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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

#71

Post by vidarh »

tialaramex wrote: post #62
mmustapic wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Windows 95 had memory protection for 32-bit apps. Usually when a 32-bit app crashed, the rest of the OS worked fine.

There's definitely a difference in magnitude in how likely crap software is to set the world on fire and ruin your day between Win95 and Amiga. One big problem is that Amiga "multi-tasking" while not co-operative like Mac or Win 3.x, can be switched off as a convenience for programmers. So all that needs to go wrong is a program switches off multi-tasking to do something and then gets stuck before restoring it. The p…

In all the years I used an Amiga, I don't think I ever had the machine crash because they used Forbid(). I'm not saying it never happened to people - I'm sure there were badly misbehaving programs in use -, but using Forbid()/Permit() outside of very tight sections was very firmly frowned on, and Forbid was overall relatively uncommon apart from games which took over the system on purpose.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#72

Post by anthk »

vidarh wrote: post #59
dd8601fn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Spain and Portugal the Mac was the printed press and graphic design platform. Everything for people who truly knew what CMYK and "offset printing" meant. Amiga were for TV studios and odd demoscene people and maybe raster artwork. PC's were for "real work" (even under Windows 95 days). Boring offices with Microsoft Office and custom software, which literally had millions of software for it, from custom Borland ones to Visual Basic 5/6. Well, that and DOS compability and DOS and Windows games.

In late 90's Amigas were still used in TV studios but they were replaced by NT or Mac machines. And, well, PowerPC Macs where still the serious platform to run Photoshop and the rest of graphic suites (and DTP's) until everyone switched to Windows 2000 and NT, altough a G4 Mac was unbeatable for audio and video producing (it curb-stomped Pentium 3's like nothing) until Intel released Pentium 4's with SSE2's and 2000 with SP4 or XP with SP2 were good enough with either a Geforce 3 or a Radeon 7500 series and up.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#73

Post by pjmlp »

flohofwoe wrote: post #37

For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then. The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical use…

It isn't as if the tools aren't there, Powershell with .NET/COM (yes COM really needs a DX improvement), AppleTalk/XPC/zsh, GNOME/KDE/D-BUS.

Yet as you very well point out, it is a mess, and no where close to using AREXX or Datatype libraries.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#74

Post by pjmlp »

rwmj wrote: post #68
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…

I think the Acorn Archimedes (1987) might be the closest UK vision to the Amiga. Of course it was 2 years later. But, mouse-oriented interface, graphics central, kind of 32 bit CPU with limitations (similar to the 68k which is 16 bit aspiring to be 32 bit), thoroughly weird desktop environment.

And a great BASIC with inline Assembly.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#75

Post by pjmlp »

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…

To match the Amiga in gaming, only from STE improvements onwards.

At least when the Amiga crashed it got to do some meditation. :)

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#76

Post by [deleted] »

elpocko wrote: post #31
dev0p wrote: post #28

I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems. Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison. It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God the…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#77

Post by pjmlp »

vidarh wrote: post #15
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…

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.…

Yes, the Mac was hardly anywhere in Europe until after the reverse acquisition from NeXT.

In Portugal there was only an importer in Lisbon for the whole country, at the university campus, only a single lab had a couple of LCs, as did some secretaries on the CS department and that was it.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#79

Post by dosisking »

kryptonomist wrote: post #10

Though the Atari ST was a superior machine.

In hindsight, I think it was. The built in MIDI is extremely useful. The high resoution B&W monitor with high refresh rate as well. My main complaint is that it should have came with the YM2203 sound chip, or at least had an optional card slot for it.

It turns out that the Amiga chipset design did not age well, once CPU's became faster than RAM. The Amiga had a design flaw where it could not be used reliably for MIDI, because every so often an interrupt would get masked, resulting in dropped bytes from the serial port.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#80

Post by pjmlp »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #27
vidarh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boomer is a tricky term now - it's starting to become a generic term for old people. Personally it still felt like a step backwards when I felt I no longer had a choice but to switch to Linux in '97 or so (I'd used a souped up Amiga 3000 until then) Sure, you could get far faster PCs with better graphics, but even Linux still felt like a step back in usability. By '99 I was using Enlightenment with draggable virtual…

> Boomer is a tricky term now - it's starting to become a generic term for old people. We Gen-Xers are used to being completely ignored as a generation. That is not new at all.

Yeah, apparently we suffer from too much "I don't care attitude". :)
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