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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

#131

Post by Razengan »

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…

And how long did apps & games take to make full USE of SVGA/SBlaster on DOS vs Windows?

The FULL experience of Wintel was definitely 10 years behind the full experience of an out-of-the-box Amiga.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#132

Post by kalleboo »

pjmlp wrote: post #73
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.

It's so sad to see what happened to AppleScript/the Open Scripting Architecture.

When it arrived you could basically build your whole app around it as a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration.

NeXTpple never properly integrated it into Cocoa, and eventually they wanted a more user-friendly GUI scripting system and put their NIH syndrome to work and made Automator, which never took off because it was too simple. They they built Shortcuts off an acquihire and now Shortcuts introduces NSUserActivity as the new way to... build your whole app around a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration. Except now we have all this weird magic templating going on.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#133

Post by kalleboo »

flohofwoe wrote: post #120
marbletiles wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple scre…

Back on the Amiga 3000 we had built our asset creation tools for a game that eventually ended up as Urban Assault on the PC. This was a wild mix of custom-made and standard tools wired together via AREXX and controlled with a little macOS dock like icon toolbar, and all integrated with the workbench file manager. E.g. one such custom workflow would be to "pipe" an image file created in DPaint into some standard image…

Many newspapers in the 90's had their whole classified sections automated using custom AppleScript workflows, it was one of the big things that kept publishers on the Mac instead of Windows, since Microsoft didn't have anything to compete (OLE/VBA was a joke for these things)

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#134

Post by vidarh »

flohofwoe wrote: post #120
marbletiles wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple scre…

Back on the Amiga 3000 we had built our asset creation tools for a game that eventually ended up as Urban Assault on the PC. This was a wild mix of custom-made and standard tools wired together via AREXX and controlled with a little macOS dock like icon toolbar, and all integrated with the workbench file manager. E.g. one such custom workflow would be to "pipe" an image file created in DPaint into some standard image…

> most 'modern' UI tools adhered to standards defined by the Amiga team for cmdline usage and scripting.

One minor example of the usability was that the ReadArgs() call was fairly extensively used within a year or two after it was introduced and meant that the "?" command line option for help worked "everywhere" and would give a machine parseable, semi-typed options list (annotations like "/T" for toggle, "/N" for number etc.)

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#135

Post by vidarh »

amiga386 wrote: post #84
rwmj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

nitpick: ARM1/2 were 26-bit . The PC register used the bottom 26 bits for the address of the next instruction, and the upper 6 bits for status flags. Lots of code involves getting or twiddling those flags by amending the PC register directly. There is nowhere in the architecture you could put the missing 6 bits. This was unlike the "24-bit" 68000 where the hardware package actually only had 24 address lines, but its…

> or revealed the programmer was an imbecile who thought they could get away with storing random data in the top 8 bits of addresses.

Case in point: Microsofts Amiga BASIC.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#136

Post by krs_ »

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…

> By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.

You're mentioning a lot of technologies from 1995 which were goundbreaking no doubt, but lets not forget that that is indeed 10 years later than the A1000, and that Commodore went out of business entirely a year before that.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#137

Post by dosisking »

haspok wrote: post #129
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 Ge…

I think the Gravis Ultrasound is in the same category as the Apple IIGS sound card, which came out in 1986. And I put the Apple IIGS sound card much further ahead than the Amiga Paula.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#138

Post by mosura »

kalleboo wrote: post #133
flohofwoe wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back on the Amiga 3000 we had built our asset creation tools for a game that eventually ended up as Urban Assault on the PC. This was a wild mix of custom-made and standard tools wired together via AREXX and controlled with a little macOS dock like icon toolbar, and all integrated with the workbench file manager. E.g. one such custom workflow would be to "pipe" an image file created in DPaint into some standard image…

Many newspapers in the 90's had their whole classified sections automated using custom AppleScript workflows, it was one of the big things that kept publishers on the Mac instead of Windows, since Microsoft didn't have anything to compete (OLE/VBA was a joke for these things)

Yep the whole AppleScript and (Quark Xpress) Xtension mechanism was remarkably sticky. Apple were treading dangerously during the OSX transition when it became clear much of that would never port over, but Quark was losing their grip by then.

MS were trying a huge NT push into the DTP industry that basically hit that wall and aborted.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#139

Post by kalleboo »

kamma4434 wrote: post #88
amiga386 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The mouse pointer on Amiga was a sprite. So it flies above the bitmaps below, thence the 50fps frame rate.

Famously Gates thought that the Mac cursor may have been a sprite, when it was actually in software https://www.folklore.org/Shut_Up.html

Apple loved doing things in software, ever since Woz wrote the Apple II disk routines in software so their floppy drives didn't need their own controller (the Commodore machines had a whole second CPU running an operating system in theirs). This is also why the one thing that WOULD lag the cursor on a classic Mac was formatting a floppy disk, since it required interrupt-level timing.

Even to this day Apple loves running things in software - the speakers on modern Mac laptops are driven in software - macOS has a daemon that runs and adjusts the speaker volume, tracking the sound pressure sent to them to keep them from being blown out. When Asahi Linux added speaker support, they had to reimplement this from scratch.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#140

Post by seanwilson »

> Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic.

Hadn't seen this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

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