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What the Amiga Pioneers Are Doing Now
The_Borg writes "Nice little piece in the OttawaCitizen about the pioneers of Amiga and what they are doing now, as well as a few details of how Microsoft tried to sink them.
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I do not see "details" in this article of Microsoft practices.
Slashdot people *need* to start reading your links. It's only fair that we see the real information
And I know your gonna moderate this down because why is that k1dd13 d1ss1ng the slashdot poeple theyresoooo cool.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Amiga was developed by a company that thought they were making the next great console. Their engineers, probably the finest design team that had ever been assembled to that point, had other ideas: they were going to make it the ultimate personal computer. Most of their development was done semi-secretly -- the people bankrolling the initial project didn't realize the feature set had expanded so enormously.
.8 or .9 or thereabouts) the same way that I had done on the Amiga. Linux was, in many respects, a bit like coming home again. Linux didn't really do graphics well (in a way it still doesn't: SVGALib just isn't that hot), and X was slower than dirt on the 386-16 I was running. It wasn't an Amiga replacement quite yet, but it was sure closer than Win 3.1.
:-)
Obviously, I'm not up on all the details here, but that original seed company ran into financial trouble. Atari lent them money, knowing that they probably wouldn't be able to pay it back and they would get this incredible technology very cheaply when the little company defaulted. (I don't know if the little company was called Amiga or not.)
Well, sure enough, they hadn't quite completed their design and the loan was due -- Atari was about to move in and shut them down. Commodore rode in as a white knight and bought the company lock, stock, and barrel. They repaid Atari and took the technology for themselves. This infuriated Jack Tramiel of Atari.
To get revenge, Atari slapped together what was essentially a cheap piece of shit that, on paper, appeared to have many of the same technical merits the Amiga did. In actual fact, it was a 68000 with some RAM, I/O ports, and very simple graphic and sound chips. TOS was their single-tasking operating system. The desktop was called GEM, and was ugly and sluggish. But it had a 68000, like the Amiga, and it actually clocked the CPU faster (8Mhz) instead of the Amiga's 7.14Mhz. It also included a built-in MIDI port, which is probably the only really cool thing about it.
The Atari STs had three big advantages over the Amiga. They were cheaper, were easier to program, and were backed by a big, sleazy advertising campaign. They ran 'comparison' ads all the time which were horribly slanted. They actually did pretty well with it for quite some time. The infighting between the Amiga and ST weakened both computers, and eventually destroyed both: the PC juggernaut overwhelmed them, though the Amiga lasted a lot longer. The Amiga/Atari wars were worse than any of the distro wars you see now. But ultimately, while the Atari died a lot sooner, they both still died.
It took ten years, however, for the PC to catch up to the Amiga completely. Out of the box, it could do 4,096 colors (32 at once in low res, 4096 at once in a special HAM mode that was really hard to program for). It had sprites, four-channel digital sound, and an array of (for the time) incredibly powerful custom chips that offloaded almost all of the graphic and sound work from the CPU.
The operating system multitasked with an incredibly light overhead. You could seriously expect to run several smaller programs in 256K. 512K was quite usable, and when you expanded the machine to 2.5MB of RAM you had a really kick-butt machine.
It didn't have the concept of memory-to-disk paging, but that's probably just as well. Disk I/O was always bad on the Amigas; their filesystem really wasn't very good, and their floppies weren't especially reliable. It wasn't until you added a hard drive that they really started to sing, and most consumers couldn't afford hard drives back then.
It wasn't until 1994 that I could really multitask on my PC (with an early Linux,
My personal PC didn't rival my original Amiga for actual useful power until about 1996: considering our family bought our Amiga 1000 in Christmas of 1985, I think that's just amazing legs. I have a friend who is still using an A2000 (1987 or so) and absolutely swears by it.
At this point the original technology is hopelessly primitive and probably not worth saving, IMO. There are just too many features missing that we are all used to. The BeOS is, at present, the closest you can get to the Amiga. If you want to get back into that type of technology again, I'd suggest BeOS on a dual-CPU PC instead.
They did finally emulate the Amiga in software. There is a commercial package with ready-to-run binaries that will allow you to do almost anything you could do with a real Amiga. Check Cloanto for details. You can also, if you wish, download and assemble the pieces separately without paying for them, a la Linux.
It's worth a look. There were some cool ideas back then. The Amiga was the most technologically brilliant personal computer ever created. There are a lot of us older geeks out there who have very fond memories indeed.