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Was Commodore's Amiga 'A Computer Ahead of Its Time'? (gizmodo.com.au)
Long-time Slashdot reader Mike Bouma quotes Gizmodo:
Despite being ahead of its time when it was unveiled in 1985, the Commodore Amiga didn't survive past 1996. The machine, which went up against with the likes of the IBM PC and the Macintosh, offered far superior hardware than its competitors. But it just wasn't enough, as this video from Ahoy's Stuart Brown explains. While the Amiga had other 16-bit computers beat on technology, it didn't really have anything compelling to do with that hardware. "With 4096 colours, 4 channels of digital audio, and preemptive multitasking, [the Amiga] was capable of incredible things for the time...."
[U]nfortunately, internal struggles within Commodore would signal the beginning of the end.
I'll always remember Joel Hodgson's Amiga joke on a 1991 episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But in 2015 Geek.com reported on an Amiga which had been running a school's heating system for the last 30 years. A local high school student had originally set it up, and "he's the only one who knows how to fix software glitches. Luckily, he still lives in the area."
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Does anyone else have their own stories about Commodore's Amiga? And was the Amiga a computer ahead of its time?
[U]nfortunately, internal struggles within Commodore would signal the beginning of the end.
I'll always remember Joel Hodgson's Amiga joke on a 1991 episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But in 2015 Geek.com reported on an Amiga which had been running a school's heating system for the last 30 years. A local high school student had originally set it up, and "he's the only one who knows how to fix software glitches. Luckily, he still lives in the area."
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Does anyone else have their own stories about Commodore's Amiga? And was the Amiga a computer ahead of its time?
It was at the Zentralinstitut für Kernforschung Rossendorf in the former communist East Germany, where I saw two Commodore Amiga 2000 being deployed as central managing units for a lot of nuclear experiments. Apparently, the ZIK Rossendorf paid 200,000 East German Mark (or about 10 years salary of a well paid East German engineer) for the computers.
There was two primary factors outside of Commodore's incompetence:
a) The machines were advertised as multimedia machines, in a time when nobody knew what multimedia was
b) The Mac was a "better" as in more elegant, designed system.
Really, if you put an Amiga 500 beside an Apple II, without them plugged into a TV, nobody would know that the Amiga had thousands of colors while the Apple II had 4. They just saw a large keyboard.
Really, you would have had to compare the Amiga 2000 (which actually used IDE hard drives as the only common part between it and the PC) to a late 386 era PC and Mac Quadra to actually get any idea as to why any of these PC's were better than the other.
The Amiga, as a consumer (eg not professional) machine, eg word processor, occasional games, video editing, was where it was actually significantly better. However most games made for it, actually were better than versions made for the other two platforms. It was also in direct competition with the Atari Falcon which had similar capabilities.
The PC for what it's worth, was a far more upgradable thing, but most people never upgrade it from stock, so when MPC standards came out, any advantage the Amiga had was eliminated. The Video Toaster was what professional users used with it, because the Amiga ran at NTSC resolutions, but the toaster was something that kept being used until we transitioned out of analog video, because it was still better than NLE's on the PC (and capturing NTSC video on a Pentium II was still a god-awful experience in 1998.) So the toaster was used for live broadcast, and was basically the only option for it without buying expensive proprietary newsroom equipment in the multi-thousand-dollars.
The Mac meanwhile found it's desktop publishing legs, and thus the non-broadcast news (eg physical papers, magazines, etc) glommed onto that.
So what could have saved the Amiga was these Mac software packages being ported to the other platforms, or games being developed on the Amiga first. The reality is that the PC was was hard to program for during the DOS era, but it was the DOS OS that allowed anyone to develop for it, where as Amiga and Mac required tools from the manufacturer or knowing assembly code to get the specialty hardware to dance. Hence the demo scene was almost exclusively Amiga until the PC's started having soundblaster-compatible hardware.
The machines were advertised as multimedia machines, in a time when nobody knew what multimedia was
I watched some of the Amiga merchandising videos pretty recently, and they advertised them as machines which could do everything.
The Mac was a "better" as in more elegant, designed system.
They had superior case design, and square pixels. In every other way, the Macintosh was inferior. Literally every.
Really, you would have had to compare the Amiga 2000 (which actually used IDE hard drives as the only common part between it and the PC)
A bare Amiga 2000 didn't have any hard drives. The earliest Amiga 2000 hard drive controller was ST-506 (MFM) and narrow/slow SCSI only, no IDE. You could boot off SCSI, but not MFM. Probably that could be solved with custom ROMs.
to a late 386 era PC and Mac Quadra to actually get any idea as to why any of these PC's were better than the other.
Not really. A great comparison was an Amiga 2500 (A2000 with an accelerator card) to a Mac IIci. The late A2500s and the IIci both had the MC68030, but an A2500 running an emulator was faster at being a IIci than a IIci was, because the Amiga had a superior hardware architecture.
The PC for what it's worth, was a far more upgradable thing,
Nonsense. Typical PCs and Amigas had fairly comparable-speed buses, while they were competing. By the time VLB came along (the first bus on PCs after ISA which was actually common) the Amiga was already over.
So what could have saved the Amiga was these Mac software packages being ported to the other platforms, or games being developed on the Amiga first.
What could have saved the Amiga was not being mismanaged into oblivion, and the new hardware being what it was supposed to be instead of a half-assed version.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And the |BM PC with its beeps and clunky graphics was able to run Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect and dBase. The best computer hardware in the World is no good if it won't run the software that people want to use.
You do realize that they had Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect, and dBase for Amiga, right? And you're just trolling? Right?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's nonsense. The PC had originally intended to use a 68K but changed to Intel due to problems with production commitment.
Intel had already made plans to transition from x86 to a different 32 bit architecture, the 960. IBM insisted, instead, on a followup product which it primarily drove, the 286. That product sucked not because of Intel and Microsoft but because of IBM. OS software, namely OS/2, also sucked because of IBM.
Intel finally realized that x86 was important so it repurposed the 960 to embedded and developed the 386. Then Microsoft took over 32 bit development. It was their willingness to overcome IBM's failure of leadership that advanced the platform. Prior to that, IBM was far more powerful than either Intel or Microsoft.