Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS

The Amiga 500 and 1200 of my father were the first computers I got in touch with as a boy growing up in Germany in the 80s and early 90s.

I think every generation feels more or less nostalgic about the things they grew up with. But oftentimes I get the impression that this is especially true for the Amiga community (in comparison to, let‘s say, people growing up with Ataris). If true, I wonder why this is.

I think it's the same reason I guess why people mourn e.g. BeOS.

The Atari was a nice system, but it wasn't ground-breaking. The Amiga was decades ahead of it's time and could have been so much more if Commodore had any business-savvy. It's hard to overstate the impact of seeing an Amiga A500 in full flight, coming from the previous generation of 8-bit machines. It felt like it was straight from the future (and still does in many ways).

It also straddled the line perfectly of being ridiculously powerful for the era yet simple enough and approachable for a kid/teenager with dedication to understand it on a level that simply isn't possible these days. To quote myself from an article I wrote on the floppy disk[1]:

"I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it is exactly about the Amiga that captures me in a way that no other computer ever did. Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head.

It was complex, true, but with enough studying and time you could know pretty much everything about every single bit of the Amiga’s memory space, workbench, the custom chips and so on. That’s what makes it so special and endearing.

That simply doesn’t exist on other platforms. I mean modern systems are amazing - and I’ve worked on some serious big-iron hardware in my time - but you could spend an entire lifetime now simply becoming an expert in one tiny piece of the whole system. Modern computers just don’t have the accessibility that the Amiga had, and it straddled the divide perfectly between being simple enough to know it and love it, yet powerful enough to do things you’d never dreamed possible."

[1]=https://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy...

Amiga OS 2.04 still looks so clean and great, and Workbench 3.1 with MagicWB and MUI on an Amiga 1200 with a hard disk and some FastRAM was just amazing for it's time. This was when Windows 3.11 was the competition - or the Macintosh, which was much more expensive. Add AmiTCP and AMosaic and you're browsing the world wide web, in 1993. Or get your software from a Fred Fish PD Disk, or directly from the source, by which I mean Aminet over FTP or CD-ROM. And while Norton Commander was pretty neat on PCs, Directory Opus 4 on the Amiga was just so ridiculously powerful once you started customizing the buttons to run custom scripts.

And man, the Multimedia Software. Deluxe Paint was THE pixel editor for its time. Not just on the Amiga, but it was used to create graphics for many, many other systems like the SNES as well. It's only logical that it was created by a video game company (Electronic Arts). Then we got the early 3D stuff, including Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D. Presentation stuff like ScalaMM (and yes, I know that Hypercard existed on the Mac many years before). Genlock/Video Stuff thanks to Newtek's Video Toaster. And not to forget Brilliance/True Brilliance in case you had an AGA system or the holy grail, a graphics card. It's a shame that stuff like Final Writer came along very late, because I remember it being pretty great as a word processor. I think that Wordworth was the popular one before it.

The pure elegance of ASSIGN/virtual drive letters is also one of those features that seems pointless until you used it with removable media. Arguably though, in this day and age it's no longer needed.

One could write a history about how the Amiga was amazing without mentioning a single video game, so the fact that the Amiga 500 was the ultimate video games machine for a while (until the SNES/Genesis came along) doesn't take away from how great the system was as a work computer.

As you said, it really feels like a machine that has traveled back through time, a system that should've been released in 1994 but was actually released in 1985, and then got significant upgrades in 1987 with the Amiga 500 and 2000.

But enough gushing about it, it's unfortunately all in the past, and as much as I want to embrace Linux, it just lacks that cohesion that the Amiga had.

The Amiga was such an impressive computer for its time. I remember having an A500 when it was still fairly new, and compared to anything else out there it was way ahead in terms of graphics and sound. I had mine hooked up to an old amp and big speakers, and the sound that came out of this thing was amazing. Graphics were so colourful and fast scrolling too. It’s amazing to think that the Amiga series is only one generation newer than the Commodore 64/128. There were also a lot of good games for it, so the game developer community must have embraced it too.

I still have wonderful memories of the Amiga. I upgraded from an Apple IIe to an A500. It was like night and day, and felt like a true quantum leap. I learned C on the Amiga and probably owe most of my programming career to it.

Unfortunately, I disagree about the "significant upgrades." The hardware barely changed from the A1000 release in 1985 until late 1992 with the A1200/4000 AGA machines. Yes, they added multiple expansion slots with the A2000 (an extension of the Zorro slot present in the A1000.) They also made a few very minor changes with ECS (video modes almost nobody used.) All incremental changes.

The reality is Commodore sat on their butt for years. The only meaningful change came with the graphics updates on the AGA systems, and that was too little, too late. The A1200 was performance limited, a 68020 at 14 mhz, a chip that was 8 years old at that point, no "fast" RAM, etc. By that time, 386s with SVGA and sound blaster cards were starting to become cheap and very common.

Software wise, AmigaOS 2.x was a huge upgrade. Too bad it didn't happen 2 or 3 years sooner though.