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

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#151

Post by ZenoArrow » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

wasabinator wrote: post #124

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.

The X68000 was amazing, but it was also around double the price. Amiga A1000 was around $1300 in 1985, Sharp X68000 was around $2500 in 1987. The Amiga A500 was released in 1987 and was even cheaper than the A1000 for an equivalent spec.

If I'm paying double the price, of course I'd expect better performance, but Amigas gave great value for money between the mid 80s and early 90s.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#152

Post by rwmj » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #74

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.

And a great BASIC with inline Assembly.

That was awesome, but to be fair it was a carry-over from BBC BASIC.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#153

Post by spankibalt » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #130

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…

> 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.

Or 6K (1.5K used in 92/93) for a well-specced 386 that can actually run UNIX, multiple DOS versions (including preemptive multitaskers), OS/2, Windows (3.x/NT). And that's just the surface of the mainstream.

> But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, [...].

You confuse "software" for your specific preferences in GUIs. And software? The PC software catalog in DOS alone towers over Amigas, with a couple of notable outliers (the odd exclusive here and there, especially in cost-effective video production).

> 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).

Yeah, like 2D platformer Stormlord (VGA version released in 1989) or Red Baron (1990). Played the latter first in VGA on a 286. Ran smooth. Amiga 500? Stutterfest. The game that allegedly sold more 386 machines than any other? Wing Commander. 1990. The late OCS port was technically inferior. Yeah, yeah, I know. 2.5D only counts when one invokes Doom.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#154

Post by waffletower » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 5:48 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…

Hmmm, I use Claude Code to make those two worlds work together -- where a GUI is an obvious complement (visualization, discoverability)

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#155

Post by krige » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

dosisking wrote: post #141

krige wrote: post #48

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

AmigaOS 2.X is pretty much a copy of NeXTStep, visually speaking

I'm not seeing it. Sure, the window bgs are gray, but so was 90% the OSes at the time. Everything else is different and even the only things those two have in common, the pseudo-3D on buttons, is applied in different ways, creating different divisions and accents.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#156

Post by icedchai » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 6:35 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…

It was obsolete as soon as the 486 was released, pushing 386 (especially 386SX) systems with SVGA into a lower price tier. Commodore's answer, the Amiga 1200, was released too late with too little (late 1992 with AGA graphics and no changes to the sound, plus no fast RAM?)

I stuck with the Amiga platform until 1994, then I got a cheap 486 after the Pentium was released.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#157

Post by p_l » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:42 PM UTC

thijson wrote: post #54

doener wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Windows 3.x could (and defaulted to where possible) to running in "386 enhanced" mode which actually used protected mode, IIRC.

The problem was that the Win16 part ran all in one address space, and the separation support was mainly used to handle DOS windows.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#158

Post by alexisread » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:49 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #117

mellosouls wrote: post #115

Terrific, but not sure about the ten years ahead. Let's not forget this was also the era of Atari ST and the birth of ARM with the incredible Acorn Archimedes arriving just a couple of years later.

Somehow the Atari ST is panned because it lacked preemptive multitasking (I'm not sure if this is true). They didn't mention any of the other GUIs that unix was working with - X11 already existed back then, and several unix vendors had their own windowing system that was arguably better (at least their marketing said so - I never used any). Of course Unix systems would have been much more expensive.

The ST got preemptive multitasking in 92 AFAIK with MINT/Multitos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#159

Post by graemep » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

dosisking wrote: post #79

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…

That monitor was amazing. Crisp and clear.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#160

Post by homarp » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

dosisking wrote: post #137

haspok wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The IIgs had the Ensoniq DOC (ES5503): 32 oscillators allowing for ~16 stereo voices at the same time. But it only had 64K of sound RAM.

The GUS (that kickstarted alsa on linux) is based on the DOC II (ES5504), which is more or less a 16-bit version of the DOC that could address 1MB of sound sample RAM.