The Amiga Digital Environment

The new Amiga Digital Environment (DE), codenamed Ami (pronounced Amie) is much more than an operating system. It is hardware abstraction, persistence, organization, multimedia, connectivity and user experience seamlessly brought together in a distributed service architecture. It is best to look at the Amiga DE as a set of three layers. The lowest level is the Physical Layer and it is where the set of hardware resources can be found. This Physical Layer can contain anything from processors to storage devices, graphics and audio components to speakers, memory to printers, both local and remote, and on single or multiple devices. On top of the Physical Layer, and responsible for abstracting that layer, comes the Amiga Foundation Layer, or AFL. Part of the AFL is the intent JTE (Java Technology Edition) from the Tao Group. The intent JTE consists of the Elate RTOS (Real Time Operating System), the AVE (Audio Visual Environment) and the J-Engine; a sun certified personal Java JRE (Java Runtime Environment).

Amiga is currently busy enhancing and expanding the AFL, examples being the Amiga Object Model (AOM) and a port of the 3D graphics library, Mesa-a cooperative venture between Amiga and Hyperion Software. Amiga is also working on a variety of services for the AFL, which include persistence, query, set and immigration. In addition, Amiga is working on a revolutionary common language that unites command line, scripting, control and serious application development.

All of these are necessary in order to allow for the third layer to exist; that third layer is the Amiverse. The Amiverse is a logical set of objects that has no knowledge of the quantity, quality or location of the hardware on which it exists. An Amiverse can exist on a single digital device, it can share a digital device or it can be spread across many digital devices. An Amiverse is first inflated and then users enter it. Once within the Amiverse, user can manipulate existing objects, produce and consume digital content, visit other Amiverses, import and export objects, add objects and services to the Amiverse and create organization and meaning.

The Amiverse becomes a home for elements from the Digital Content Universe: that total set of digital audio, video, graphics, text, applications, and services that are growing at an exponential rate in the world today. The Amiverse will connect and take advantage of all this emerging digital technology and put it at the users command.

The traditional computing model was computer and application-centric, with Digital Content relegated to data that sat on the periphery. The Amiga Digital Environment puts the Digital Content Universe at the center, with the many digital devices surrounding it. These devices provide the vehicles, which give access to that Digital Content Universe. In this way, activity and task are elevated to their correct position at the center of the human-machine equation instead of the user having to be slave to application and OS architectural decisions. Users will no longer have to think like machines to access and use digital content.