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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?
Image after image better than the last. Until it crashed. It would do this about every 5-10 minutes for some reason.
Not a good thing to see when you were at a university computer store and you're ready to write the check. Never figured out why it was doing this.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Microsoft and Intel held back progress in software and hardware for many years after the introduction 68000-cpu (Amiga, Atari ST, Mac) computers. (Along with some help from bad management at Apple, Atari, and Commodore. I don't know about Motorola management quality.) It was a lost decade in personal computing.
After the mid-late 90s, Microsoft and Intel finally started to produce software and hardware that was less of a garbled mess.
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.
was really ahead of its time!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
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.
I was going to say that it's OS and UI were ahead of its time, but then I remembered the Lisa...
What I would say about it is that at $599 for the 500 (the first model sold) it was the first system to offer premium performance at lower brand cost - note that this includes very good sound & graphic capabilities that would be extras on IBM and clone systems. Going with the 68k as its processor meant that it had a better growth path than the IBM systems at the time.
At the time, I had a friend that was absolutely nuts about it and thought it would overtake the market - but early manufacturing/availability stumbles really did it in.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The Amiga 500 was $599 - probably $2k less than somebody could get a comparably equipped Wintel machine at the time.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
From what I gather the issue with the Amiga was support for developers. For traditionalists, developing on top of an OS was a new experience. Granted you could kick the workbench out of the way and access the hardware, mostly, directly. But it was still a new experience for many. I've heard Commodore was pretty bad at support for these kinds of things. The differences between Kickstart versions 1, 2 and 3 were pretty substantial, and broke a lot of stuff, which also put off some devs.
Commodore wasn't the only company with similar problems, but other companies managed change a bit better and managed to survive.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
...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.
Nobody knows about the Sinclair QL. If they know the name Sinclair at all, it's only for the lesser Z80 cousin that preceded it.
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.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
No Amiga and Video Toaster? No Babylon 5.
Computers constructed out of clusters of ASICs are a stopgap measure to compensate for slow central processors, and not "ahead of their time."
It's more the kind of propietary design a company would engage in to attain an "edge" in a market. A way to get a multimedia entertainment computer out ahead to consumers.
It stil is is a good computer :) The documentary shows the famous cover for Deluxe Paint 2 by the great Avril Harrison, and we just released a "cracktro" that features a new version of King Tut as a tribute to such great graphic artists : https://www.pouet.net/prod.php...
Coding the hardware of the Amiga in assembly language is still fun in 2018, because of the various coprocessors that work in parallel with the CPU. It is a very interesting machine.
The documentary is nice. Those who are interested in the adventure of the Amiga may read the great book from Brian Bagnall ("Commodore: The Amiga Years").
A good PC keyboard at that time alone was north of $100. However it was a good, quality keyboard and not permanently built into a cheap plastic consumer grade device like a commie or amiga.
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.
Remember the Atari membrane keyboard? Good luck typing over 20 wpm.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
To be fair, there were specialized uses like the Video Toaster that an Amiga could be embedded i to that made it useful. Still very closed hardware and single sourced up the wazoo, but useful as a turnkey device.
Let's compare it to the Mattel Aquarius, too. That's another brand of propritary computer that almost nobody has heard of.
500 came way later.
Yep. So good you could ignore that there was an Amiga embedded inside.
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.
By a wide margin. I'd argue that the Fidonet even was/is superior to some aspects of the internet and its services.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
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 Amiga is the best computer ever made, and I doubt anything else in the future will have such a massive leap forward from what's around at the time.
I am pretty sure just 2 years after the introduction of the Amiga, the 1987 Acorn Archimedes was already a more massive leap forward (4+ MIPS at 32bit for just £800).
Sure, the Amiga was a leap in multimedia hardware when it came out and it is a shame it didn't come out with matching software and in the end didn't catch on more, but Amiga fans are very, very far off the mark with statements like "best computer ever made" etc...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Sad to see it go, it was a creatives tool and really fun to use. Kodi multi-media is my attention these days and allows me to put aside operating systems as important.
>Hardware means nothing without software. An operating system without application
The Amiga had everything, right down to WordPerfect and DeluxePaint. Lightwave and Caligari for 3d rendering (both still available for PC today), AME for modern-style email processing, JrComm for VT100/ANSI modem support, etc.
The whole suite was there, the failure was Commodore not upgrading the machine at the right pace, failing to advertise (they relied on word of mouth), and ultimately a lack of clear direction on the operating system.
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.
I heart Slashdot's semi-annual Amiga lovefest / flamebait articles.
Books have been written and elegies produced covering the Amiga's history –strengths, weaknesses, mismanagement, influential nature, comparisons to other platforms, etc. One great book (IMHO) is _The Future Was Here_ in MIT's Platform Studies series, written by Jimmy Maher.
As an enthusiastic user of Amiga, Atari, and Commodore computers, I have been struck by a few things recently:
* both the Amiga and the Atari made UNIX accessible to home computer users, as far back as Fred Fish's freely redistributable ports of open-source UNIX tools to the Amiga in the mid-to-late 80s, and the Atari's MultiTOS and MiNT environments. But only the Amiga shipped with a native command-line interface (which was superior to COMMAND.COM in userfriendliness and capability, if not in stability).
* the Amiga dazzled with its graphics and sound when it was introduced, being "best in class" for gaming technology at the time (based on Jay Miner's design), but by the time the 90s arrived, the Amiga was notable for its serious uses as well, namely its multitasking, APIs, and inter-application communication using AREXX –something which IMHO still has never been matched on another platform (think: writing scripts to control and communicate among running, GUI-based apps from multiple vendors –AppleScript never came close). But by that time, its legendary custom chipset was becoming more of a bottleneck and shibboleth, with Commodore unable to deliver significant improvements to it. Commodore was able to introduce incremental improvements, like a VGA "Productivity" mode which allowed high-resolution displays without requiring a flickery interlaced display (a widely-criticized shortcoming of the original chipset)... but it too had shortcomings compared to other dominant platforms, due to deeply-treasured personality traits of the Amiga's architecture, such as bitplane-based graphics.
* the schism between the original Amiga development team (Los Gatos) and eventual Commodore replacements is quite captivating, considering the cultures at play, the hardware/software results (A1000 vs A2000, OS 1.x vs OS 2.x), and the eventual retirement of the Amiga as a consumer product
* considerations of corporate culture at Atari at the launch of the ST (being run by the Tramiel family, meaning the ST was essentially a follow-up to the Commodore 64 and Tramiel's answer to the Macintosh) and corporate culture at Amiga/Hi-Toro illustrate much about the two platforms. I'd say these (and other) cultural differences are still reflected in the demoscene productions on the two platforms. Also interesting is the early involvement of Electronic Arts on the Amiga, who included Xerox PARC alum Dan Silva on their original Amiga software development teams (see Maher's book), and contributed much to the developer experience and cross-application compatibility by encouraging and publishing open standards such as IFF ILBM.
* legends of how the Amiga and Atari (and Acorn and Sinclair and etc.) lost the market to the PC with Windows and MS-DOS often fail to recognize the Apple Macintosh's role –how many early Mac devotees could have been Amiga or Atari (or Acorn or Sinclair) users instead, had they been somehow compelled to make a different purchasing decision (via price or marketing or press or software or workplace culture or...)? So many different platforms were fighting for a diminishing slice of pie until the smaller ones started to die off in '92-'96.
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.'"
I was in high school in 1983 and watched as my dad introduced IBM PC's into their work place (I worked at the software company in the same building doing midrange stuff). The PC was filling a massive gap in the business world. Previously stuff was on the mainframe and/or midrange, or by hand.
If Amiga wanted to "win", they should have identified what the business world needed and marketed towards that. That's what all of those other wildly successful companies did, they provided products that met the needs of business.
laptops wifi cards are full pci-e / pci mini cards
Yes it was, "but".
I worked in a company that tried to sell Amigas.
In Eastern Europe.
Around 1991-1993 or so.
At that time in that place, nobody was paying for software, ever. The prices were astronomical compared to the salaries and income. So we installed pirate stuff on anything that we sold.
For PC-s, this was easy.
Word (pre-windows!) or WordPerfect, Quattro, Foxpro or some other database, some games. This got most purchasers through their needs. The economy was changing fast - socialism out, capitalism in. So all real sofware was custom-made anyway.
For Amiga, setting it up with a set of workable software was a nightmare. There were text editors, none of those worked. There were spreadsheets, none worked. And so on. There were games, which worked well and looked beautiful. But our customers needed something for bookkeeping, or document management, or whatever their need, and this just was. not. there.
For tech and UI, it was great, especially for the price.
But it could not become commodity because it lacked what users actually need - software.
Sure. But if you make a general purpose product that is only really useful to a TINY portion of a mass market industry, Your productâ(TM)s extinction is a virtual certainty.
Did it do stuff better than other platforms? Sure. Did it do enough stuff better to outcompete the others? Nope. Whose fault is that?
The Silicon Graphics Indy and then the O2 were desktops way ahead of their time with built in camera, networking, Sound, and a solid OS (irix). But they didnt run Word and Excel. The ISDN was interesting too... I still miss showcase, and the Interop tools. but not the pricetag. The Video game Lumbus used the camera to act as input.. but... SGI got too full of itself with Jurrasic park and crashed. 64 MB RAM and a Gigabyte Disk was enough.. Imagine that. CacheFS / NFS was really handy. I recall doing VRML modeling with the OpenInventor package. Beta/VHS.. ugg.. should the better tool win?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Remember the Atari membrane keyboard? Good luck typing over 20 wpm.
Yes, but at the time the Amiga came out, you weren't competing against the Atari 400. It's rival was the Atari ST, which had a 'normal' keyboard.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
That sound clip used to be the boot up sound for my Amiga 500 way back when.
Good times. Good times....
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
speaking of "fans"... I'd always thought that people who said Mac people were "fanatics" had never met any Amiga people
Oh ya, some people spend that much on a black and white graphics card for the PC.
Keyboard for the Amiga 1000 wasn't bad, and the Amiga 2000 keyboard was nice. The 500 was meant to be a simpler and cheaper product.
The Mac really wasn't architecturally better. It had a lot of hacks in it, but of course improved over time. The Amiga had a solid design and a solid OS (not counting the DOS layer TripOS). The Mac was also easily double the cost, and still couldn't do multitasking. The Mac had an interesting desktop design (borrowed from Xerox), but under the hood it wasn't that sophisticated.
When the Amiga 1000 came out, the competition was the Atari ST and Apple IIgs. At least that's how the media portrayed it. The Apple IIgs was really nothing special, sad to say, it was like an Apple II with better graphics and a 16-bit processor, none of the more advanced stuff from the Mac side of things seemed to be there. Atari ST had a few things going for it, but it was still a single-tasking system. What irked me the most about the Atari ST, and really not it's fault, was the jihad that Jack Tramiel had against the Amiga. All that bitterness was just sad.
Given popularity numbers, most people prefer McDonald's, Starbucks, and Kanye. Why on Slashdot of all places would someone want to play the popularity card?
The early Amgia 3000's, like the one I had, had the perfect keyboard. Even today I still think the Amiga 3000 was one of the best designed computers. I love the look of it and would love to find a case like it today that fit a standard mother board.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Isn't that the truth. I've seen actual fights between Amiga and AtariST fans.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
The Amiga could run MacOS so did the Atari ST since they had the same cpu. These non apple computers were also able to run macos better than Apple's own machines. https://youtu.be/Jph0gxzL3UI
It had way too many capabilities that it excelled at.
it even managed to cost less than the competition.
But the not-widelyused 68000 processor plus custom chipset and OS meant that it wasn't compatible with anything remotely interesting in the business world (an important consideration by 1985).
And the complex hardware meant a massive learning curve for programmers (which is why it took years for software developers to find "killer apps" for the Amiga, and for Arcade-perfect ports to become the norm).
They should have used a 286 processor, so they could have made it DOS-compatible. Then it would have been an impressive competition against IBM, and gotten more eyes in the architecture early (more hackers = faster optimization of native programs).
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I recall when Wolfenstein came out and all of the angst that caused in the Amiga community. Everyone was so used to being THE gaming computer platform, and all of a sudden the Amiga couldn't do this style of game without it being super slow. I can't recall the details, but something about the 80386 handled the bitplanes made it fast vs. the Amiga's Motorola and custom chipset. It has been quite a while now.
The Amiga was an awesome machine and far ahead of the competition, IMO. I didn't need a spreadsheet, thankfully. Otherwise, everything else was amazing. Dpaint, tracker, the amazing demo scene and the games, so easy to hack on and do silly things with the copper. I can't remember what I used for a word processor, but it did everything I needed.
It was pathetic to look at the competition in comparison. Looking back, the only real problem was the inflexibility of the hardware; the custom chips pretty much locked you into that version of the platform. You could upgrade the CPU (sometimes), and add more RAM and a HD, but that was mostly it unless you were adding further custom hardware like the video toaster (which was a massive leap over what was possible at the time).
Those were great times!
Since the original source media was abandoned, we will never see an HD remastering of Babylon 5. Sadly, memories of the Amiga will last longer than memories of Babylon 5.
I make music on the Amiga today. Not necessarily mod tunes, but I integrated it in my home studio and use it for midi sequencing, drums, triggering synths, controlled glitching, etc.
WinUAE to be exact, because it allows the flexibility of saving snapshots, midi ports and whatnot :)
Theres' software and techniques to produce music with the Amigas that is simply not doable anywhere else.
Yeah, those were the days!
Of course, we on the Amiga side always won when the arguments were technical. When arguing using fists, the ST people outnumbered us. :)
In 1989 I bought the A2024 display. 15", 1024x800, 63hz with an extreme phosphor afterglow. It was simply the best CRT I ever had my hands on. I used this one on my Amiga 2000 which had 1MB of Chip-Memory, 2MB of Fast-Memory and a 40MB SCSI hard drive and did a lot of professional work on this system. Later I upgraded to an Amiga 3000 with 2MB Chip, 16MB Fast, a true color VGA card and ethernet. This machine does pretty much anything a modern computer can do without showing its age.
The things I did on my Amiga in 1986 were pretty much impossible to do on any other machine until 1996. Only a €1000 Windows 95 system could barelly do what a $500 Amiga could do ten years earlier. And it took a €2000 Windows XP system to do what an €1000 could do 15 years earlier. Did I mention that I could run Amiga OS, Atari TOS, MacOS, CP/M 68k and ixemul (a unix subset) all at once and often faster than on "real" hardware? And emulate a C64, a PC and MAME Arcade too, all at once? Also in 1989 I did connect regularly to Internet, Fidonet and BBSs through official Amiga Software. While listening to my music collection running DeliTracker in the Background.
It was a scaringly advanced machine totally ignored by all the non-nerds and ruined by a company which had no clue what they had build.
The only real critic for the amiga: Big-Head-Companies didn't offer their software for the amiga. But honestly, noone needed them because there was so much from smaller companies and a lot of that stuff was extremely well done.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
And for about half of 80s music videos, and for tv show intros especially for small regional networks even into the late 90s
Having read a bunch of computer history books in the past and Fire in the Valley (Collector's Edition) just a few days ago, I find that "Informative" mod really hard to understand.
If I was forced to summarize it in a few words, I'd say the Boca Raton project was a rather wild stab in the dark and IBM went with commodity components mostly to speed things up. The relatively open architecture was basically a lucky guess. In a way I'd say the IBMers are similar to Microsoft. They couldn't get the hang of small machines, just as Microsoft never got the hang of small OSes.
I was actually working in Austin when a lot of the mass production of PC components was being done there. Not sure if this will date it precisely, but I think we were shipping motherboards with four banks of memory. Only one bank was soldered in, and the other three banks were empty sockets because memory was so expensive at the time. Pretty sure it was 8 or 9 memory chips per 64K. Also worked on CGI graphics cards, if I remember correctly. Maybe 16 colors in the fancy mode, but I think it was 4 colors in the high-rez mode.
Then again, Commodore didn't get much mention in the book. I do remember when the Amiga came out and the specs sure sounded amazing.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The Amiga hardware was incredible at the time, even though it had some severe limitations. In many ways that's what made it such a fun computer to code for, you could do so much hacking but also it needed so much care and guile to get the best out of.
For example, the standard machines only came with RAM that was shared between the CPU and chipset. That was how most machines were back then, and it created bottlenecks. To produce those high resolution, colourful graphics the chipset needed to use a lot of the available RAM bandwidth just to produce the video output. It was possible to add extra RAM that only the CPU could access and make the whole system much faster because the CPU and chipset could then operate in parallel, but for some reason Commodore never upgraded the base machines (the A500, 500+, 600 and 1200) to work that way.
Even so, it was possible to get some incredible results from the hardware. Shadow of the Beast is often cited as an example, but there were many such as Lionheart and even 3D games like No Second Prize. Let's look at Beast for a moment. That famous level 1 with all the parallax scrolling.
Firstly the Amiga supports some hardware parallax in the form of "dual playfield" mode, but the front and back fields are limited to 7 colours each. Extra layers of parallax were added by using sprites, of which the classic Amigas only had 8 and they were limited to 32 pixels wide and 4 colours (or 16 colours if you combined two, but then you only had 4 to play with). And of course, enabling sprites used up even more of the available memory bandwidth, as did dual playfield mode.
In fact memory bandwidth was often the limit on the Amiga. Once you went over 16 colours or enabled 7/7 colour dual playfield mode the CPU started to slow down because it was starved of memory access cycles more than usual. Add in sprites and sound and there wasn't much left for the CPU, let along the blitter (a fairly primitive kind of 2D GPU that was basically good for copying images).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Anybody nuts enough to buy a brand name Hercules graphic card deserves our accolades and sympathy for financing the revolution in cheap PC graphics. The rest of us followed along with the ubiquitous 'herc compatible' card at $20-70.
It was always about the clones, and the base price of the least expensive Amiga eventually greatly dwarfed the price of an XT clone.
Then, later on, the flattened landscape of the PC clone environment fostered Linux, and here we are. Proprietary consumer grade systems and mucho-$$ proprietary UNIX hardware all run over by defacto-standard clones. Not as prissy, less performant, but truly open.
Translation: suitable for the lower end of the market.
There are still nutters today who gather at the periphery of abandoned strip mall parking lots with their restored Edsels to compare with their fellow enthisiasts.
It would scale, increased memory bandwidth on AGA demonstrated that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A reason that the Mac architecture won out long-term is that while the Amiga's graphics hardware was technically way ahead of everybody else, almost everything that used it depended on the specifics of that design with that particular combination of features. (Who else used HAM colors? Even if they didn't realize it, Amiga was basically committing to putting that in every future design!)
By the early '90s, the first graphics accelerators had appeared for Mac, and they worked by intercepting the existing API (one of the best things the Mac OS designers did was leave hooks for everything--they were constantly designing with the future in mind) to make "normal" graphics run faster. Sure, they couldn't make bit planes fly around with color table animation (literally all that the "bouncing ball" demo did), but they could move pixels around in a single bit plane a lot faster than the main CPU, and freed up the main CPU to do other things with those cycles.
Then 3D graphics cards happened, and the new OS X graphics were designed to work with graphics cards that could do compositing from multiple bit planes. Windows did something similar. (Aero?) So by the early 2Ks, there was literally nothing left of the Amiga technology that wasn't already mainstream, but with an API that didn't require you to know the details of how the whiz-bang hardware worked.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I used to have an A3000, which I traded for a BeBox. Then I traded the BeBox for an Indigo. ISTR scrapping the Indigo. Probably should have kept the 3000, but I was bored with it. I had an A1200 for a little while recently, put an accelerator on it and then sold it without losing any money. That reminded me that there's just no point in dicking with an Amiga any more. At the time, they were super-awesome. Today, any rinky-dink PC running Linux makes them look sad in all kinds of ways.
The A3000 had a great form factor, and it would have been even greater if it would stand up nicely on its side on its own. But it was pretty ugly in a bland, beige sort of way, and it had the large gaps around the bezels characteristic of computers of the day. There are many SFF PC cases about the same size, if you want to indulge yourself. Most of them only have room for one PCI-Ex16 slot, though, so there's not a whole lot of expandability there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
* legends of how the Amiga and Atari (and Acorn and Sinclair and etc.) lost the market to the PC with Windows and MS-DOS often fail to recognize the Apple Macintosh's role
The former and the latter were really not competing, because of the price difference. They sold to completely different audiences, with different expectations.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only way Apple was selling: Adobe and some other publishing product I forget the name of.
LaserWriter, perhaps?
AppleTalk networking and file sharing in the late '80s put them way ahead of the rest of the world in that realm. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but the "Macintosh Office" meant that it was worth getting two or more Macs to share an expensive (and very nice) printer. You also didn't need to buy an expensive file server software or hardware, there was one called "TOPS" which was very popular. But if you got two Amigas, how were you going to share your documents and printers? SneakerNet and a switch box?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I would hear people laugh at Amiga for not having "standard" methods of doing video or audio or for becoming obsolete, but then they would also use PC add in cards that grew obsolete in only a couple of years or so.
Actually, even the Amiga 1200 was faster at running the Mac OS than the Mac LC III.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI&t=75s
The former and the latter were really not competing, because of the price difference. They sold to completely different audiences, with different expectations.
Yes, somewhat. That was part of the Apple Macintosh's role. :D
Although the Atari did try (and somewhat succeed) in making inroads in the Macintosh-dominated (Macintosh-created?) desktop publishing market, by offering a competitive alternative to the Macintosh at a lower price.
Commodore also marketed the Amiga 2000/2500 to graphic design professionals in trade publications. Whether it "sold" to them is a different matter.
the Workbench SUCKED BALLS compared to the Mac's GUI.
It had its ups and downs. Window and icon management were more fiddly, but being able to flip between multiple full-screen windows instantly was a major plus over the Mac. And then there's the CLI, which was overall very good, while the Mac didn't even have one. The closest you got was a shell that came with one of the development systems (MPW?)
It's biggest disadvantage was it was monochrome-only, but that went away with the Mac II in 1987.
The biggest disadvantage was that they went from a design intended to never be expanded to a design with expensive expansion slots. The second-biggest was that they had a graphics-only system... with zero graphics acceleration hardware until the 8*24 GC. Just drawing the screen was slow, even at 1bpp.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Commodore also marketed the Amiga 2000/2500 to graphic design professionals in trade publications. Whether it "sold" to them is a different matter.
To my mind, before Scribus the only GUI DTP software which didn't come from Aldus/Adobe which was even slightly credible was Quark. (I've used Framemaker, Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Pagemaker, InDesign, Quark, and Scribus. I tried the stuff on the Amiga briefly, and it was just frankly painful. I did a lot of Pagemaker work on a Mac IIci with 5MB RAM and a 8*24 (not GC) with a two-page greyscale display, and that was barely painful. It did get a lot worse with System 7, though... :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To my mind, before Scribus the only GUI DTP software which didn't come from Aldus/Adobe which was even slightly credible was Quark. (I've used Framemaker, Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Pagemaker, InDesign, Quark, and Scribus. I tried the stuff on the Amiga briefly, and it was just frankly painful. I did a lot of Pagemaker work on a Mac IIci with 5MB RAM and a 8*24 (not GC) with a two-page greyscale display, and that was barely painful. It did get a lot worse with System 7, though... :)
Yes. The Commodore ads I saw which marketed the Amiga 2000/2500 to design professionals seemed to suggest that Deluxe Paint would be a tool of choice. I don't think that was realistic. The key marketing point seemed to be "Amiga can do color graphics!" without noting a lack of quality tools for vector artwork or resolution independence.
Calamus on the Atari was widely heralded. I used it a bit and it seemed capable and well-engineered. It's still around today.
I don't know if anybody could credibly claim that PageStream had a leg up over Quark or Adobe/Aldus at any point. :D
And on the "upgradeability" front, people forget that with an Amiga, you dropped an expansion card into a Zorro slot and that was the whole installation process. There was no fidgeting with IRQs, etc... like on a PC. To borrow a marketing phrase from Apple, "It just worked."
"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."
That's nonsense. Developing for the Amiga didn't require any special tools from Commodore.
There has never been a hardware platform that didn't perform at its most capable when coding to the bare metal (or, as you stated, "manipulating various quirks in its architecture"). Code something in C++ for a bog standard x86 machine with a run of the mill nVidia GPU, then code the same thing in raw assembler, with hooks directly to the underlying hardware and see which performs better. It's just significantly more difficult to do that. Especially now.
Amiga was my dream come true, but I simply could not afford it at the time. I imagine this was the case for many others.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
The Amiga was great. It had lots of features that didn't come out on other systems for many years. The problem Commodore had was not the technology, but the execution.
Steve Jobs didn't invent the smart phone. What he really did was 1) package it in a slick package, and 2) convince everyone that they needed one!
Commodore made great stuff, they just excepted their products to become popular by word of mouth. Unfortunately, it takes more than word of mouth, it takes lots of money and marketing, to explain to people why they need the gadget, regardless of how far "ahead of its time" it is.
"The CLI is a concession to programmers. "
Having an integrated scripting language, especially a batch control language, is absolutely a feature and not a bug. Without it you have to rely on APIs. If an Amiga application didn't have arexx hooks you could still at least script it. If a Mac application didn't respond to applescript then you were just screwed. And don't get me started on applescript.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, there were other computers that were able to do the things the Amiga did when it came out.
But there was no HOME computer that could do what the Amiga did, and all in all, it was expensive, but not out of reach.
Commodore should be studied in bussiness schools, they still hold the record to this day of the best sold computer ever (c64) and they had a product like the Amiga afterward (which was very popular in EU, not so much elsewhere) that was so powerful and capable compared to anything else. And still they manage to go broke. My young mind couldn't understand it at the time, today, i'm just disgusted to read and learn all the things that went on behind the scenes leading to its demise.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
maybe (if it's PCH pci-e then X4 is best case)
Granted, scripting is useful, but most end users don't need it. Plus you can have scripting without a CLI.
I'll grant you that most users don't need it, but not supporting it is unforgiveable in a general-purpose operating system. Scripting without a CLI is quite possible (I like Tasker, for example) but either the OS or the applications have to support it somehow.
I think that NeXTStep is probably the most impressive operating system of its own time since UNIX itself. Too bad it wasn't affordable, or computing might have looked a lot different.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We got them in Europe. It's the North Americans that were daft. Especially considering it was designed and manufactured there in the first place.
There was also the A3000T but Commodore only sold a couple of those.
The Amiga also had decent DTP software. Ever heard of PageStream? The main issue IMHO is that the original OCS Amigas were made for TV output so you couldn't do high resolution work in them without using an interlaced display. The Amiga 3000 came with a built-in "flicker-fixer" and VGA output but by that time it was too expensive and too late.
It is not true that you required assembly code to get the specialty hardware to do its tricks. There were other languages available like AMOS and Blitz Basic. Heck even some actual commercially viable games were sold and made with those tools.
Yeah but MacOS wasn't preemptive multi-tasking. The underlying OS architecture was worse. Besides you had no optional command line prompt with UNIX like commands. That's a minus in my book.
What are you? French? :-)
That's probably one of the few places the ST sold more.
As I remember it the 520ST was quite a bit more affordable than the A500 in Sweden. Don't know about the sales numbers - perhaps I was just moving in cheap company at the time. :)
And in reality we were mostly friends and had a blast together - it was the same 68k CPU after all, although theirs was a little bit higher clocked. We were solidly united against the 8086 crowd (which I was also a part of but I kept quiet about it).
I guess you didn't get to the part where they later replaced the PCs with DEC Alphas.
The Amiga had a much more wider variety of 3D software and a lot of it was easier to use. Plus if you had the money and wanted performance you could just buy an accelerator card with another CPU on it.
That is what it was like around my parts too. The AtariST/Amiga and sometimes Mac owners always stared at each other with hostile intents. That is until a 8086'er walked by. Then we where firmly in the same camp. At least till they where out of sight.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
The Amiga was a great computer for the time but its short comings where pretty epic. No memory protection in a multitasking OS? Thanks to the Amiga I thought all computers where unreliable POS till I first encountered a proper unix workstation.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.