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."

Comments

The good old days

[mfloy]

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.

A great machine indeed.

[AmiNTT]

The Amiga was a fantastic computer for its time, and even up until recently, was an excellent platform. An Amiga 3000 was my daily machine for email and web work up until late 2003, when I got a Mac G5, which is pretty much everything the Amiga could have been. AREXX was an extremly handy tool.

Now, my 3000 is relegated to playing Settlers once in a while.

Memories...

[volsung]

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. :)

Best. Easteregg. Evar.

[EQ]

I remember this one (and the how-to is still on the net!):

1. Hold Left-Shift, Left-Alt, Right-Shift and right-alt

2. Press any of the F keys and get a message!

3. To get a rude message toward Commodore, do this

4. Hold down the same as step 1 and hold down an f key

5. Insert a disk and you get the message " We made the amiga... "

6. Take the disk out and you get " And Commodore Fucked it up! "

(This was from the site above -but I remember doing this on 1.2, with an original 1000).

Ah - my Amiga - how I miss thee

[de Bois-Guilbert]

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 :) ).

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. ...and you know, everything was a hell of a lot more fun back then. ;)

Part of the houston amiga users group.

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

big in europe

[joe094287523459087]

i never saw one in stores in the US but i went to germany in the US army and they were all over - amiga stores on the US Bases, amiga stores in the local economy. it was very popular

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=

Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning..

[cheesybagel]

The original Macintosh did not have preemptive multitasking. It also came with a monochrome screen. Its 3 1/2" floppies were single-sided 400KB while the Amigas were double-sided 880KB.

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.

From five years into the future...

[jfoust2]

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.

I have very fond memories of the Amiga

[sgant]

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.