I miss the Amiga.

[athelind]

Twenty years ago the personal computer in most people's homes connected to the TV, could multitask, do colour and multimedia, and cost around $400. It's taken Wintel twenty years to reach this price point.

Comments

[scarfman]

I loved the Amiga because I could make animations on it, with a Broderbund program called FantaVision. Then the monitor went bad and the only repairman in town was my sister-in-law's ex. These days, in the past month I've taught myself enough Flash to do what I used to do with FantaVision and a little more. And the Gateway laptop I'm working on has - relative to an Amiga 500, anyway - memory and storage. Twenty years ago I was where I needed to be, and if I had to do it over I'd do the same; but now I'm where I need to be too.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but imagine what the Amiga could have done with that same development time.

Hey, tech geeks in my audience: weigh in! What are we missing here? Aside from obvious stuff like raw processor power and storage capacities, how are modern WinTel boxes fundamentally superior to old Amigas from 1990? What could a low-footprint, high-effiicency, mutli-tasking, multi-threading GUI like the Amiga OS have done with 21st-century hardware?

[araquan.livejournal.com]

I can but offer this anecdote, which is itself almost a decade old...

In 1997 I was working at CompUSA when one of the other software guys dragged me over to the Mac section, popped a Zip(TM) disk into one of the 300MHz PPC systems (604e processor, just prior to the G3 coming out) and rebooted it into this weird thing called BeOS. He ran a demo program of sorts. In a day when playing a simple MPEG1 video file reliably and chop-free on a Wintel PC was sometimes asking a lot, BeOS on PowerPC could play six such videos simultaneously- each on the faces of a freely-rotating cube. That was also undergoing various transformations, such as rippling, twisting, stretching, etc. In real time. Without missing a beat. Oh, and while not in the strictest terms a flavor of Unix, it was POSIX-compliant and had a bourne-compatible command shell. I was drooling for pretty much the rest of the day.

That was, as I said, nearly ten years ago, but I'd like to think that a mainstream the-way-it-should-have-been system of the day would have been not too different from that- and imagine what it could do today...

[jirris-midvale.livejournal.com]

I think it's funny that the modern PC is just now starting to approach things like multiprocessor/multithread processor junk that's been around for ages.

I think windows did well because Bill is a businessman and knew that he could make bank with IBM. He kept his OS retardedly simple and easy to program for.

That's why we have so many goddamned viruses.

I've always used a windows machine but had a passing interest in other ways of computing, amazed at what they could do.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I found myself nodding as I read that.

I used to have a Tandy Color Computer 3 running OS9. I could open and reliably multitask 9 programs, all on 128K ram and 360k floppy. MS-DOS NEVER handled files as well as OS9, never ran as reliably for such long periods, and needed a $4k PC to run on. MS Dos was bloated, slow and unreliable right up to its incorporation into Windows.

It worries me that Gates is being touted at the Inventor Of Cheap Computing.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Well, you know. "Cheap" != "Inexpensive".

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Sniff. I miss my Amiga 2000. Whopping 20 Mb HD and all. I think I spent over $3000.00 Canadian on it at the time, and I had tons of games, and other fun programs to use with it ("Lemmings", "Dungeon Master". About the only thing I didn't have was a Video Toaster.

I used it with both a track ball, and a a graphics tablet, and with the latter I used it to make some simple animations. I did a lot of word processing with it and Idid my earliest fanzines for Alarums & Excursions. I started BBSing with the local telephone networks on my Amiga, and I also did some simple programming using both Visual Basic and AMOS.

Alas, it stopped working circa 1994, and I couldn't afford to get it repaired, and when we moved in 2000 I reluctantly chucked in into our moving dumpster (along with a badly water-damaged copy of the boardgames "Titan" and "Diplomacy", along with a a busted Betamax that wouldn't stop chewing up tapes).

::B::

[triggur.livejournal.com]

See, my perspective is entirely different.

I programmed Amigas for a living in their heyday. I coded for Aegis. I had a mini-lab set up with a 500, a 1000, and a 2000 for compatibility testing. I was the hugest Amiga cheerleader anyone could possibly be. Go team.

Yeah, the Amiga had some good ideas in it.

Yeah, they had pre-emptive multitasking as opposed to cooperative like Windows had (though from a user's perspective, 99% of the time it's hard to tell which is which).

Yeah, they delegated some forms of processing off to non-symmetric co-processors.

But in the end, one solitary business decision and one solitary design flaw destroyed the Amiga.

The business mis-step was that Amiga rested on its laurels for several years while the rest of the computer industry forged ahead. Commodore came out with new models, but all those models had more or less the same hardware, with the exception of tiny changes.

The design flaw that killed the Amiga? Bit-plane video buffering versus byte-per-pixel indexed. The Amiga didn't have 8-bit indexed (256 color) video, it had nominally 5-bit bitplaned video (discounting Super Half-Brite mode, which was even more of a PITA to code for). So really it had 32 colors, and you had to choose your palette carefully to get images that looked okay, or you had to do screwy tricks with the Copper to change palettes halfway down the screen-- at any rate, it's a pain.

But let's lie and say the Amiga COULD do 8 bit depth indexed color (IIRC a later version could, but too little too late). Because of the way the 68000 addressed memory, everything was accessed as a 16-bit word on even byte boundaries at the bus level, even when all you're doing is fetching a single byte. So to write a single pixel in 8 bit planes, you'd have to spend 8 bus cycles (assuming one of the co-processors wasn't bogarting the bus) doing memory reads to find out what's already there, 8 AND operations to mask out the other bits, 8 OR operations to drop in the bits forming the pixel you're writing, 8 table lookups or source register shifting operations to decide what bits to drop in, and 8 more memory bus cycles to write the 16-bit words back out. If you're clever and your application can make use of it, you can write pixel blocks, but you still have 8 of the memory cycles and all of the bit masking ops.

The PC? Because of how the VGA buffer worked, you just... write one byte. Done.

That is why-- and this is not hyperbole-- the day I first saw Castle Wolfenstein 3D on the PC, is the day I said out loud, "It's over for Amiga." The best Amiga could muster was side scrolling platforms. Suddenly the competition could do first person perspective immersive realtime animated smooth motion, and the gamers flocked to it. Point, Set, Match.

And that success propelled further video card development until here we are today with 100x more rendering power in your $300 graphics card than a $200,000 Silicon Graphics machine of the day.

Where would the Amiga be today If Only ____ and If Only ____ and If Only _____? Who knows. But from an in-the-trenches-and-ultimately-abandoned-by-Commodore perspective, it's been sort of annoying for the last 15 years to hear people wax about how fantastic the Amiga was and how unjust it is the PC won. The PC won because it got better, faster.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

See, now, that's EXACTLY the perspective I wanted to hear. Thanks!