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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

#161

Post by Danox »

detritus wrote: post #95
vidarh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Atari fans showing up does bring up the nostalgia of BBS and Usenet flamewars though. The Atari was so unpopular in my parts that was the only exposure I had to the two of them.

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…

The Amiga had a superior and hardware and software combo, the total package was extremely good. After the Amiga died I moved on into a Mac running OSX, and later Apple Silicon, when you combine the MacOS with Apple Silicon, it feels very similar to the Commodore Amiga in short, the total package of hardware and software made by one company, provided a level of integration that Microsoft Windows still can’t equal even with all the separate OEM’s making Windows computers across the world.

Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition, if the next computer or the SGI computer was around today with the technology advancements of today I definitely would be in the market for one, back in the day. I couldn’t afford one but today I can.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#162

Post by homarp »

homarp wrote: post #160
dosisking wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NTrYGFlImQM

VCF East: The Story of Ensoniq – Al Charpentier, Bill Mauchly, Joe Friel: When Bruce Crockett, Bob Yannes, Charles Winterble and Albert Charpentier left Commodore in late 1982, they named the company Peripheral Visions.

Listen as Albert & Bill will tell their tangled story of how they become Ensoniq.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#163

Post by stormking »

mnw21cam wrote: post #127
snvzz wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

There was a Shareware tool called Executive that would manipulate task priorities to, amongst other things, prioritize the active application.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#164

Post by wasabinator »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #151
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.

Yes but the point of the article was simply that the tech was 10 years ahead of it's time, but it provably wasn't.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#165

Post by ZenoArrow »

wasabinator wrote: post #164
ZenoArrow wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but the point of the article was simply that the tech was 10 years ahead of it's time, but it provably wasn't.

10 years ahead of it's time for affordable home computers. You have to take the target market into account. To use an analogy, most people accept that Gran Turismo on the PS1 has great graphics for it's time, despite releasing months after Scud Race on Sega Model 3 hardware, because it's accepted that what's impressive for a 70s/80s/90s console is not what's impressive for arcade hardware.

The X68000 was basically arcade-class hardware in a PC form factor, with a price to match. There are reasons why Capcom used X68000s as their dev machines for CPS1 games.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#166

Post by phs318u »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #6
phs318u wrote: post #2

I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be. However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent…

> ... which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing. > A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the li…

Almost. I'm technically in the first year of Gen X ('65). I knew a some guys a few years older right into the hobbyist computing scene in the early '80s. I lost touch by the time the Amiga came out but they would definitely have been into it.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#167

Post by phs318u »

vidarh wrote: post #7
phs318u wrote: post #2

I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be. However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent…

I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that. My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size). My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like d…

Love it! Any chance you'd be willing to share what you've got on GH? Also, I wonder if anyone has tried creating an Amiga OS style Linux distro? Sounds like your work could be the guts of it.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#168

Post by phs318u »

doener wrote: post #13
vidarh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that. My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size). My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like d…

> I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that. Me too. I wrote a blog post about it: https://text.tchncs.de/r3nun0mxs9

I love this so much. Did you ever take it further? Did you find anything close to ARexx?

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#169

Post by LocalH »

actionfromafar wrote: post #25
SwellJoe wrote: post #11

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)…

Don't you mean "it was heartbreaking watching Commodore shooting heroin with dirty needles in an alley, then later scouring trash bins for food" before finally dying? (Twice.) You are right about graphics.

And then someone decided it's time for "Weekend at Commodore's"

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#170

Post by TheAmazingRace »

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

The UI found in WorkBench 1.x was designed to be the way it was so that owners could plug their Amigas into television sets of the day and still be able to make out something without requiring a pristine purpose-built CRT monitor.
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