The Amiga vision - Digital Living(tm)
By Fleecy Moss

A few weeks ago I was enduring my occasional bout of self flagellation by following an Amiga community website thread when I happened across an email from a well respected and long time community member, Bill Hoggett. Details are not important but the crux of it was that Bill, despite having been a community member for umpteen years, still had no idea about what it was that Amiga is actually trying to do.

Being the chief technical officer of Amiga, I was taken aback at this, primarily because I thought most people who were interested did know but also because it means that I now had another pile in my personal Aurigean stable. The purpose of this article therefore is to try to set out our vision in as short and concise a manner as possible.

Digital Living

WHAT????

I can already hear the eyes rolling into the skies, the snide comments on IRC and the news sites. Digital Living? B*ll*cks more like!!! More marketing and fleecy speak. Well, sorry to disappoint people but long terms plans and strategies need simple and concise concepts as a target. The devil is in the detail and this is what I will attempt to provide.

In this lies the first seeds of discontent for some in the community. It doesn't start with the processor choice, or the custom chip set or even 'The name' as some of our bluer friends like to maintain. Too many of our fair community have become obsessed with the individual trees and do not see the wood. It isn't about continuing implementational details such as custom chips, it is about considering the small part they play, and merely an implementational part at that in the greater purpose. The start of our vision, our purpose is a simple question. What is life?

Ignoring the philosophical connotations, life is about activity. It is about a person observing, contemplating and manipulating their environment for one or more purposes, some of which are common to us all (eating, sleeping etc) and some of which are a matter of personal choice (playing Rugby, weeding a parsnip patch or reading a newspaper). Each activity involves making use of one or more resources in one or more ways for the
achievement of a specific goal.

Being smarter than the average daffodil, humans have developed tools to maximise these activities for minimum expenditure. They have created processes and streamlined them; indeed the whole study of what is called 'Workflow' is vital to the Amiga vision. Workflow is about bringing together a set of resources and a set of processes as a solution to a particular problem. It has its scientific roots in the turn of the century behaviourists such as Taylor and is probably better known as time and motion study. (Before anyone accuses me of being a behaviourist, I will point out that this is strictly about workflow rather than the more mechanistic aspects of behaviourist philosophy. In that respect I tend to side more with Elton Mayo and Abraham Maslow and the other humanists).

You will all have experienced this subject first hand. That growing feeling of anger and frustration (process friction) as something you are trying to do just isn't working or is taking too long or involves too many steps. At the other end, you may have experienced the almost nirvana like state of grace when an activity you are doing progresses so smoothly that you almost transcend the tools and processes themselves, becoming one with the task. This may sound like hokey 'Use the force, Luke' speak but it is an integral part of human activity. Indeed Amigans already celebrate a small part of workflow excellence, even naming their interface service 'Intuition' because it is so easy to use.

If living is about activity, which is the employment of a set of resources and/or processes in response to a problem, then digital living is about the employment of a set of digital resources and/or processes in response to that very same problem. In short, it is about using digital technology to improve a person's quality of life.

It is at a more fundamental level though than providing a game playing solution or an email solution. It is about looking at every activity, and especially essential human activities and seeing whether a digital solution would be better than the existing physical solution. It is about transference of activity from the physical to the digital.

The process we at Amiga are adopting is a realistic one though. Some activities may always be better in the physical domain rather than the digital whilst for others, the technology infrastructure or indeed the necessary process flow itself might not be available. In all cases, each activity that is considered for a digital makeover has to given true and honest measure against the physical activity it is to replace and our rule is that the digital activity has to at least equal the benefits of the physical activity for the given expenditure of time and effort.

Making such a measurement is difficult because activities and their component resources and processes very rarely exist in isolation, instead being part of a complex set of activities and behaviours where changing one provides cascade change in others. In other cases, there can be very successful isolation with controlled cascade. A good example is the introduction of the iPod. Initially a next stage development in music listening activity, its success has allowed for a secondary and potential more important activity change, the move from physical to digital purchase via the iTunes service.

A key term in our vision is transference, which we use to mean the transfer of activity from the physical domain to the digital domain; this is the driver behind the digital revolution. Revolution is really the wrong term though because transference does represent a paradigm (structural) shift; in other words it is not about doing new things but doing old thngs in a new way.

The strength of the digital revolution lies in the simple but awesome power of binary codification, the use of binary as a universal solvent for both resources and processes. Consider that at our core, a human being represents a separation between itself and everything else that is not itself. This separation is achieved in the brain via semantic abstraction, a method of describing both the I and the not I that comes from this separation. This manifests itself as language.

A human lifespan will provide a rich experential session, full of events, meetings, experiences and learning, and all of this will through a piagetian process of accomodation and assimilation enrich the semantic store of each person. The problem with humans is that they have no natural method of disemination of these semantic stores. It is no surprise that the one of the greatest leaps in human development occurred with the development of language, first the spoken form and then the written form. What the written form allowed was for education, learning and experience to now become independent of humans. As long as the resource (physical representation) and the process (a person who could read) exist, then the semantic store is available.

The digital revolution has taken to this to the next stage; the representation is now binary and the process is now a binary or digital processor. For example, consider the storage of audio - initially scratches on cylinders, then grooves on a vinyl disc, then analog signals on a magnetic tape. Each represented a direct representation of waveform and because it was a direct representation, any damage to the representation was a damage to the reproduction by the process - crackling. What it took was the development of waveform digitisation, initially stored on magnetic tape and then moved onto compact disc and then DVD. The power of this lies in the fact that it is an indirect representation. The representation can be damaged and yet the processor can repair and reconstruct t (to an extent). The next stage, in which we currently find ourselves is the realisation that the physical carrier is now the biggest liability and it actually no longer required. What it important is the digital content itself and then can be transmitted wired or wireless.

The purpose of this article has been to get to this point and the phrase from the last sentence - "What is important is the digital content itself.". If the Amiga vision of digital living could be summed up in a single sentence then it would be "the supremacy of the relationship between the user and their content and services."

Again I can hear the flapping of lips and the rolling of eyeballs? What's all this got to do with computers? I am the user and my content, whatever that maybe is on my computer. Great. Unless your computer is in your study and you are on an airplane or in a hotel in Auckland, New Zealand, or if your new CD is in the player in the living room and you are in your car, and definitely not good if your hard drive crashes and you can look forwards to hiding in Brazil when your wife finds out that your arguments for moving from a film camera to a digital camera have now just destroyed the last two years of photographs.

You see the problem is that the agenda in the past has been set by the device manufacturers and sellers. Initially technology demanded that content be bound to very specific devices because only hardware implementations were fast enough to process their encoded content. With the development of the computer for the home (as opposed to the home computer), there was suddenly enough power in the home to perform multiple activities for multiple binary encodings - music, pictures, text, film, games. For a while the computer for the home could rein supreme, obsoleting dedicated devices with no competition. Unfortunately for it technological advances have meant that whilst it is getting more and more powerful, smaller and smaller devices can be made which do one or more of its jobs. This means portability, and the one thing the computer is not is portable.

Why is portability so important? It brings up round full circle to the earlier discussion of workflow. An activity is a set of resources and a set of processes. One of those resources is location. An activity is location bound. You may listen to music all over the house or indeed the world, you may watch DVDs in the sitting room, you may write dates on the calendar in the kitchen, you may need a persons email address whilst sitting on an airplane. With a computer for the home a stationary device, either all of those activities have to be done at the computer OR they are not done on the computer.

However this analysis fails because it is trapped in the device centric view of the world, where the device is more important than the activity or the content or the services. It describes a relationship between a user and their computer (or device) with content and services being a byproduct of that relationship. If you forget about devices for a moment, you begin to understand that what you really care about is being able to access your content and services (or any content and services) whenever you want and wherever you want.

As an illustration, take the motor car. A device centric approach says that the person buys the car and then drives places because they have the car. A non device centric approach says that the person wants to go places so they buy a car. Whilst there are some who buy a car just to own a specific car, most people buy a car to go places, with their only real concern being that it is comfortable, holds all the passengers and luggage and doesn't break down or cost a fortune in fuel.

This illustration moves us neatly on to the next point. If all the person cares about the car is that it is comfortable, holds all the passengers and luggage and doesn't break down or cost a fortune in fuel, then that could be any one of a number of cars. Indeed those very requirements could vary between each trip, to the point where a different car could be used for each trip. In this view the car has moved from being the central object to being a commodity with the individual trip becoming everything.

Whilst not perfect as an illustration, we can remap that last sentence into the digital domain, saying that "in this view, the computer has moved from being the central object to being a commodity, with the individual activity becoming everything". From this it is a small step to get to the vision statement of Amiga Inc - the supremacy of the relationship between a user and their content and services".

What Does It Mean Though?

First and foremost is that a user can access whatever they want whenever they want wherever they want. At Amiga, we call this the new WWW, which is ironic since the world wide web actually provides a prototype version of our vision. This means that the set of content and services, both private (owned by the user) and public exists in a virtual domain and that the user has no knowledge, and needs no knowledge of where that content is stored, nor where the services are stored to act upon that content.

In today's world, we know that picture A is on hard drive B which is in computer C. We also know that Application X is on hard drive B which is on computer C. Application X can be used to manipulate picture A. Our future vision is that you have picture A and services X. That is it. Both exist in a virtual domain that is as unknown to you as the biochemistry of a dog or the generation of the laser beam within your CD player. All that matters is that you can access it. This requires an accessor device that is somehow able to provide a connection to or a doorway into this virtual domain. You use the accessor device, you identify yourself, either physically or via a role based construct called a virtual persona or VIP and you then have access to your private digital property, all shared digital property and all public property. All the accessor device provides is a doorway.

This is not a hard concept to understand but it is a hard concept to visualise mainly because we are so used to being in a device centric mindset. Of course this is also a vision, a goal at which we point our Amiga ship as we sail forwards. There are many issues to overcome in reaching this goal, some technical, some psychological, some political. What is important is that the goal makes sense (even if you may disagree with it) and that there is value in reaching it.

How we get there from here, a position of having the AmigaDE awaitings it breakthrough and with AmigaOS4.0 on a PPC platform close to launch is the question that I'm sure is uppermost in your minds. It obviously has to be in stages. It obviously has to advance at the pace that the technology advances to support it, although we can give it a push. It obviously has to make money at each stage if the next stage is to be funded. It may be as much a marketing push, to break people out of their device centric mindsets as it has to be a technology push. Circumstances may also change as we move forwards.

Unfortunately, this article has already gone on for too long and the HOW is our bread and butter, not to be shared too much in public unless competitors move in whilst enough to generate debate, discussion and hopefully some excitement.

I have always believed that the spirit of what is Amiga can be summed up in the phrase "elegance through simplicity". Eastern disciplines teach that to strive towards elegance is to embrace simplicity and is the key to mastery. I believe that by in breaking away from the device centric view that has caused us so much frustration, we can now see with a clear line of sight the goal that we should be moving towards - not hyper fast processors, or polygon generators or huge hard disks but the simplicity of activity as described in this article - digital living.

Fleecy Moss
CTO
Amiga, Inc.