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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."
I can remember back with the old systems like the Amiga. I was completely amazed when I first got to use one, and I thought that computers had reached perfection. Now if I was to show someone one they would laugh and think it was something a high school kid built in his garage.
Voice your opinion!
Now, my 3000 is relegated to playing Settlers once in a while.
Please... do not remind me. I still have an Amiga 3000 at home and my wife wants "to take that piece of junk out of the room".
Vi havas e-poston.
To this day I still pull out the old Amiga ROM kernel manuals to look for inspiration. Beautiful design. Way ahead of anything else at the time and still a good design in many areas even by todays standards.
Man, the red and black Guru Meditation screen is probably the creepiest error message I've ever seen. No soothing blue or green to be found there. :)
I don't know if they all had this, but my Amiga 1000 (the one in the room in the original box) had signatures on the inside of the plastic cover. I recall a little dog footprint too.
I'm not sure what I'm saving the machine for though...if only I could get a variant of Unix to run on it...but its lack of a MMU made the 1000 ill equipped for modern OS's.
This poses another question- how long will a system last boxed up like that?
(This was from the site above -but I remember doing this on 1.2, with an original 1000).
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
I remember seeing the demo model of the Amiga 1000 in a local "mom and pop" computer store before the production shipment. I was blown away. It was so much more advanced than any other home computer at that time, both graphically and OS (AmigaDos). I got on the waiting list for months, and I payed full list price, I believe about $1300. I needed the new high density floppies (1.2 MB) and payed $49.95 for a box of 10 floppies!! For a laugh, I still have that box with the price tag still on it. And I still have the Amiga 1000 sitting in a box somewhere. Later I added a 2 MB memory expansion which was another $450. Ah, the bad old day, which seemed so good 20 years ago.
I used to own an Amiga500 back in the day, and got me a A1200 when they were released. Everyone I knew who were into computers had an Amiga, PC:s were more or less unheard of and generally ridiculed as clunky, ugly and unsexy (to a bunch of greasy-haired computer nerds anyhow :) ).
...and you know, everything was a hell of a lot more fun back then. ;)
It always bugs me how the Amiga is forgotten when media - mainstream as well as trade press - do pieces on the "history" pf home computing. Back when no one outside universities and the military had heard of the "internet", and computers were considered wierd and anti-social, we were cruising BBS:s on our 1200 baud modems.
I had an apple and then went up to the amiga.
It had "HAM" graphics (hold and modify) so you could finally have real pictures (lots of porn of course).
It had true multi-tasking (not sure if windows has that yet- I think it got it with win2k). By true- I mean if one process dies, the machine didn't hang- that process did and everything else kept running with it's preemptive slice (come to think of it my win2k machine still hangs up for over a minute sometimes in azureus or when the virus scanner runs so win may not have preemptive multi-tasking yet).
It had an incredible battlemech game that we just played to death (probably helped some guys fail college).
It had a great networked tank game where you drove around a city blowing it up and hunting for your buddy's enemy tank- but the atari had one with smily faces that supported more people.
I wrote a shareware game for it (Spaaaaace Aaaace!) which was a space war clone with cool graphics and hit location- got a cease and desist order from "Bluth Enterprises" - they had a video tree game with the name B(. It was right about then that game started requiring 10-15 people to produce (since you needed real artists and musicians and the programs were so large you needed multiple programmers)
I got my first virus on the amiga. My buds didn't believe me until it happened to them- it spread via floppies but tended to make the floppies crash. It said
Something wonderful is happening
Your Amiga has come alive!
Great computer that commodore ruined.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
we had a club of all army guys that would meet once every 2 weeks on base. everyone would bring their games (on 3.5" disks) and some guy would sell stacks of blanks - 50 for $20 i think. and we would spend literally all day copying each other's games. i usually came home with 400 floppies to try out, and usually about 50 new good working games. there were also a few companies that listed every game in their catalog and sold "backup copies" including documentation for as little as $2.
i guess in a way we helped drive them out of business by not supporting the software developers but i made $600 a month. if i had to buy software for $30/title, it just wasn't goign to happen. i DID buy a few titles, mainly from psygnosis, who released just AWESOME games that were a decade ahead of their time. and other guys in the barracks saw me having so much fun, they went and got amigas too. these were totally computer illiterate guys who had never heard of a mouse, back in 1990.
we would set up very rudimentary LAN parties with 2 or 3 amigas connected by serial cable and play roller coaster racer all night... amazing fun. i remember the first time i saw populous. it was at about 8pm, and next thing i new it was 6am and time for exercise. i was tired but excited all day :)
i'm not surprised IBM won the PC race but i am sad and disappointed that the creativity and genius that went into games 15 years ago seems to be gone now. there used to be 20 or 30 new games every year that were totally original. now 1 original game like katamarcy darcy comes out and everyone talks about how great it is :( if only they knew...
actually i just played a (PC port of) an amiga game a couple days ago. i was surfing around and somehow saw a reference to Overlord, which was a great game for the amiga, really fun and creative graphics about taking over planets. anyway i googled around a little and discovered i could download and play it for free! the sound is PC speaker beeps instead of midi quality music and sound samples the amiga had, and the graphics arent quite as good but it still brings back fond memories :) http://www.mirsoft.info/gmb/music_info.php?id_ele= MTEyMDc=
But to me it was the piss poor marketing that did it in. The Amiga was far, far more technically advanced than either the Mac or the PC for several years but CBM sat on their hands for most of that. There were a few enhancements e.g. ECS & AGA and 680x0 CPU upgrades but too little too late. The A3000 was too expensive, and the A4000 / A1200 turned up when the battle was nearly over.
My personal experience mostly bore that out. I was an A500 owner for years and had an external HD. I was just about fed up with the speed of it so I was looking to upgrade. I thought the A1200 was great but to add a harddrive and memory meant I might as well buy an A4000. So I saved up to discover CBM had hiked the price by £100. So instead I looked through Personal Computer World and located a 486sx with more memory, sound and a monitor for the same price as an A4000 and never looked back. Even then I was wowed because the Cirrus Logic card could do 16.8 million colours at 640x840 and 65k at 800x600!
Certainly Windows 3.1 was pretty shitty compared to AmigaOS, but soon I was running OS/2 2.1 and I had a desktop that was miles better than Amiga had ever been. The switch opened my whole career up. I I began by programming OS/2 and the similar APIs meant it was easy to switch to Win32. I also dabbled with Linux. I loved that my PC was modular so the CPU, memory, graphics, harddrive were all upgraded as my needs and pocket allowed. That same PC eventually became a Pentium, one component at a time until I bought a new machine.
I hate to imagine what would have happened if Commodore hadn't forced me down another path. It certainly opened my eyes and allowed me to observe with some amusement those desperately clinging to every rumour that have filled the last 13 or so years after the Amiga had clearly died.
As for the 16-bit color, I find that somewhat hard to believe without a daughterboard and new graphics chips. If the claim is correct, the Mindset had a 512 color (9-bit) palette. No amount of video memory would give you 65536 (16-bit) colors. Unless it had another palette mode which seems unlikely.
I have heard of personal computers with better graphics and sound than the Amiga, but they are all posterior to the 1985 A1000 launch. Examples include the 1987 Acorn Archimedes which had a 32-bit CPU and better graphics or the 1989 Fujitsu FM Towns on which you could have 8-bit colors from a 15-bit palette. Both were superb machines at the time they came out.
http://www.modarchive.com/
:)
I loved MOD music files. Thankfully, winamp can play them, too!
The amiga could do 4-channel music with sampled instruments, when PC's could just do bleeps and tweets. I still wonder why PC sound cards didn't emulate the amiga sound chip.
I hope you're a troll because those two computers were worth serious ca$h. An A1000 with signatures is an original edition. Antique computers are worth real money second hand.
ok, i'm way too uninformed. apparently amiga produced a version of the A3000 that came with UNIX System V. this was the A3000UX, shown here and here. If someone has any bits of information in recollection of this machine could you inform us all. This is very interesting, I never knew this existed.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I have a contemporaneous (and slightly cat-peed-on) "Amiga Format" issue (imported from "Future Publishing" in the UK) that proves you wrong with a Gassee interview. BeOS was called B-OS because it was thought to be the logical successor to A-OS - AmigaOS. This was back in the 66MHz 2-way SMP BeBox days. Now, the BeBox was a seriously cool box. The Geek Port ruled. I drove a sort of turtle thing with it, in the Cali sunshine. Believe it or not, rollerblade women dug me.At least in my dreams. But I ain't a virgin, if you get my drift.
The BeBox was the last Cali computer. The Apple II was perhaps the first. Amiga was the pinnacle. Nothintg can overtake it. It represented the end-all and be-all of 2D computing. Trexx Warrior, 15" Philips CM8832. On boardwalk. Zowie, and I'm no pinhead, not that Zawinski will let me in without a fee.
It's in a box in the basement, but I have it. I fired it up a couple of years ago when I was reminiscing about the F/A-18 flight sim. I was remembering it as super-realistic, extremely responsive, and smooth to play. I fired it up, and got was looked like a 320x240 ascii art rendition of the Bay Area. Funny how your memory plays tricks on you.
Still, I remember spending/wasting hours/days flying around san francisco in a fully loaded F/A-18 - flying under the golden gate, buzzing the airport, carpet bombing alcatraz... those were the days...
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The Amiga was a fine example of the persistent techie belief that "better" should always win. It doesn't. We whacked our heads against that one for years in the Amiga market.
So we started out trumpeting the advantage of sound (few PCs had sound; the guys who eventually successfully marketed the original Sound Blaster were refugees from the Amiga market) or color (remember, VGA was rare and expensive when the Amiga was released) or video compatibility with deep color (Targa cards were rather static and very expensive) or windows (GEM? Windows 1.x?) or video manipulation or color desktop publishing or 3D animation or emulation (we had Mac, Win, DOS, Atari, etc.) or persistent RAM drives or hypertext help systems or any number of other whizzy features, and the PC and Mac marketroids would *successfully* say "Who needs that?". Rinse, lather, repeat.
The distillation of my Amiga market experience came from the lips of a drunken Amiga dealer at a party in 1992 or so. Of course, a popular topic of conversation at these events was discussing why the so-obviously-superior-to-us-annointed Amiga wasn't outpacing the Mac and PC in sales.
This dealer said of the past few years (at that time) that "It was like we were all from five years into the future, back in the days of radio."
I did say this guy was drunk, didn't I?
But he was right. It was as if we'd all seen what television was like, but we were trying to sell to people who really liked radio and couldn't imagine the value of audio plus moving pictures.
We all knew they'd want television someday, but it was always hard to hear they didn't want to buy it.
I have a developer A1000, serial number 36 or so.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
Heh, I remember when I dropped the Amiga for a Mac (please don't hate me, this was 1995), I was pissed that DD floppies on the Mac were only 800K and HD's where only 1.4 MB as opposed to 1.76 :).
I now have an A600 that I will be reconnecting this weekend, in memory of the amazing experiences I had as an early teenager with my A500.... it ended up with a 33MHz 68030 (CSA Derringer board!), an 80MB hard drive (Alfa HDD controller) and a whopping 24 MB RAM or so. Man I miss that machine, it kicked the ass of any PC we had at school in 93-94. It was also the machine with which I first connected to the Internet, used email, and downloaded a file from an FTP server. Man, my mom freaked (about the phone bill of all things) when I told her I was connected to a server in Finland via the Internet. Such fond memories...
Ahhh, nostalgia.
John
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
Sometimes I wish that I had kept at least one of my Amigas but I threw away Amiga 2000HD a year and a half ago and gave my CD32 to a local thrift store.
My progression in computers went from MSDOS->AmigaDOS 1.3-3.1->Windows 95-XP->OS 10.2-10.4.
The Amiga platform is dead but I will always have a warm place in my heart for those days.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Had a friend that I met through the Amiga that developed Disk Mechanic for the Amiga. Eric Quackenbush. He was independent before he went to Greater Valley Products to develop for them. He was a HELL of a programmer. Last I heard he was doing things for OS/2 but this had to be 10 years ago.
I remember I had lured some guys from Pixar to a Chicago Amigafest to see if they wanted to port Renderman to the Amiga. The Amigafests were small affairs compared to the Apple or Microsoft ones back then, but I got a guy to fly out to it. He was nice and everything, but you could tell he thought it was kinda small-time. He was polite and suggested that we just make a Renderman compliant renderer for the Amiga. And looking back he was right, the Amiga just didn't have the horsepower to run Renderman at the time.
This was when Alan Hastings had just come out with Lightwave for NewTek...having hired Alan after his Videoscape 3D was a semi hit. Videoscape had competition from Sculpt-Animate 4D and Turbo-Silver 3D. But it was Lightwave that really broke through. This was in the days when it was a single guy doing all the programming/developing for the product. Remember them? Alan had very little help when developing Videoscape and I believe he had a partner join him in making the first version of Lightwave. Newtek was the center of the Amiga universe at the show with the VideoToaster and Lightwave.
I miss that really. It was a small group of very rabid fans that loved this machine. I used to go to Amiga user group meetings and met a lot of really friendly people. But all good things come to an end. I just wished the Amiga had a more dignified death.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
The Mindset was clearly inferior in every way with the dubious exception of having some IBM PC compatibility.
Though I don't recall when it came out but Amigas did have PC compatibility. There was a daughter board you could install which allowed you to install and run PCDOS/Windows 3.X.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"the macintosh didn't get preemptive multitasking until osx."
But it is interesting to note that the Mac's predecessor, the Lisa DID have preemptive multitasking.
It's one of the things they stripped out to make the Mac a cheaper computer that could run with less memory overhead.
I'm platform agnostic but use Windows at home for gaming as you do. Prior to OSX it used to really erk me when Mac OS 8 fan boys would laugh at Windows. I mean Windows 98 and NT 4 were a bit dodgey, but they sure multitasked better than OS 8. People would ask me what I didnt like about the Mac and I had a simple demonstration. I would start decompressing a stuffit file and then click on the desktop. When the stuffit application didn't have focus the decompression rate slowed to a crawl, no matter that the computer wasn't doing anything else.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I blame Doom for the death of the Amiga. Doom was the killer app for the "PC as home computer", and due to the Amiga's planar bitmap based graphics architecture which was amazing for 2D, but crap for 3D, the Amiga just couldn't compete...
:(
I'm another ex-Amigan who like so many others who have posted here, miss it dearly
Buying an A1 you would need to buy Amiga OS4 pre-release (it's still being worked on) and you'll be given a final version of OS4 when it is finished at no extra cost, so you may as well buy it now.
;-)
OS4 is PowerPC native, rebuilt from the grounds up, so buying a Blizzard/CyberPPC with a 040/060 would be overkill unless something absolutely refuses to run under emulation and it's worth $800 just to run/play it
$800 is a hell a lot of money for a CPU upgrade, Amiga or not, you'd be better off spending it on a G4 mirco-A1 (ITX form factor).
Just my two cents.