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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?
for putting out such crap relative to the technical elegance, power, and simplicity of the Amiga.
How could they live with their decisions, from an engineering pride standpoint.
The problem was, the average business person or home computer person had no knowledge to discriminate good computers or OSes or applications from bad, so the cheapest ones won every time. Sad.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
And here I was 30 years later hoping that people would shut up about how great their Amigas are. No such luck. We will be hearing it until the end of time. Curious though that if the Amiga was so wonderful why did it go extinct?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I think that "ahead of its time" doesn't really mean that a product had more advanced hardware. What it means is that there was a later time during which the public was ready and primed for its features and thus, if it had been introduced in that later time instead of the earlier one, it would have been a success.
Regardless, I'd agree that it was ahead of its time because I believe a fully modernized offering with some of the same concepts could be a cool offering.
One of the things I remember is a friend who was an Amiga maestro producing a nearly indistinguishable synthesis of my voice on his Amiga in just a few minutes in about 1989. Of course, it didn't have the right inflections, but the tone reproduction was right on. He did that for several people at that party in less than 30 minutes total time. It was very cool for the day and would still be cool for today.
...and I say that as a former ST owner, not Amiga. The hardware was astounding, the custom chips instead of pushing everything through the CPU was fantastic. I liked my ST a lot for what I did (SM124 'paper white' mono monitor, built-in MIDI ports) but there's no denying the Amiga was more powerful. PCs were nowhere.
Late eighties/early 90s I worked weekend and holiday job selling 16 bit games and computers. We were the first in the area to seriously specialise in them, so we got a bit of reputation. Sold a large amount of everything, then started moving into PCs. I could not believe the prices people were paying for such utter garbage - Amigas killed them.
Then there is programming. I remember looking at a declaration in C: far char *, and deciding never to do segmented memory model junk again and just do all my coding on the flat addressing of the 68000 range.
Amigas could have looked more professional and been built out of metal I think, and they would have been taken more seriously, But the my-mum-was-on-the-board-at-IBM-so-I-got-the-contract juggernaut of MS DOS, as hacked out and made ubiquitous by Compaq, had taken over by then and single manufacturer stuff was struggling to hang on - even Apple. The name Commodore was mostly associated with home gaming, so apart from Germany and Scandinavia it struggled to get recognition as a serious firm. Its own antics with suppliers and retailers didn't endear it much either - see Brian Bagnall's excellent book Commodore - A Company On The Edge. But the machines and capabilities themselves? Lightyears ahead.
It's statements like this from Amiga proponents that I always felt was one of contributing reasons for its downfall. The Amiga was an excellent machine for its time and groundbreaking in terms of its graphics and sound capabilities relative to its contemporaries.
By saying you had to use it properly (and you're nowhere near the first person I've heard say this) means that the machine can only be used for certain tasks that it's best at and that you need to be either specially trained or uniquely intelligent to be able to use it. These types of statements turned many people off who just wanted a computer they could use.
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Amiga had graphical word processor before word for windows was a thing. The Amiga word processor did neat things like wrap text around images and stuff. Basically apps on the Amiga were better than the corresponding PC versions. What killed the Amiga was the sales channel. They were targeted as high end home computers. They did not go after businesses at all except for the niche market like tv.
Funny how you have no clue about former East Germany.
Two things happened at the same time.
The IBM PC was only developed because it drove IBM execs nuts to see all the Apple IIs on desks in Austin. BTW, the x86 architecture was, and is, a pile of crap, with Intel often not the best producer (NEC on the early chips and AMD on the Pentium); the Intel chips are only good now because they run the x86 in emulation on a completely different architecture, as the Amiga did in the 1000. What spread the PC to homes was that at a lot companies "you could not get fired for buying IBM", regardless of how well or badly they worked. As PCs proliferated in offices, they were purchased for use at home by those with the means (they were quite expensive, compared to the Apple II, Amiga, Atari, ...) so they could continue working at home, often on pirated copies of same, also expensive, software. This provided a hardware base for the "fun" applications that, ultimately, could not be overcome, despite students often having Apple IIs in school.
Another aside on the PC/Intel thing: the only reason that the 8088 was in the PC is that, as a maker of third-class processors, Intel was going out of business, so IBM purchasing people overrode the engineers, who had designed around a variant of the much superior and mainframe-like Z8000, to buy cheaper CPUs. Further, IBM stupidly did not make MS-DOS a "work for hire", giving them exclusive rights, which, ultimately, brought in the clones.
The Amiga, OTOH, has a 32-bit CPU (for which Microsoft violated the software guidelines in their Basic, and broke a lot of applications when the 68020s and '30s were put into Amigas), rather than a 16-bit processor, meaning much more directly accessible address area, without segmenting and all of the "himem" silliness. As a much more capable computer than anything PC-ish until, approximately, Windows 3.11 on a 386, the Amiga had a large following in several industries, in addition to mainstream applications such as word processors (Word Perfect among them) and spreadsheets. AT&T had Amiga 3000s in their display booths for the release of UNIX System V Release 3. However, despite the greater power of the Amiga and its better price, there was no way for it to displace the "Daddy (later, Mommy, too) needs this at home, so it's what we're getting" of a PC or clone.
Finally, it did not help the Amiga, at all, that the management at Commodore saw it mostly as a cash cow and did not put much into mainstream marketing or to speed hardware development.