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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?
They had an innate overheating problem. There was a piece of metal under the chip and when it got too hot, it'd flex and push the chip up, ever so slightly getting it out of position. Turning it off caused it to come back down because it cooled relatively quickly.
We used to have races where we'd write the most intensive code to heat things up the quickest. If you did a good job, it'd actually fully eject the chip - you could hear the 'ping' inside the case when it hit the side. Then you'd have to put it back before trying again. ... sort of a niche thing, like making the old drives 'sing'.
You've misunderstood what I meant by 'properly'. I meant as a computer and not just a games machine. Some people never did anything apart from put in a game, play it, then switch it off. They never used the graphical operating system with a hard drive.
I used mine for playing games, programming, video production, making music, graphics work, printing, video and audio digitising, word processing, spreadsheets, emails, internet access, 3D modelling, emulation, and probably a few other things I can't think of at the moment. Pretty much anything I ever wanted to do. That's what I call using it properly. I had hard drives, a CD drive, a Zip drive, plus a printer. I actually still have it all now. Next to me.
You needed less special training to use an Amiga that you did to get a game running on a PC by setting IRQs and messing with Config.sys and Autoexec.bat, that's for sure.
It's say it was something like 10 years ahead of the PC. While the PC was making beeps and showing 16 hideous colours on a DOS screen, with no proper scrolling, hardware sprites, multi-tasking, etc. Oh, and paying about 3 times as much for it.
All the computers of that era suffered from one problem... Software distribution.
I'm sure the Amiga had killer apps somewhere that was comparable to anything on the x86 platform. My friends and I all had various computers from that era, my family was an Atari house. Others were commodore, some Apple, and some were PC. Some had access to BBS's that had software from the other side of the globe in the UK (We were US) The UK 16 and 8 bit scene were crazy compared to what we had here in the states.
That being said, the "What if" I want people to consider is.. What if the internet had existed back then?
Lotus only succeeded because they had MASSIVE distribution channels into every continent on earth. They had IBM's money behind them, and IBM was already everywhere with things like Selectric typewriters. Had the internet existed in a usable form for these other computers back in the day, we might have seen more than the x86 dominate like it is today.
My first hard drive was a full height 5-1/4" Shugart drive. It was a 5megabyte drive. I paid $60 for it at an electronics surplus store at the same time that people were buying Seagate 20mb drives for over $200 each.
I mean, what the hell do you mean 'small' hard drives and what does it have to do with the discussion? There was a ton of need still for floppy drives, obviously. My point was that 3-1/2" drives on clone hardware didn't happen 'right away' after a few of the proprietary-hardware companies adopted them. I have one of the first IBM machines with 3-1/2" floppies, an IBM PC Convertible, in my collection. They were still low density, i.e. 720K drives. It was sort of an anomaly machine, being a heavy slow laptop (4.77 MHz 8088). And IBM wasn't really in the PC clone business by that point. They abandoned the behemoth they had spawned and started making the proprietary PS/2 hardware in the 3-1/2" floppy era.