---

Hello Rob, thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview.
Even though you are a new developer to AROS you have shown a lot of promise.
We hope you continue your developing efforts with AROS for a long time.

Thanks for the encouragement!. I must say that I was a little surprised to be approached since I only just got here, but you'll find I'm always happy to talk about myself and my work I expect I'll be around as long as AROS remains interesting, which it should be for a while - there's still so much to do.

Could you tell us a little about yourself and how you became interested in Amiga's?
I'm 26, living in Melbourne, Australia with my wife Gabriel and our two-year-old daughter Francesca. By day I work as a system adminstrator and programmer in the IT division at Monash University, mainly working on the central email, calendar and newsgroups services.

I've been a longtime C64 user, being actively involved in the demo scene for most of the 1990s. I'd read about the Amiga in the various Commodore-related magazines that were around at the time, and my uncle also owned a A500 which I'd drool over whenever I visited. I don't remember exactly what pushed me to get one, but at some point after I got my first job as a teenager (around 1995) I'd managed to get about AUD$400 together, and bought a secondhand A500 and 1084S monitor. There was maybe 30 or so (pirated) games with it, and I managed to pick up about 50 more from a local salvage yard a few months later.

It only had WB1.3 with it, and I was consigned to floppies (though I did find a A590 a few years later), but I still had lots of fun messing with the guts of the thing as best I could (mostly via free things I got from Amiga Format magazine).

I still own the Amiga, though it doesn't get used because the monitor is long dead and I can't find anything that will sync down to 15KHz so I can play the games. I pretty much moved to Linux once I got to Uni, and stayed there ever since.

You are fairly new to AROS, how did you hear about it?

I don't remember where I saw it initially. I think I used to search around every now and again to see what's happening in the Amiga world, so I probably came across it then.

I remember downloading it back around 1999 somehwere, where the best it could muster was some gadtools demos. I think my response would probably have been "whatever", as I don't remember looking at it again for a long time.

In mid-2004 I took another look at, and found it had come along way. I grabbed the source and started fiddling, even getting a working port of JJFFE up and running (this was a decompiled cross-platform of the Elite sequel "Frontier: First Encounters", for those that remember it). Sadly, that code is long lost, though I hope to do the port again soon.

At this time I was busy with other things, and my daughter was born in November of that year, so I didn't have much chance to go further with it. I don't think I ever forgot.

This time around, there was a post on Slashdot in December about the release of OS4, which reminded me again about AROS, so I swung by for another look.
Being more experienced this time round, the code made even more sense to me, and I had lots of spare time, so I decided that it was time to get into it more seriously.

What kind of projects were you working on before you started working with AROS?

My major claim to fame is "jabberd2", an implementation of the Jabber/XMPP protocols for instant messaging. I was the main programmer on this project for over two years. It was tremendous fun, and I learnt more about programming, networks, Unix and project and user management than I could possibly have learnt anywhere else. On the other side, it was incredibly hard work and I ended up burning out because I didn't know my own limits. The project still exists, though appears to be in decline, which is kinda sad, but it was so good for me that I don't feel like I've lost anything.

Since then I haven't done alot, being without a computer at home for the last couple of years, but I bought a nice laptop a few months ago, and have mostly been experimenting with bits of Perl and JavaScript since then. AROS is the first project I've taken up seriously in the last four years.

How does AROS compare to other operating systems you have used?

Thats an interesting question, because I don't actually use AROS - I just fire up the hosted environment whenever I want to test something. At the moment my interest is in the code itself. At that level its like oranges to apples compared to Unix systems, which is all I really know.

In terms of its actual usefulness to me, its not even close to ready yet. I've spent eight years tweaking and adjusting my environment to be perfect for the way I write code, and so AROS needs to be able to support that before I'd consider making it my primary OS on my laptop. But I'm working toward that, because I actually like its style as opposed to Unix, which I tolerate, and Windows, which I loathe.

What work have you completed for AROS up to this point?

My only finished piece is tap.device, which is a network driver for Linux-hosted AROS. With it you can run network apps in AROS on your Linux machine and have them hit the network, which is necessary if I'm going to do further work on network apps.

Thats all so far, but I've only been doing this for a few weeks.

What AROS specific projects are you working on now?

Right at this moment I'm splitting my time between porting PuTTY (a SSH client) and implementing a FAT32 filesystem driver so we can access Windows filesystems (which will be needed for using USB keys and the like). Both these projects are pushing me to shore up holes in other parts of AROS, like the console terminal emulation and DOS packets, so don't expect me to stay on these things for long, though I'll certainly come back to them once I have the pieces I need.

Has your AROS coding experience been a positive one so far? Do you find you enjoy coding for AROS?

Absolutely. The architecture is fascinating and not completely familiar to me, so I'm learning huge amounts as I try to get things done. Things aren't perfect; there's alot thats difficult about it (incoherent code in places, lack of docs, etc), but I'm certainly finding it much less frustrating than writing equivalent code on Unix.

I want to point out one of your posts on your blog named "Optimize for Fun". I thoroughly enjoyed that post and agree with it 100%. I have always thought the same way about my experience with the Amiga when I was first learning about computers and now with AROS. I am sure there are many others that feel the same way.
The post is here: http://cataclysm.cx/2007/01/20/optimise-for-fun/
Please feel free to comment any further if you would like.
I've been thinking a little more about the future of AROS since making that post. I haven't thought everything out yet, but I'll write a little of my thinking here, and perhaps follow it up with a blog post sometime later.

One of the original goals for AROS was 100% compatibility with AmigaOS 3.1. This is a noble goal, but its not particularly forward looking. AmigaOS has moved on since then, and there will be no new m68k hardware, yet many AROS developers are intent on making sure everything they do can be made to work on the older systems. Thats their prerogative of course, but my concern is that by constantly looking backwards we're missing the opportunities in the future.

As I mentioned in the post you reference, AROS could be the personal desktop OS that the world is waiting for. Thats not going to happen unless we get new developers. As time goes on, the pool of developers with experience with AmigaOS