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Little Things That Made Amiga Great

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Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#141

Post by squarefoot »

Nice article that brings back memories. It missed a couple things surrounding the Amiga that contributed to make it great: Among libraries, the arp.library, whose windowing functions were somewhat precursor to the ASL library.

Scala Multimedia, an absolutely top notch presentation/titling software. Many local TV stations were using it to add titles to their video material, advertising etc. Its animations were super smooth, the PC world had nothing that could come close. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5V0J2BB5Ho

The demoscene, it literally forged a generation of coders/artists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjHZ85KwzM

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#143

Post by the_af »

pjmlp wrote: post #125
the_af wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The year of Desktop Linux arrived for me about a decade ago. Now I work, game, watch movies, edit graphics and photos, all on Linux. I like and want the powerful combination of the CLI and GUI applications.

Finally met one of the happy 1% from Steam surveys.

Also GOG and Humble Bundle ;)

It's generally a joy to use Linux. In some cases (like HP LaserJet printers) even more painless than Windows and macOS!

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#144

Post by noizejoy »

mattmcknight wrote: post #7
burlesona wrote: post #3

I got really into computers in the mid-late 90s by which point we were mostly down to Wintel and Apple hanging on by a thread. What I remember from that era is that nothing was compatible with anything else. It took a lot of work to interoperate between two PCs, let alone cross the gap between OSes. So for a long time, I have kind of taken the current world of few OSes that are highly interoperable as being a great t…

Whatever got us the Internet was worth it. To generalize, it's fine to have a variety of components, as long as the interface between them is roughly standardized, and the innovation can come in the components. That we can have a Playstation and an iPhone use the same network is a good thing, and they can do whatever they want with the rest of the stack. A computer pre-internet felt a lot more like an island. I had a…

Not always islands, if you had a modem and a phone line. Pre-Internet were increasingly numerous BBS systems, from big one’s like AOL and CompuServ to medium sized one’s like GEnie and many tiny independents. Instead of remembering URLs you had lists of phone numbers (the smaller one’s requiring long distance calls when those were still expensive) for your little modems to dial. My Atari ST (a contemporary of the Amiga) was online a lot already during those days. I actually connected to the Internet via CompuServ for quite a while before the local phone company began to offer dial-up Internet service. And pirated as well as free software were widely available already back then.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#145

Post by noizejoy »

hexsprite wrote: post #142

Fun trip down memory lane. My first C compiler was Lattice C which I made resident so I wouldn't have to swap floppies on my single drive Amiga 2000. I can see now how it was a great stepping stone to learning UNIX.

+1 for Lattice C (I had the Atari version). Wrote my first little Midi monitoring program with that one!

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#146

Post by wolfgke »

bhauer wrote: post #60

A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time. I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's "mobile first" UX regime, we now have m…

> A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time.

Windows has proportional scrollbars: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030731-00/?p=43...

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#147

Post by kmeisthax »

alexisread wrote: post #97
burlesona wrote: post #3

I got really into computers in the mid-late 90s by which point we were mostly down to Wintel and Apple hanging on by a thread. What I remember from that era is that nothing was compatible with anything else. It took a lot of work to interoperate between two PCs, let alone cross the gap between OSes. So for a long time, I have kind of taken the current world of few OSes that are highly interoperable as being a great t…

I think there have been many missed opportunities in computing, however I'd suggest that the Internet and GPL (open source licencing in general) would have come regardless of the diversity of operating systems. Both these two innovations have really bound the software world together - compatability these days is really at the TCP level (eg. docker and APIs) and allows for a massive diversity of architectures (kafka,…

Oracle v. Google would have happened eventually. The underlying problem is the law, not the litigants. In any other field that deals with copyright, the idea that copyright protection extends to what is effectively a series of headings and summaries would be obvious. The problem is that copyright is a poor fit for software - our headings and summaries carry function to them, and changing them breaks code. In general, the law doesn't want to grant copyright over purely functional things, or even things where functionality and creativity are frustratingly mixed. That's why boat hulls and hardware have separate ownership regimes - copyright over them was explicitly rejected. But we also explicitly said software is copyrightable, which leaves open the question of where the unprotected function ends and the protected creativity starts.

Maybe in the world where Android never happened, some other company stumbled upon this rich vein of confusion, and we're dealing with SCO/Novell/Attachmate/Whoever v. Apple over who can implement UNIX APIs in their kernels.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#148

Post by noizejoy »

timbit42 wrote: post #77
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #29

>And we were fierce: if you think Apple fanboys are annoying today, be very happy you didn't meet an Amiga zealot in 1995. I was an Atari 8-bit guy, but I have a friend who was an Amiga zealot, and to this day every time we have a conversation he make an Amiga reference.

> to this day every time we have a conversation he make an Amiga reference. The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that there hasn't been anything else comparable. I lived through that time and I reference it a lot as well because so many things today are based on the Amiga or still aren't done as well as they were done on the Amiga.

The Amiga was far ahead on several fronts including digital audio and video, but the Atari ST was the platform of choice for midi using musicians. A couple of today’s biggest DAWs (Steinberg Cubase & Apple Logic) have their roots on the Atari ST.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#149

Post by jzwinck »

pjmlp wrote: post #131
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything "has been done before" in computing. The difference is a matter of degree and attention to detail. And your comment about it having been a thing on mainframes underscores my point. The server story for Linux is evolving (and maturing) greatly, and very quickly. The Linux of today is not at all like the Linux from 2010. To say that Linux is stuck in some sort of legacy UNIX quagmire is just silly.

So what ideas are actually new, introduced by Linux crowd, instead of copied from either older UNIXes or mainframes?

How about recvmmsg? I never saw that before Linux, and haven't been able to find a reference to anything similar on say AIX or Solaris.

Re: Little Things That Made Amiga Great

#150

Post by icedchai »

29athrowaway wrote: post #40

The Amiga has a very impressive demoscene... Two Amiga demos that I like from The Black Lotus (TBL): - Eon (2019): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc (4:16 is my favorite part) - Starstruck (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM

I remember watching some Amiga demos as a teenager and being absolutely blown away. This was roughly 1990 or so.

"Shadow of the Beast" was also a game I remember buying and being totally amazed by it...

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