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The Amiga Turns 25
retsamxaw reminds us that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Amiga. "[The Amiga] debuted to rave reviews and great expectations — heck, InfoWorld said it might be the 'third milestone' in personal computing after the Apple II and the IBM PC. ... Commodore was a famously parsimonious outfit, but it splurged on the Amiga's introduction. The highlight of that Lincoln Center product launch was a demo in which pop art legend Andy Warhol used an Amiga to 'paint' Blondie's Debbie Harry. The exercise didn't prove much of anything other than that Warhol was able to use the paint program's fill command, but it was heady stuff... Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings — most notably OS/2 and Linux... But Amiga nuts of the 1980s and early 1990s... remain the ultimate fanboys, even though it hadn't yet occurred to anyone to hurl that word at computer users."
The big, not-often-told truth is that IBM PCs sucked donkey ass, compared to the Amigas. I remember the huge hype that surrounded the IBM PC, so I wanted to have a look. I was spoiled on Amiga's full-fledged GUI (G for Graphical!) that permeated all the applications present on the Amiga. When I saw the apps on the IBM PC, I couldn't believe my eyes - in the most negative way possible: the poor ASCII graphics sported by the apps present on the IBM PC were a colossal turn-off. And the computers were considerably more expensive than the Amigas, even without soundcard and color graphics. And "colour" on the IBM PC meant 4 colours (CGA)! Of course, CGA cost you an arm and a leg.
I mean, c'mon! IBM PCs and Amigas? No comparison. The only thing the IBM PC had going for it were the three magic letters.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Given the persistent failure of Official Management of the remains of the Amiga, Its OS, there are those who decided they can do without such management...
The Status page and News page of the open source project AROS
I thought at the time the web was unbearably slow with the speeds of the day being 14.4kbps, and Mosaic performing quite badly in only 2MB. These days I have 4GB RAM and 4Mbps downstream, and pages still seem to take forever to load.
Here's a playthrough of my bestselling Amiga game The King of Chicago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17xQQ-PMPBs It sold 50k copies for Cinemaware - not bad for 1987. Some reviews: http://channelzilch.com/doug/kocblurbs.htm I'm still proud of it.
Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!
Digg are currently running this story, and there's a post on there leading to this:
Software Patent ended CD32 and Commodore Amiga
It describes how Commodore lost a software patent fight over, believe it or not, blinking a cursor using XOR. They owed $10m as a result, and were also prohibited from bringing CD32 into the US. Since Commodore had bet large on the CD32, this was a fatal blow.
Read it, it's interesting. I didn't realise this and've read more about Commodore than many. If you're interested in the history of Commodore, and it is interesting, try "On The Edge", which describes it very well. The book is sold out in many places but I imagine it will be possible to locate copies.
Cheers,
Ian
Having been there (still have a bunch of Amiga's - that I never use anymore sadly - including an A4000 with a Phase 5 233 MHz PPC board and video toaster/flyer) I don't think it was a marketing issue until the early to mid 90's when Commodore started to face serious problems.
In the early days of the Amiga I recall 4 or 5 magazines, one official one, TV ads, ads in 3rd party magazines (I remember vividly seeing ads for the machines in various video/multimedia trade journals). IDG - with Amigaworld shows you how big it was really - this is the same company that publishes Macworld and Infoworld to this day (and consequently I knew the writing was on the wall when one of the editors for Amigaworld - now writes for Macworld).
I think the problem was a bit more deep sadly - one of mindshare more than anything. When I started working in video part time with a friend - this was in 91-92 when the A4000 came to market many of our colleagues used to think it was hilarious we took the machines seriously. Never mind we were the first shop in town to do editing via disk, (5.25" Quantum SCSI disks :)), and the only shop in town that could do 3D graphics for a long time (long before the flyer we used the DPS Personal Animation Recorder - it rocked). The 3d animations from the demo reel we worked on back then still looks pretty nice today (despite being only on VHS). It was a serious computer developed by some really smart and talented software and hardware engineers, but people didn't see it that way.
At the local computer club most ms-dos/mac users used to decry Amiga users with statements like who needs multi-tasking (the claim back then was "I'm far more productive doing one task at a time thank you very much"), and oh all those wonderful animations and graphics/sound we could do too with the right hardware.
Sadly Amiga met the same fate as NEXT, SGI, Apollo and almost Apple (yes if Steve didn't come back - they would be a topic in some history book right now).
Also I should mention - out of all the companies who have bought Amiga - Commodore was the only company to actually release marketable hardware and advertise said hardware. I think while they mismanaged their entire business down the toilet - they certainly did a much better job than most have (managing the Amiga that is).
Really? The A1200 was kind of...meh. Seriously, the Amiga 1000 was revolutionary when it came out in 1985! The Amiga 500 was revolutionary when it came out in 1987 because it made the Amiga affordable. After that? Nothing much. The Amiga 1200 came out in fall of 1992 and what kind of specs did it have?
Sure, the 68EC020 at 14MHz was of course an improvement over the 68000 at 7MHz, but c'mon! It's five years since Amiga 500!
Only 2MiB of chip RAM (and no fast RAM) - once again, it's been five years!
Graphics were kind of braindead, just adding two bitplanes and making a total mess of the color registers. Could have gone with a chunky mode instead.
Blitter is exactly the same as the old Amiga 1000 for goodness sake!
Sound is exactly the same as the old Amiga 1000...
Remember that in 1994, the Playstation came out. Compared to Amiga (and especially CD32 which came out a year earlier) now that is revolutionary again!
Yeah, of course I thought the A1200 was the shit at the time, but that's cause I was a blinded Amiga fanboy. Luckily, it wore off (even though I still actually have two A1200 and one A600 in my closet somewhere); for some people, it's chronic. Just go to amiga.org and watch some deluded people, not in jest or in irony, argue that the Amiga is, in 2010, a better computer than a PC. Oh, the humanity!
The Amiga turned 25 and I am extensively using Amigas since 1993. That's seventeen years. Things changed a lot since the early 1990-ies. First it was the BBSes, where an Amiga with modem more than fine. Then the Internet era came, where I was connecting to the Internet and downloading games and scene demo off Aminet and enjoying them. Then the 68000 line of processors was getting old and slow, but hopefully the PowerPC accelerators came to give the old machines an enormous speed boost. Then new machines appeared based on faster, more powerful and newer processors. And now in 2010 we have more new Amiga machines coming - the Sam 460 and the Amiga X1000. My Amiga history and experience is excellent, so I have no reasons to move to other platforms. Cheers
Good points. Thanks for your reply, no matter how much you've ruined my Sunday evening you ghastly blashphemer :)
The AGA chipset in the A1200 and A4000 was a stop gap chipset, a quick mod of the ECS chipset. It was supposed to plug the gap between the ECS and AAA chipsets.
So both the A1200 and A4000 were just stop gap machines, but sadly nothing ever was released after then.
People may go on about the A1200 not being much faster than the A500, but have a look at your history books. PCs were faster in specs but they were using Windows 3.1 still back then. Slow, 16-bit code and cooperative multitasking. DOS was still used for games!
Also, a PC would cost you about 4 times as much.
Holy cow! Have you never played Armour-Geddon? This was a game in a completely 3D environment. You could use 6 different types of vehicles to move around the very large environment. You could fly a jet fighter, a bomber, or a helicopter. You could drive a heavy tank, a light tank, or a hovercraft. You could use up to 6 vehicles at a time (set a waypoint and then hit F1 through F6 to jump into the drivers seat of another vehicle).
The gameplay was fantastic. You were trying to prevent the computer controlled enemy from gathering enough energy to fry everything on the planet surface. The power gathering was represented by 3d towers that had light beams going from them to the next tower in line until you got to the gathering point of all the towers. These "powerlines" were ditributed all over the surface.
My friends and I played this game for YEARS. I would love to recreate it. We almost perfected beating the game. Our strategy was to run a mission (we created the parameters for it. It was not a mission required by the game) where we would fly a jet equipped with a laser, a night sight, and a drop tank for extra range. We would fly low to avoid radar and start following power lines to junctions, destroying the towers on the way to the junctions (you had to start at the end of the powerline as each tower was more difficult to destroy when it had more power flowing through it). Flown (very!) carefully, a single jet flight could darken most of the map and return.
The next step were bomber missions where we would either pick up missing neutron bomb parts or drop teleport devices. One mission was called the Swooping Bat Mission because we flew a bomber across the landscape (low, to avoid radar) and picked up a bomb part that was surrounded by pyramids. There was no way in other than through the air. The trick was to stall the bomber just above the part so you could pick it up and then punch the engines to full throttle so you could climb enough to miss the sloping slides of the pyramids. (this was so difficult that for months, we were convinced it was impossible to do!)
Near the energy gather point, there is a line of "mountains" (pyramids again) with a valley. We called that cocaine alley because when you flew through it, you could not shoot fast enough to destroy everything. We usually took a laser, a rack of rockets, and a rack of guided missiles. The rockets were to destroy the "stubborn" towers and the missiles were for the jets. You would end up with a LOT of jets chasing you and guided missiles were the best weapon for shooting down other planes... however, (near cocaine alley) I once shot a jet down with a tank using a normal artillery shell!
Meh, this is all tl;dr I am sure. My point is that all of this was possible on my Amiga 500 with only 512k of chip RAM and a 7mhz processor. Your claims about the graphical weakness of the Amiga are not true. How else could a simulated 3D enviroment like that, with such possibilities (shooting down a jet with an artillery shell!), be created?
The Amiga was just plain awesomeness. It had multi-tasking all the way down to its hardware. The Agnus chip could be blitting crap across the screen while the CPU was busy calculating crap elsewhere. Anything that required raw CPU horsepower was slow, but since each chip could do its own thing, you could have tons of crap going on at once.
While I am it, I really really miss DPaint IV. Heh, with its name, you would think it was just a paint program like Microsft Paint. No. That thing had all sorts of tools that I have not seen in any one package since then. It would more realistically be called an animation program. You could make animated brushes and move them through time with just a few keystrokes. It was awesome. I really miss my Amiga. Modern computers are nowhere near as fun and useful and cool.
strike (sad)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I got one of the first A1000s. I bought the white ROM Kernel Manuals several months before I got the machine. I learned C by reading the RKMs and K&R.
Several months later I bought one of the first memory expansion boards (the Insider I think) from a small computer shop called Michigan Software. They ran a BBS that I frequented.
I spent thousands of hours with Amiga Paint, Aegis Animator (I think) and a music program (can't remember the name). Once I recorded a version of GhostBusters that I hand edited in the music software, than I added vocals using the speech synthesizer. I was 15.
The next year in high school I wrote a molecular modeling program for the science fair. You could load models and rotate them with a joystick. I remember being frustrated that I wanted BlitMaskBitmapRastPort() which allows you to blit an image through a mask, but my ROM kernel didn't have it. Eventually the new ROMs came out and I could finally finish it. Took me all the way to Puerto Rico for the International Science Fair and I won first place in computer science for it, as well as several awards for photography, for taking long exposure pictures of the computer screen in a dark room. My father had an Anvil Case custom built for the trip, and I remember when we got to the hotel room I unpacked the Amiga to make sure it had survived, and it wouldn't turn on. My sponsor was freaking out. I quickly popped open the top case, re-seated the memory board, and it started up fine. My sponsor thought I was a genius.
I was at a SIGGRAPH in 1989 and met several of the Amiga inventors (RJ Mical, Dale Luck, and some others). We ended up at RJ Mical's house (I think, it might have been Michael Bittner's house) talking about what it would take to build a 3D accelerator. Copper Bittner was there - I always thought she had a cool name. I was honored, at 18, to be taken into the fold.
I made a lot of pizza money in college selling my Periodic Table of the Elements program through Fred Fish (rest in peace) disks. I still have some German Deutsch-marks that someone sent me from Germany.
I remember the first time I tried closing a door on one of those walking plant things in Dungeon Master, and watching it get crushed to death, and laughing my ass off, spewing Jolt and M&Ms everywhere.
Later I sold a bunch of programming articles to Amigaworld Tech Journal. Those were fun times.
Eventually I sold my A3000, all my disks, peripherals, manuals, everything for $500, because I wanted to buy a PC to play Ultima Underworld. It's probably just as well, as I'm now sitting on several SGI machines in the basement that aren't worth anything either.