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Amiga - Back From the Dead?
Wired has this story about the Amiga comeback, under a new company, which bought the Amiga rights from Gateway. As an old Amiga fan, I will believe it when I see some new machines. You can read more about it here on the official Amiga Web site. I really hope to see something come out of this.
Well, in the beginning (I'm talking about the days when Amiga 1000 came out with 256k RAM), Someone (probably from Amiga) created this red-white bouncing 3D ball. No one said anything about it (copyright license or anything), and everyone like that demo (along with the juggler demo) - so later Commodore (not sure) - made the red-white ball - the Amiga logo..
Hetz (Heunique)
...Amiga's back from the dead again.
Refered as my own experience, what made me love Amiga was that I could pay myself without breaking my mother's purse, that you have lot of informations for programming at the price of floppy disks and that for only $100, I bought a C compiler and could run the whole thing with only two floppy disk drives on my A500 (it's true!), and nevertheless have fun with beautiful games. :-). So without money, I have to drop my Amiga (and started with linux few months later after the discover of the sad and flat Windows world)
I started with a A500, continued with an A1200 two years later, and boost it with a 68030 processor card a year after without breaking my whole (and old !) software and cut budget's familly for food and clothes. I could work with LaTeX for editing, play funny and beautiful games, discover programming in GFABasic, Assembly language and C language. In 1996, the hard disk crashed just after I bought a expensive PC (at least for me, a poor student) for working at my school because everybody used to work on PC with windows (may be evil waves from the PC ?
Oups, I almost forgot to say that Amiga was a she computer ;-) The only female computer in the world.
Today even with linux for free, If you want to both play good and beautiful games, discover programming and work, you need an expensive PC. why ? because:
So, there are rooms for low cost and easy systems. Maybe we can call it Amiga in old days when computer was also for pleasure and not only for taking your money.
I just want to come back in happy days when just plug a card under the keyboard was enough to boost my computer, when nobody spoke about plug and play because it was already there, when having a Command Line Interface in the corner wasn't a shame.
Today when I speak with people, ever non-programmer, old enough to have worked on an Amiga, I never meet someone saying that it was a bad machine. Everyone remembers how easy of use it was, how easy it was to just put a card in it and use it without pain for lucky owner of A3000 and A4000. They also remember the low and affordable price of A500 and A1200 computers. It was the days of computers at purse scale.
1. Multitasking Desktop OS (in 1985 this was unheard of, although Most Amiga owners just assumed that all OS's had Preemptive multi tasking)
2. 4096 colour pallette. (Once again impressive in '85) as well as custom hardware such as the blitter chip - A much more sophisticted one than the simple rectangle movement chips in a lot of SVGA cards too. This could take 3 sources and AND and OR them together.
3. Stereo Sound. Not the best sound available at the time, but certainly very impressive. 2 8-bit channels per speaker allowed a crude 14 bit sound format.
4. Small fast efficient Os. This would work on a 512K machine with no swap space, and still have room for applications
5. Stable. Ironically, This was down to the absence of memory protection. If your program crashes it brings down the whole system.
6. Screens. Something that no other Os has done as well, although the multiple consoles on Linux gives a similar feel. Essentially each application had its own screen at its own resolution and colour depth. This is available on other operating systems now, but it was part of the whole look and fell of the OS.
7. Cost. This was priced competitively against consoles. The small amount extra was considered worth it for the added benefit of having word processors, and paint programs. (Not to mention pirate games)
I'll let others go into the disadvantages. I'm too much of a fanatic to seriously believe that there were any. (It's all lies from the un-Amigaly who will go to silicon Hell)
The people who are making this attempt to rejuvenate the Amiga are in it because they love the platform, they find it worth their time and energy, and they want to see the Amiga continue. Open source/Linux, etc. fans should start to see the parallels here... right? Now that I think about it, I'm uncertain whether to be more amused or sad at the attitudes taken by the supposedly open-minded and enlightened people here.
Herbie J.