Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
...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.
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.
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.
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.
500 came way later.
It did have multitasking, and the built-in BASIC had windowing primitives. It was built on the 68000 series just like the Amiga, which also meant it didn't suffer from Intel's bizarre paged memory scheme.
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.
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
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.
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.'"
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.
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.