141–150 of 181 posts
10 years ahead, but for Irving motherf- Gould wasting it all out of pure greed, even after Rattigan managed to turn things around. AmigaOS 2.X is still a fantastic UI and design language though, especially compared to the ugly mess of 1.X
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.
The Amiga was the best and worst thing to happen to a kid in the late 80s. It was heartbreaking watching Commodore die, but it was an amazing introduction to the possibilities of computing. I made a ton of music with OctaMED, learned a bunch about programming, learned how to use all sorts of graphics tools, made all my own icons and wallpaper images, wrote an interactive book in AmigaGuide (an early hypertext system)…
But:
>"Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable.
But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. 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. Except it was red, not blue."
Not true!
Well, not entirely true...
Or at least, that's not an entirely correct, nuanced, contextual historical understanding...
I was an early Amiga owner, so I speak from experience!
Yes, software could crash the system from time to time (any software of the era could crash almost any consumer computer of the era, because CPU's with MMU's and protected memory and protected mode operating systems where kernel/OS code was separate from user/client/program/application/unprivileged code (call it what you will!) either did not exist or were not widely available or inexpensive enough for mass-market adoption by the majority of home/family/mass-market consumers in the early to mid 1980's.
The Amiga 1000 used the Motorola 68000 CPU, which did not have a built-in MMU on it or external MMU working alongside it, which means that there was no protected memory where the OS/kernel code could live, which means that any given program, even the simplest of C programs, could overwrite OS/kernel memory, which means that any given program could crash the computer -- but that's exactly the same as most of the other mass-market consumer computers from other manufacturers of the early to mid 1980's -- the same as early Macintoshes with 68000's, the same as 6510 Commodore 64's, the same as 6502/65C02 Apple IIe's, the same as early 8086/8088 IBM PC's and clones, etc., etc.
Any program could crash any of those.
So if the early Amiga had a "reputation for being unstable" (a reputation which I have never heard about until now, until reading this article what, 41 years or so since the original Amiga 1000 was first produced, I should explain that I've read almost every single early Amiga article (I was a voracious early "Amiga article reader"!) in the 1985-1993 time period) -- then the same thing would have been true about just about every other consumer-grade mass-market computer in the early to mid 1980's... because most didn't have MMU's and run protected mode operating systems...)
If the Amiga 1000 had a "reputation for being unstable" -- then that's either fake news (what are your sources?) or AI-generated copypasta or possibly marketing gossip/slander originating from other jealous less-technologically superior competing computer manufacturers back in the day...
Now, other than that minor point, that minor nuanced contextual understanding (which I apologize for, because it sounds like I'm trying to be a critic of the article -- I am not! I am merely trying to mitigate the spread of "fake historical news" surrounding the original Amiga 1000!) -- other that that minor point, the article is 100% spot-on, a great article, and I'm really glad the author wrote it!
So, to the Author, I say "well done!"
An excellent article overall!
That, and I greatly appreciate any and all articles written about the early Amiga!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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], an…
(yes, the default AmigaOS look isn't anything impressive either, but "nobody" kept the default look so we're prone to very unfairly judging other systems against not what the default looks like but whatever we think a system should look like - I'm not claiming this was rational)
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.
Personally, I just love the sound of it. Modules were awesome and games continued using them until ~2001.
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…
Much more expensive than the Amiga 1000 of course, but those capabilities had moved way down the Mac line by 1990-1991. And by that time the high-end had 24-bit color, much higher resolutions, accelerated graphics, and laptops (something else the Amiga never had).
The software had moved on too (eg TrueType, QuickTime, AppleTalk).
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…
I somehow do really like the sound that some managed to squeeze out of that YM2149 sound chip in the ST though. It was an old low-end chip when the ST was new already, and most games do indeed sound like ass. But the people in the demoscene worked their magic on it to great effect.
(eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv8WfmI4TiI - loading screen for Dizzy)
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…
Possibly Art Department Professional (aka ADPro)?
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…
To support protected memory, you need an MMU, and the base 68000 did not ship with an MMU, however the 68020 and later did. The Amiga 3000 onwards should have defaulted to MMU and had a flicker fixer and chunky graphics and 16 bit sound to really succeed. Another multiverse timeline, perhaps.