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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?
Because Commodore management messed it up.
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.
The people who used one properly (not just to play games), realise what an incredible machine it was, and still is.
...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.
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.
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.
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.