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Happy Birthday, Amiga
Sebby writes "Today is the Amiga's 20th anniversary. Commodore officially introduced the Amiga 1000 with much fanfare at the Lincoln Center in New York on July 23, 1985. It was the most advanced computer of its day. The Amiga 1000 was originally conceived a few years earlier by a small California company called Amiga, Inc. and was financed by a group of Florida doctors looking to invest in a killer game machine."
It was the most advanced computer of its day.
Funny, I always thought the Cray-2, also released in 1985, held that title.
Trolling is a art,
The real problems that plagued the Amiga was the lack of cheap hard disks from Commodore, Later in the Amigas life the lack of memory protection started to plauge the users too... If they actually released, standardized the platform perhaps it would have helped...
On the otherhad the killer is that everyone that has bought the IP has either died, or promised to do something with it, and done nothing.
As a plus Amiga's gave rise to smart GPU's, offloaded IO & a better less cpu centric design of cheap computers.
Too bad Amiga ever hooked up with commode-door. If they had been bought out by anyone else they might be a viable platfor, today. I used to have an Amiga 1200, but sold it when it still had some value, and used that money toward a PC. Sometimes I miss it.
How ya like dat?
What I liked best?
Debugging. Coolest system error name...
Software Failure. Press left mouse button to continue.
Guru Meditation #0100000C0.000FE800
Sigh.. had they marketed it right, we'd not be talking about MS Windows at all. A machine and OS far ahead of its time.
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..the Amiga was a nice machine for its time. I remember checking an A1000 out at a friends place many, many years ago. The graphics and sound on the machine were quite amazing, compared to what was available on the market. Sad that the Amiga never got the recognition it deserved.
20 years huh? Wow, I didn't realize it's been that long.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
The most "advanced" computer at that time depends on what your criteria are. The systems from Cray and Amiga are very different, yet still both very advanced.
While the Cray-2 may have been the most efficient number crunching computer in 1985, the Amiga was the top of the line when it came to multimedia and workstation applications. So while the Cray-2 didn't offer the amazing multimedia capabilities of the Amiga, and the Amiga didn't offer the pure crunching power of the Cray-2, it isn't correct to say that either is more "advanced" than the other in all ways.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
(Chiming in with all fellow retrospectives)
I grew up on an Amiga 500. It, as well as a friend's A2000 which I bought of of him some years later when I was making the switch to PC, are still sitting in my parents' house somewehre. =) (In fact, probably in almost pristine quality with a snapshot of the BBS that I was running on it some years later until the fateful day I decided to pull the plug and make some more desk space for the new Mac that had infiltrated and upstaged.)
My first introduction to computers was actually the QNX/Unisys ICON system in elementary school (yep, a networked system running a Unix-like operating system... something that *also* ahead of its time, well, kinda). Following that, the Commodore PET and 64 on which I learned BASIC and got my start in software development. =) A few years later, I was back to the ICONS where I started learning C in about grade 8, but through that time we had an Amiga in the house.
Ours was an A500 which Dad bought from the local Canadian Tire (!) and revealed as a surprise family Christmas gift in 1987. It was a phenomenal machine. I can still recall the school-yard conversations with my 286- and Mac SE-toting friends about how many simultaneous colours their computers could display ("16, eh? Howzabout FOUR THOUSAND NINETY SIX, foo'").
Ahh, good times.
Truly a revolutionary force in its day, though. The intervening years (death of Commodore, slow atrophy of the Amiga brand and innovation) were painful but inevitable to watch, kind of like a withering tree you know is past its prime and on its way.
-b
myselfmusic
I loved my Amiga 1000 and even did some professional development for it. I kept it running for a great many years before it finally gave up the ghost. There were many things that contributed to it's demise, but one of them has to be it's over specialized hardware.
Part of what made it so awesome was how incredible it was at graphics. How perfectly tuned it was to making a video signal. Unfortunately that limited the design of the hardware, the speed of the processor. Even if you had a faster processor for it, everything had to slow down to 7.xxxx MHz (IIRC) when you hit the video interface.
Then the PC got better video cards, and I could just upgrade that one part. The Amiga was always playing catchup with custom designed chips tuned to the hardware. After a while it felt like they were always a day late and a dollar short. It was still an amazing machine for video, but for a general purpose system it had seriously lost it's luster.
Still I miss it...
What do you know I wrote a novel
In my opinion, the most advanced computer of the 80's was the MSX
That was awesome. Consumer electronics companies got together to make a "standard" home computer that would never go out of date because... it was already out of date when it launched! Sheer genius. Then having advertised that it wouldn't go out of date (Toshiba ad: "What happens next year when it's out of date? Not with this, this is MSX mate!") of course they brought out MSX2. Not that it was better not to have done... just the fact that they either didn't see it coming or else so casually lied about it was stunning. The whole thing was hilarious.
It was the particular hardware design of the Amiga that positioned it for the application area it ended up dominating for a time. However, it was much more the efforts of third party hardware and software vendors that kept Amigas relevant.
Newtek, Great Valley Products, Scala, the developers of Imagine, Real3d, and all the various genlock manufacturers to name a few.
Without these companies, things would never have gotten off the ground. You know you're failing to meet demands as a computer manufacturer when the standard route to a high end system was to buy a 16bit machine and virtually superceed its entire internal hardware with expansion cards.
In the case of the Amiga, for much longer than it should have been, you bought an A2000 which came with a 16bit CPU, space for 8MB of 16bit memory, at best 4096 colours (a bit of a hack) and a SCSI controller. You would immediately buy an expansion card containing a 32bit CPU/FPU (ya you youngins who take their FPU so much for granted its not mentioned in separation from the integer part of the core these days), space for 8MB of 32bit memory and a faster SCSI controller from GVP and some sort of 24bit frame buffer. A couple years later the framebuffer was bumped for a Newtek Video Toaster.
The Amiga itself became increasingly subordinate, and when the A3000 came out it was a bit too little too late. The A4000 release date was just pointless.
This is all coming from someone who was a card carrying Amiga zealot and still has his A2000 sitting in the closest.
The Amiga was a good system but so was the Atari ST. The only problem was that both were designed to compete against each other, not the PC and MAC. It didn't matter if the Amiga or ST had superior graphics or sound or multitasking the Mac already had its share of the market as well as the PC.
I owned an ST and had no problems with Amiga owners. Both systems had great applications as well as games. But the PC ended up as the one who took the games crown from both even though it was inferior for its time.
I still use my ST and I hope all those Amiga users with Slashdot use their systems as well. We have a good history to look back upon as well as a lot of fun!
I used and programmed both the ST and Amiga extensively, and the comparison isn't as clear-cut as you make it sound. They both had their strengths.
The ST definitely got you a working computer for less money. The Atari monitors (at least the early ones) were high quality. The ST operating system was easy to use, easy to program. It also made efficient use of processor power -- my Amiga wasn't as responsive as my ST until after I dropped in a 68020 card, effectively quadrupling the main processor power. And the ST had great programming languages. My personal favorites were GFA Basic and Laser C. There was nothing as polished on Amiga, and one handy reference book was all you needed for most Atari ST application development.
By way of comparison. . . The Amiga had better and more flexible graphics, amazingly better audio, far better expandability on some models (like the A2000, but you paid a premium for it). Double-sided floppies were standard, so you could distribute software on them. Amiga OS right up through Workbench 1.3 was ugly and awkward. After that it got better for users, and it was more powerful and flexible than Atari TOS -- but Amiga OS remained brutally hard to program, and you needed about 15 pounds of reference manuals. There were lots of programming environments offered for the Amiga, but all of them had a half-baked quality (with the notable exception of CanDo, but it was too expensive for most people).
Incidentally, the biggest thing I miss from Amiga is the screens system, and the custom screens. It bugs me that none of the other major operating systems -- not a one -- ever came up with anything similar, to this very day.
Does anybody remember when Amiga was the premier platform for computer games? There was a stretch of several years when all the best games appeared first on Amiga, the Atari ST was often right there with it (or a close second), and then some of the games eventually trickled down to MS-DOS PCs. The PC in that era didn't have the graphics or audio capabilities to match Amiga, or even the main processor power for that matter (i.e. 68000 versus 8088).
Somebody told me a story about going to a computer show and seeing all the PCs struggling to run crummy CGA/EGA games. There were Amigas at the show. . . but they were forbidden from running games! Commodore thought if Amiga was seen running games, it would ruin their reputation with big business customers!
Amiga users got the first crack at classics like Shadow of the Beast, Populous, The Settlers, Lemmings, NY Warriors, Battle Squadron, Stunt Car Racer, Turrican II, Cannon Fodder and too many other great games to list.
As time went by, and Amiga hardware became more outdated without any meaningful upgrades, the PC gradually caught up. I think Wing Commander was the turning point. It was on the PC first, and your basic Amiga couldn't handle it. From that time on, the PC was the top dog of computer gaming, while Amiga and Atari ST faded away.