[nirai]

the apple II, the C64, the mac, the Amiga, and later the PC, the Internet, Windows, Linux and then the IPhone and Android, dozens of other amazing projects, products, technologies and movements (e.g. open source), all revolutionized and transformed our lives or at least had some impact on the history of computing,

but how does an API for handling image formats amount to that today?

isn't it fair to say that the Amiga had its day in the 80s and 90s, and that time is now past?

Or to put it in Mr. Praline famous words: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

[SteveMoody73]

Datatypes were a very cool feature, not just a simple API. For an application to be able to support new format be it an image, video, spreadsheet, document or anything the application has to be updated to use a library or to add native support for that format.

Imagine if you could add a Datatype for an image format such as EXR and you would instantly be able to open it in Paint, embed it in Word and Powerpoint without having to update the apps. A DOCX Datatype would allow Wordpad to open Word documents. A new video format on the internet? No need to wait for browser support, just add the Datatype and it would work.

Another advantage of a system like this would be for security. If an serious exploit was found in a popular image decoding library then you could delete the offending Datatype and none of your apps could be exploited until the fault is fixed. May be inconvenient but at least it would be safe. Shared libraries could be used to handle this to an extent but most apps would probably crash if you deleted a required library and who knows if the app is using the shared library or a statically linked version?

There was a few nice features that were in the Amiga operating system but this was one that i wish had been implemented in other operating systems.

[function_seven]

Many of the abstract concepts introduced by the Amiga have not been replicated since. All the amazing things we do today we do by brute force. By throwing more clock speed and storage capacity and memory at the problems. Meanwhile, every application developer has to explicitly write—or include a library for—every format they want to support, every codec they want to be compatible with, etc.

Even with all of our gigahertz and gigabytes, we misty-eyed nostalgics know that it could have been so much better, more elegant.

> isn't it fair to say that the Amiga had its day in the 80s and 90s, and that time is now past?

Yes, it's totally fair to say that. But don't mistake all the love letters people write for the Amiga as irrational pining for "the good ole days". There's real substance there, real things that were lost, as vidarh's comment shows.

[vidarh]

Tomorrow a new image format comes out (like it has many times over the years; consider WEBP for a reasonably new example). None of your applications supports it.

Suddenly you have to update everything before you can use it, and because it's like that for everyone, getting the new format into use is hard.

Except, your apps uses datatypes, so you just download a single datatype library and description, put it into the right directory, and suddenly your browser, your desktop publishing software, your paint program, your word processor, your image viewer all supports the new format and will happily load and/or save images from/to the new format.

Sounds familiar? Probably not, because it doesn't work like that on any modern platform. It did on the Amiga.

That's why datatypes are worth remembering.

As a demonstration of how this helps future-proof software, consider that most commercial Amiga software stopped receiving updates in the mid 90's, many of them before the advent of even png, and certainly before webp and similar. Yet all of the ones that supports datatypes for image access today support png and webp with no changes to the applications needed.

> isn't it fair to say that the Amiga had its day in the 80s and 90s, and that time is now past?

Of course it does, but that doesn't mean these concepts deserve to be forgotten.