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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,
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!
I would expect many here to know, but people still do run Amiga hardware. In fact, when the company that made Fusion, a Macintosh 680x0 emulator, first started making a PPC emulator, they wrote it first to run with Amigas that were upgraded with PPC chips.
I don't get it.
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.
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.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
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. :)
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.
(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
The Amiga always seemed to he the rich mans Commadore 64. I have no idea why but them little disks always seemed to be in the hands of rich kids where as us "normal" kids had tapes.
:)
Then again maybe that's just how I bitterly remember it because everyone with an Amiga had Lemmings and all I had was Flimbo's quest. Although it was quite impressive when it stopped working after an entire year of 12+ hours use a day..
I like muppets.
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.
It is interesting to note that parts of AmigaOS were written in BCPL, due to its derivation from TRIPOS. BCPL was the predecessor for C, for those who weren't aware.
AmigaDOS was later rewritten in C for Kickstart/Workbench 2.0. Indeed, it is quite interesting to see that they could create such a fantastic workstation OS (often unmatched feature-wise until the late 1990s by Windows and Mac OS) in a high level language, and running on lower-end hardware.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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
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=
DeluxePaint! I'd kill to have an updated copy of DeluxePaint!
I still wonder why PC sound cards didn't emulate the amiga sound chip.
There wouldn't have been much point. The Amiga sound hardware was basically a set of 4 8-bit DSPs with about a 28Khz maximum sample rate. There were two DSPs per audio channel. With some trickery you could use both DSPs on one channel to simulate 14 bit audio. There were also some filters and a means to let one channel modulate the other. An SB16 could do most of the things this hardware could do. Most of the vaunted "Amiga sound" was due to good programming and the fact that competing machines of the era had either beeper sound or cut down synthesizer chips for audio.
There were (are?) tracker players that emulate the Amiga CPU+sound chip for playing the Amiga's audio library.
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
I have often said that had Apple been selling the Amiga, we'd all be running offshoots of that platform, rather than the PC. It was ten years ahead of its time, and I mean that almost literally; it wasn't until 1994, running Linux, that I could get even CLOSE to what I could do on my Amiga in 1985.
In looking back, it is amazing the number of things they absolutely nailed wih the Amiga. It was the first machine to use fully-programmable custom chips for sound and graphics support. That hardware was immensely powerful; it could do memory copies (the blitter), palette shifts (the "copper", and I don't remember why it was called that anymore), sprites, collision detection, four-channel stereo sound, and probably many other things I'm forgetting, without even using the main CPU at all. (well, except to set things up, at any rate.)
The system could display separate programs with separate resolutions and color palettes on the same screen at the same time. You could literally grab the Workbench screen and drag it down, revealing some cool demo running behind it..."Boing!" in the top half, Workbench in the bottom. This was done by some clever copper tricks... on the fly, over the space of about two scanlines, the copper would shift the entire display mode and palette, and start displaying screen data from a different arbitrary program.
Later, a variant on this technique was used to create the best graphics the Amiga could manage...Sliced HAM, or S-HAM. The default 'high color' graphics mode, HAM, could have any 32 base colors out of the palette of 4,096. Any pixel could either have one of the base colors, or it could H)old the color of the previous pixel A)nd M)odify either the red, green, or blue component. S-HAM took this a step further, and swapped the base 32 colors on *every scan line*, so that you could have many more colors available. Some of the S-HAM pictures were absolutely stunning. It did, however, put a huge load on the graphics hardware... the machine really crawled when running that mode. So it was really only useful for slideshows... you couldn't animate that mode, to my knowledge.
Then, on top of that, they mostly nailed the OS. There were three major components to the AmigaOS; Exec, Intuition, and AmigaDOS.
Exec was the multitasking core, what we'd probably think of as the kernel in Linux land. It was immensely efficient. The task switching method that RJ Mical came up with was so fast that it ended up going into the Motorola programming manuals. I can't find the numbers offhand, but I believe the Amiga could task switch in less than twenty clock cycles. Whatever the actual number was, it was FAST.
Intuition provided the windowing libraries; it was what kept windows properly layered and coordinated, and routed user input. That would be roughly the equivalent of X, though much simpler. Workbench, the built-in graphic UI, was an optional load; you could stay in 'console mode' if you wished. The Amiga had no true text-only mode, however. Even if you had just a single CLI window open with nothing else, it was still drawn in graphics mode. (scrolling on the Amiga was never very fast because of this).
AmigaDOS, I believe, did all the disk and file I/O. It was rather Unixish, but it was very slow and had an absolutely horrible user interface. (Fortunately, it was easy to replace the DOS programs with better ones, and most people who really used their machines did so.) Filesystems were abstracted too, which was a good thing.... the early filesystem on the Amiga was very fragile and very slow. Later on, the Fast File System was introduced, which sped things up a heck of a lot. With FFS, hard drives were quite comfortable, but floppies were never very good. There were many special custom loaders that sped things up (much like on the C64), but the floppies were always slow, no matter what.
Of the three major components of the OS, AmigaDOS was the weakest, and was responsible for a lot of the early (justified) griping about the pl
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