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A history of the Amiga

arstechnica.com

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Re: A history of the Amiga

#11

Post by tjr »

MC27 wrote: post #2

Having stuck with the Amiga until '98, with an overly expanded computer - capable of playing Quake etc, it was the last real computer platform I cared for. All these useless companies that purchased it without a long term plan was exasperating. If anything, it's taught me to take a step backwards and avoid becoming tribal over any technology.

I hung in there with the Amiga until around 1996. I truly enjoyed that computer system, in a way I haven't enjoyed any computer since. Perhaps part of it was the overall novelty of personal computing, as there was still so much totally new development going on... but I sure didn't have that same enjoyment factor when using IBM-PC clones or even Macintoshes of the same era.

I think, maybe, somehow, probably unintentionally, the Amiga captured the 1970s/early-1980s "hacker spirit" better than any of the other personal computer systems. It wasn't a Lisp machine, and it wasn't a PDP-11, and it wasn't particularly used for artificial intelligence, but its users thoroughly enjoyed tinkering with it and making it do awesome things.

And awesome things it did.

Re: A history of the Amiga

#13

Post by DLWormwood »

Robin_Message wrote: post #5

If you are irritated by the fact this was only part one, part 7 - with links to the earlier parts - can be found here. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/05/amiga-history-p...

I’m sad that that stopped about halfway through the story, I think they were shooting for about 10 parts or so. But part 7 was a kind of sidetrack listing games on the platform, and the writer might have run out of contacts or behind the scenes info to finish the narrative.

Re: A history of the Amiga

#14

Post by DLWormwood »

henrikschroder wrote: post #10

I had an Atari 512 STE. Clearly the superior choice. (More of my school friends back then had Ataris than Amigas, so it was a no-brainer decision for me.) I'm curious what spurred the insane die-hard mentality though. Most of us left the Amigas and Ataris for the PC in the early 90s, except for a few who swore by their Amigas and loved them to bits even though their relative performance grew more and more pathetic. S…

Same here, and I really did want an Amiga at one time. One of my favorite internet comic writers still apparently uses them to this day.

http://www.sabrina-online.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q

That said, I ended up on Macs, and for the longest time, I though we were going to end up in the same boat. (And in a way, we did. To me, OS X isn’t quite the joy to use due to it’s complexity and design compromises for interoperability versus the classic Mac OS.)

EDIT: Every time this topic comes up, I’m reminded of an old USENET thread I posted to back in the day.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/brows...

I’m the first “Mac user” in that thread.

Re: A history of the Amiga

#15

Post by [deleted] »

tjr wrote: post #11
MC27 wrote: post #2

Having stuck with the Amiga until '98, with an overly expanded computer - capable of playing Quake etc, it was the last real computer platform I cared for. All these useless companies that purchased it without a long term plan was exasperating. If anything, it's taught me to take a step backwards and avoid becoming tribal over any technology.

I hung in there with the Amiga until around 1996. I truly enjoyed that computer system, in a way I haven't enjoyed any computer since. Perhaps part of it was the overall novelty of personal computing, as there was still so much totally new development going on... but I sure didn't have that same enjoyment factor when using IBM-PC clones or even Macintoshes of the same era. I think, maybe, somehow, probably unintentio…

[deleted]

Re: A history of the Amiga

#16

Post by rryyan »

unwind wrote: post #7

The Amiga remains magical to me, having grown up programming it and having had more "aahaa!" moments thanks to it than any other computer in particular. I still have things like this, floating around in my brain somewhere[]: .loop: move.w $dff006,$dff180 btst.b #6,$bfe001 bne.s .loop It was so awesome, a computer with a great CPU, intriguing and poweful custom hardware for graphics/sound, and still a very decent oper…

What does this code do?

Re: A history of the Amiga

#18

Post by jackfoxy »

I got an Amiga 1000 in 1985 or 86, and hung in there with a 2000 or 3000 (can't remember now) until 1996. Only about a year ago I finally tossed all the old floppies, but I kept several thinking I might write an Amiga retrospective someday.

Here are some highlights. It's been a long time, so I'm sure to make some technical mistakes.

Rexx Plus Compiler -- by Dineen Edwards Group; Implementation of the Rexx language (ARexx). You cold easily hack together the OS and many applications as well. ARexx was one of the things that kept the Amiga alive.

UEdit -- by Rick Stiles; One of the first great things available for the Amiga. A highly programmable editor. If Rick hadn't passed away too soon UEdit may well have lived on past the Amiga.

Migraph OCR -- by Migraph, Inc.; I was scanning financial data from Investors Business Daily, compiled quite a database.

Descartes! -- by Mindware International; Some sort of AI-ish thingy I never found a use for.

Magellan -- by Emerald Intelligence; Expert System generator I never found a use for. The company ran into some sort of trademark infringement and later renamed it Mahogany.

Boole -- by URSIC Computing; Fuzzy logic and Bayesian Inference. Actually a DOS program, but you could run it on the Amiga.

The Amiga was really a hacker's machine. Thanks to programs like ARexx and UEdit you could really do some interesting stuff at a time when a DOS computer mostly just ran stand-alone programs. It was greatly stymied by Commodore's terrible marketing and lack of commercial applications.

I think in a way I was scarred by investing so much learning effort in a technology that dead-ended. It was probably a factor in my taking a career detour to more business, less technical work for several years.

Re: A history of the Amiga

#19

Post by hackermom »

rryyan wrote: post #16
unwind wrote: post #7

The Amiga remains magical to me, having grown up programming it and having had more "aahaa!" moments thanks to it than any other computer in particular. I still have things like this, floating around in my brain somewhere[]: .loop: move.w $dff006,$dff180 btst.b #6,$bfe001 bne.s .loop It was so awesome, a computer with a great CPU, intriguing and poweful custom hardware for graphics/sound, and still a very decent oper…

What does this code do?

$dff006 is the vertical raster position register, $dff180 is the background color register, and $bfe001 is one of the registers belonging to one of the two CIAs of the Amiga; the piece of code copies 16 bits of data (on the amiga referred to as a "word") from $dff006 to $dff180, checks if bit 6 in $bfe001 is high - the bit that contains the status of the left mouse button of joy/mouse port #1 - and then branches back to the .loop label if the comparison resulted negatively - that is, if the bit was not high.

In plain-speak, it renders vertical green/blue/cyan gradients in the background until the left mouse button is pressed.

(as a side note, I spent 4-5 years coding on the Amiga in the early 90s.)

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