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AmigaOS 2: The Greatest Upgrade

A system software release for the ages

June 2026

The Good

In 1985 the Amiga 1000 was launched, and there was much rejoicing.<br>Competing with a lineup of other 16-bit machines such as the IBM PC,<br>Apple Macintosh and Atari ST, it offered far superior sound and graphics<br>capabilities at a surprisingly low cost. It also provided something else the competition lacked: effortless, performant pre-emptive multitasking. The<br>only other option for people who wanted a multi-tasking machine with<br>some semblance of a GUI at this point in time was, to the best of my knowledge, to fork out an<br>exuberant amount of money for a Unix workstation.

The GUI - or, as it was also known at the time, the WIMP (for Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer) - was a defining trait of mid-eighties 16-bit machines:<br>The release of the Mac and its Finder had made desktop environments<br>all the rage. Consequently, the Amiga also offered one, and called it<br>the Workbench . All of this pointing and clicking vastly improved the user friendliness of computers, and<br>it was also a new concept for users to learn, turning<br>these early years of GUI proliferation into a golden era for<br>hand models across the globe.

Impeccable nails!

The Ugly

Workbench was one of the first GUIs to incorporate colour in a<br>meaningful way (including in icons). The Mac was still monochrome at<br>this point, and Atari's TOS simply added a sickly green background to<br>an otherwise monochrome GEM desktop (licensed from Digital Research). Perhaps that green background in turn<br>inspired Microsoft's Windows 1.0, a system that truly pushed the limited EGA palette to induce the maximum number of seizures and migraine attacks among users.

Atari TOS: Well, it's, uh... It's green.

Not that Workbench looked particularly nice, either. Its blue and<br>orange colour scheme, naivistic icons and lack of a standardized<br>GUI toolkit could make even young boys in elementary school - otherwise<br>completely mesmerized by the Amiga - recoil in horror.<br>It's been suggested that the Amiga palette was<br>selected to produce the best possible result on RF output, but I have my<br>doubts: orange on blue can bleed something fierce on lower quality<br>displays, and I haven't managed to find a reliable source for this claim. It was likely just a perfectly reasonable<br>aesthetic choice in<br>the 1980s - a decade that normalized concepts like the mullet, neon pink tracksuits,<br>and starting the morning with a few lines of blow before firing up<br>the Bloomberg terminal to commit large scale securities fraud.

Workbench 1.3: The font isn't helping either.

At least Amiga users - unlike their natural enemies, the Atari fans -<br>could change their desktop's colour scheme. The multi-tasking, combined<br>with a competent command line, also helped soften the blow.<br>But despite all of this, Apple's Finder - and even GEM -<br>were in many ways more mature and coherent than Workbench.

The Workbench 1.3 Preferences offered a decent amount of configuration options. The pointer editor opens up a little pixel painter, letting the user draw their own mouse pointer. The big square in which the mouse pointer is located is for positioning the screen so that it's visible inside a TV set's overscan area.

The Bad

The first release of AmigaOS, the 1.x series, was in many ways an exploration not only of what could be accomplished with a GUI, but also how it could be accomplished. Some early constructs were very primitive, probably in part because the first system release was rushed, but also because everyone was treading new ground. One of the most dismal examples is probably how to create a new directory using Workbench 1.x:

Double-click the Workbench disk icon to see its contents.

Select the "Empty" drawer (Workbenches have drawers, not folders). This drawer was helpfully a part of the standard Workbench distribution.

Select "Duplicate" from the "Workbench" pull-down menu.

This will result in a copy of the "Empty" drawer, called "copy of Empty".

Drag "copy of Empty" to its desired destination.

Rename "copy of Empty" to its desired name.

The fact that the drawer icon animates and actually "opens" when selected is pretty nifty, but the elaborate workflow soon gets tiresome. The lack of a standardized GUI toolkit also meant a lot of user interaction was primitive and confusing, because every single dialog had to be designed from first principles. When renaming an icon, for example, the user is presented with nothing but a box for text input. The action can't be cancelled, so if having regrets after erasing half of the original name, it has to be retyped, letter for letter.

Here, the user can either rename the file or rename the file.

Another interesting idiosyncrasy of Workbench is that for a file to be at all visible on the desktop, it must have a corresponding ".info" file, which contains the icon data. In some ways...