Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time • Hacker News Board

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#121

Post by cowmix » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

When the first mentions and prototypes of the Amiga started surfacing in 1984, I began saving my paper-route money to buy one. I finally got it on the first day I could.

It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined.

What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability.

It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#122

Post by krs_ » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #103

detritus wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, at the time I thought there was a lot more parity between the ST and the 500 but when I watch videos of the two these days, I realise just how much better the Amiga was. I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga. Oh, to go back in time and use that in an ar…

Yeah, my old flame wars with Atari users were all largely based on vibes and spec sheets and screenshots in magazines and how ugly TOS looked, not on actual experience with the Atari... But I've been happy to be vindicated by various videos...

I don't really want to come across as an Atari ST fanboy in this thread (although I do love it, and the Amiga) but while TOS is very bare bones, an ST with 4MB of RAM, an HDD, and an install of Neodesk + Geneva is genuinely a nice experience.

Outside of that I've also set up a dev environment consisting of a copy of the Pure-C compiler suite (basically Borland C for the ST), MicroEMACS for editing, Okami shell[1], and pcmake[2] for a very UNIX like development environment. Most people these days would set up a cross compiler on their PC, which is the sensible thing to do, but it's been great fun to do some retro coding with on period correct hardware.

[1] https://gitlab.com/wolframroesler/okami-shell [2] https://github.com/th-otto/pcmake/

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#123

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

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…

There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System nowadays.

It lacks a usable browser for todays websites. Maybe someone gets into the vibe of agentically coding one.

While being at it, the foundations could use heavy fuzzing, lift them up to Open/NetBSD at least. A few looks into Genode for technical inspiration wouldn't be wrong, maybe a port of Aros atop seL4/Genode could be supreme. Same as Haiku.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#124

Post by wasabinator » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

I'm an Amiga diehard from the start but the industry caught up in a lot less than 10 years. Also, the amazing X68000 was a thing in Japan as of 1987.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#125

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

amiga386 wrote: post #69

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…

To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders! This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen. The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers trigger…

There were SCSI floppy drives. Rare, though. However, with the right controller, not necessarily Adaptek, and drivers for it, they enabled all of that, too.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#126

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

amiga386 wrote: post #89

vidarh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The A3000 had a ficker fixer. If you meant that the other later models should have also included it, I agree. Regarding the MMU, the problem was/is the OS. AmigaOS uses message passing between processes extensively, and those messages often involved passing pointers to structures that the receiver expected to be able to dereference and even writ to in some cases. I'm on record repeatedly arguing over the years that i…

It would be simple, but somewhat incomplete. It would not look like a virtual memory subsystem where merely accessing an address can allocate physical RAM to it. The API is already there! AllocMem(, MEMF_PUBLIC) allocates shared memory, otherwise you get private memory . You can then enforce memory protection around that, but obviously the entire OS is still built on message-passing between tasks where the message it…

[deleted]

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#127

Post by mnw21cam » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #108

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…

The keyword being latency. Even a powerful PC, such as running WinNT or Linux on my 9800x3d, doesn't feel as tight as my pretty basic Amiga 500 does. It's the difference between a RTOS proper (AmigaOS, QNX, BeOS) and a toy (Windows, Linux, MacOS).

AmigaOS couldn't be described as a RTOS proper, not like QNX. For one, it had a forbid() system call which would stop the scheduler from pre-empting the current running process. It had no guarantees on latency, which is the essence of a RTOS.

It had a very simple static absolute priority scheduler and very little that could cause long pauses (like virtual memory), which made it much more predictable in scheduling than more sophisticated schedulers like in Windows, Linux, and MacOS. At one point I had an A1200 and a Linux Pentium 300-ish, and CD-writer on both systems. I could trust the Amiga to write CDs without creating a coaster every time, where the Linux box would succeed only 2/3 the time due to the unpredictable scheduling and it running the buffer dry.

So it wasn't a real RTOS, but it definitely behaved more like one that what we have now.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#128

Post by mnw21cam » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

amiga386 wrote: post #89

vidarh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The A3000 had a ficker fixer. If you meant that the other later models should have also included it, I agree. Regarding the MMU, the problem was/is the OS. AmigaOS uses message passing between processes extensively, and those messages often involved passing pointers to structures that the receiver expected to be able to dereference and even writ to in some cases. I'm on record repeatedly arguing over the years that i…

It would be simple, but somewhat incomplete. It would not look like a virtual memory subsystem where merely accessing an address can allocate physical RAM to it. The API is already there! AllocMem(, MEMF_PUBLIC) allocates shared memory, otherwise you get private memory . You can then enforce memory protection around that, but obviously the entire OS is still built on message-passing between tasks where the message it…

Software that tried to implement memory protection or virtual memory on the Amiga had to have a huge long hit-list of software that set the AllocMem flags incorrectly and had to be treated differently. That's because the MEMF_PUBLIC flag didn't really do anything on the base OS, so programmers didn't bother using it correctly.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#129

Post by haspok » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

deepsummer wrote: post #116

The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then. The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely…

The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992.

Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.

And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.

In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.

In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#130

Post by flohofwoe » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

deepsummer wrote: post #116

The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then. The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely…

A VGA card was not in every aspect better than the Amiga custom chipset, otherwise Doom would have happened much earlier. The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486). For some 2D graphical effects, the Amiga could do much more with much less hardware power and for a much lower price.

But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, it took the PC until Win95 (arguably, until NT4) to implement 'proper' multithreading and to finally get a desktop UI that wasn't a complete joke, and the Mac only got preemptive multitasking with OSX in 2001. Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.