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Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

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Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#51

Post by nikanj »

0x1ceb00da wrote: post #41
zedr wrote: post #33

Some features of the Amiga that are peculiar even today: 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode) 3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its s…

> The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pre…

The trackpad is not "locked", it's moving just as much as it used to, but the driver running the haptic fake click feedback is dead.

Apple's haptic technology is some deep black magic

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#52

Post by mdlxxv »

Back when I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, there were two "mythical" machines that I read a lot about but could never afford to own, the Amiga and the Neo-Geo. Nowadays both of them can be casually emulated on any kind of PC, but their capabilities still impress me.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#53

Post by b112 »

mrob wrote: post #35
elpocko wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish. Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor la…

There's a good article about this: https://www.datagubbe.se/stupidslow/ (previous discussion) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40604972 The Amiga feels fast because its slowness is predictable. Modern systems have unexpected slowness, and unexpected things are always more noticeable.

I had a sidecar with my Amiga 1000, which allowed you to use an XT MFM hard drive + controller card for the Amiga side. Once kickstart + the software loaded, it was incredibly fast. It was weird having a full IBM PC + Amiga in one conjoined machine.

But I agree that predictable slowness is a thing. One only need to discuss traffic jams vs a 20 minute car trip without them.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#54

Post by thijson »

doener wrote: post #19
spacedcowboy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”). The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga…

> but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.

Windows 3.11 was pretty unstable, because it wasn't using protected mode. I remember how unstable the Macs were back then too before the introduction of OSX.

Applications also had to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, cooperative multitasking. That's bad when an application crashes and takes down everything with it.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#56

Post by thijson »

dd8601fn wrote: post #23
vidarh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas. In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.…

Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else. At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple. Mine was an IBM ho…

I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#57

Post by Annatar »

vidarh wrote: post #30
Annatar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all have our delusions.

The Atari fans showing up does bring up the nostalgia of BBS and Usenet flamewars though. The Atari was so unpopular in my parts that was the only exposure I had to the two of them.

[dead]

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#58

Post by technothrasher »

tosti wrote: post #4

When I took a computer course in the early 2000s, the teacher said like "look, this had a desktop called workbench and it even has a recycle bin in f$#ing 1985." Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.

I loved my Amiga 2000, but AmigaOS was pretty late to the party with their trashcan. It came from the Xerox Star software in 1981, was ripped off by Apple in 1983, and by 1985 Commodore was just following the trend.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#59

Post by vidarh »

dd8601fn wrote: post #23
vidarh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas. In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.…

Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else. At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple. Mine was an IBM ho…

It's fascinating just how balkanised computing was at that point. Growing up in Norway I never saw a non-Mac Apple computer in person. Commodore was dominant, with Atari, Spectrum, Amstrad as runners up. Some schools had the homegrown Tiki (early versions were Z-80, then with an 8088 CPU board), but that was itself a response to a survey finding 75 different models of computers in Norwegian schools as of 1982 leading to a government standard (that was largely outdated before it was published; demanding CP/M compatibility)

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#60

Post by UncleSlacky »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #17
somat wrote: post #12

I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game. The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the…

In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”). The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga…

The UK also had the Sinclair QL (68008-based) in 1984 for £399, famously owned by Linus Torvalds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL#Linux

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