first floppy disk required for booting was called Kickstart and contained the operating system kernel, DOS and some system libraries, which also included the necessary graphics. The second floppy disk was called Workbench, after booting with this disk the system was available.
The entire operating system of the Amiga thus initially fit on two floppy disks , the Kickstart disk (on which 256 KiB were written) and the Workbench disk with 880 KiB capacity.
Later Amiga models (from the 1987 published Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 ) had the contents of Kickstart in ROM , only the Workbench disks are loaded, it had to. In the parlance of Amiga users, the separation has persisted (the ROM is Kickstart, everything else that is loaded from a data carrier is Workbench), although it is not entirely accurate in terms of content, since the division of the system components between ROM and hard disk is different in later versions the operating system has changed significantly.
Features
AmigaOS - and thus also the Workbench - offers a graphical user interface in color, with multitasking and relatively short response times e.g. B. on user input. The part of the AmigaOS for realizing the graphical user interface is called intuition , so the user desktop called Workbench is implemented as the first application . In intuition, elements such as icons (in Amiga called “pictogram”), Windows (windows) etc. are made available. As with other operating systems, the workbench is used for the graphical version of a command line , i.e. for file management and program calls, as well as general window management. The whole system is so flexible that applications can make use of the basic features like windows and other graphic elements without loading the workbench.
The input fields, buttons and click boxes in intuition windows are called Amiga gadgets (German: "symbols").
The lack of isolation of the processes under AmigaOS from one another ("Memory Protection") enabled fast interprocess communication by simply transferring pointers without copying data, but this meant that any program could crash the entire system in the event of an error. The speed of the OS has even been increased over the years through various improvements - in contrast to the competition.
AmigaOS, the operating system of the Amiga, has a modular structure and has various similarities to concepts known from Unix . The Amiga has dynamically reloadable device drivers ( suffix : .device) as well as shared libraries (suffix: .library) and supports many concepts of modern operating systems (streams, pipelining, signals, message queues etc.). The command line interpreter (Shell / CLI) known from Unix and Linux is also no stranger to the Amiga.
The AmigaOS offered a permanent and dynamic RAM disk since 1986 . Later there was even the possibility of integrating a reset-proof RAM disk, which was bootable and was available after a restart with all previously loaded data. The RAM disk enabled applications to be accelerated enormously, as slow access to floppy disks or hard disks was no longer necessary.
Versions
Kickstart and Workbench do not necessarily have to have the same version number. If you enter the command on the command line Version, the system gives for example
Kickstart 40.63, Workbench 40.42
back. This means that OS 3.1 is running on this machine. Workbench 3.1 could just as well be operated with Kickstart 3.0. In most cases, however, mixing the versions of system components leads to undesirable side effects.
| Version number | Kickstart | publication | comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30th | 1.0 | 1985 | only for Amiga 1000 |
| 31 | 1.1 | November 1985 | only for Amiga 1000 ( NTSC version) |
| 32 | 1.1 | November 1985 | only for Amiga 1000 ( PAL version) |
| 33 | 1.2 | September 1986 | for Amiga 1000, 500 and 2000 |
| 34 | 1.3 | 1988 | for Amiga 1000, 500 and 2000 |
| 35 | ?.? | Special version for A2024 monitor | |
| 36 | 1.4 | 1989 | Superkickstart: Bootstrap ROM for the Amiga 3000, contains a boot menu for Kickstart 1.3 or 2.x from hard disk or floppy disk |
| 36 | 2.0 | 1990 | for the ECS chipset of the Amiga 500 Plus, Amiga 3000 |
| 37 | 2.04 | for all amigas | |
| 37 | 2.05 | for the Amiga 600 | |
| 38 | 2.1 | for all amigas | |
| 39 | 3.0 | for all amigas | |
| 40 | 3.1 | for all amigas | |
| 41 | 3.x | reserved for the Japanese version of 3.1 (localized with multi-byte characters) | |
| 42 | 3.2 | reserved for alpha versions of WB 3.2 | |
| 43 | 3.x | different patches | |
| 44 | 3.5 | for all amigas | |
| 45 | 3.9 | for all amigas | |
| 51 | 4.0 | OS 4 Beta for all Amigas, not released | |
| 52 | 4.0 | only for AmigaOne ( PPC ) | |
| 53 | 4.1 | Pegasos II, AmigaOne (PPC), Sam440 ep and flex (PPC), Sam460 ex (PPC), AmigaOne X1000 (PPC) |
Web links
- Details on the earlier Workbench versions and pictures
- Details on almost all AmigaOS versions including the workbench and pictures
