Was Commodore's Amiga 'A Computer Ahead of Its Time'? (gizmodo.com.au) 418
Long-time Slashdot reader Mike Bouma quotes Gizmodo:
Despite being ahead of its time when it was unveiled in 1985, the Commodore Amiga didn't survive past 1996. The machine, which went up against with the likes of the IBM PC and the Macintosh, offered far superior hardware than its competitors. But it just wasn't enough, as this video from Ahoy's Stuart Brown explains. While the Amiga had other 16-bit computers beat on technology, it didn't really have anything compelling to do with that hardware. "With 4096 colours, 4 channels of digital audio, and preemptive multitasking, [the Amiga] was capable of incredible things for the time...."
[U]nfortunately, internal struggles within Commodore would signal the beginning of the end.
I'll always remember Joel Hodgson's Amiga joke on a 1991 episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But in 2015 Geek.com reported on an Amiga which had been running a school's heating system for the last 30 years. A local high school student had originally set it up, and "he's the only one who knows how to fix software glitches. Luckily, he still lives in the area."
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Does anyone else have their own stories about Commodore's Amiga? And was the Amiga a computer ahead of its time?
[U]nfortunately, internal struggles within Commodore would signal the beginning of the end.
I'll always remember Joel Hodgson's Amiga joke on a 1991 episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But in 2015 Geek.com reported on an Amiga which had been running a school's heating system for the last 30 years. A local high school student had originally set it up, and "he's the only one who knows how to fix software glitches. Luckily, he still lives in the area."
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Does anyone else have their own stories about Commodore's Amiga? And was the Amiga a computer ahead of its time?
I was furious at Gates and IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
How could they live with their decisions, from an engineering pride standpoint.
The problem was, the average business person or home computer person had no knowledge to discriminate good computers or OSes or applications from bad, so the cheapest ones won every time. Sad.
But the Amiga was a lot cheaper than IBM/Windows (Score:3)
The Amiga 500 was $599 - probably $2k less than somebody could get a comparably equipped Wintel machine at the time.
Re: But the Amiga was a lot cheaper than IBM/Windo (Score:2)
A good PC keyboard at that time alone was north of $100. However it was a good, quality keyboard and not permanently built into a cheap plastic consumer grade device like a commie or amiga.
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Remember the Atari membrane keyboard? Good luck typing over 20 wpm.
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Keyboard for the Amiga 1000 wasn't bad, and the Amiga 2000 keyboard was nice. The 500 was meant to be a simpler and cheaper product.
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The early Amgia 3000's, like the one I had, had the perfect keyboard. Even today I still think the Amiga 3000 was one of the best designed computers. I love the look of it and would love to find a case like it today that fit a standard mother board.
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The Amiga was a great computer for the time but its short comings where pretty epic. No memory protection in a multitasking OS? Thanks to the Amiga I thought all computers where unreliable POS till I first encountered a proper unix workstation.
Re:But the Amiga was a lot cheaper than IBM/Window (Score:4, Informative)
There was two primary factors outside of Commodore's incompetence:
a) The machines were advertised as multimedia machines, in a time when nobody knew what multimedia was
b) The Mac was a "better" as in more elegant, designed system.
Really, if you put an Amiga 500 beside an Apple II, without them plugged into a TV, nobody would know that the Amiga had thousands of colors while the Apple II had 4. They just saw a large keyboard.
Really, you would have had to compare the Amiga 2000 (which actually used IDE hard drives as the only common part between it and the PC) to a late 386 era PC and Mac Quadra to actually get any idea as to why any of these PC's were better than the other.
The Amiga, as a consumer (eg not professional) machine, eg word processor, occasional games, video editing, was where it was actually significantly better. However most games made for it, actually were better than versions made for the other two platforms. It was also in direct competition with the Atari Falcon which had similar capabilities.
The PC for what it's worth, was a far more upgradable thing, but most people never upgrade it from stock, so when MPC standards came out, any advantage the Amiga had was eliminated. The Video Toaster was what professional users used with it, because the Amiga ran at NTSC resolutions, but the toaster was something that kept being used until we transitioned out of analog video, because it was still better than NLE's on the PC (and capturing NTSC video on a Pentium II was still a god-awful experience in 1998.) So the toaster was used for live broadcast, and was basically the only option for it without buying expensive proprietary newsroom equipment in the multi-thousand-dollars.
The Mac meanwhile found it's desktop publishing legs, and thus the non-broadcast news (eg physical papers, magazines, etc) glommed onto that.
So what could have saved the Amiga was these Mac software packages being ported to the other platforms, or games being developed on the Amiga first. The reality is that the PC was was hard to program for during the DOS era, but it was the DOS OS that allowed anyone to develop for it, where as Amiga and Mac required tools from the manufacturer or knowing assembly code to get the specialty hardware to dance. Hence the demo scene was almost exclusively Amiga until the PC's started having soundblaster-compatible hardware.
Re:But the Amiga was a lot cheaper than IBM/Window (Score:4, Informative)
The machines were advertised as multimedia machines, in a time when nobody knew what multimedia was
I watched some of the Amiga merchandising videos pretty recently, and they advertised them as machines which could do everything.
The Mac was a "better" as in more elegant, designed system.
They had superior case design, and square pixels. In every other way, the Macintosh was inferior. Literally every.
Really, you would have had to compare the Amiga 2000 (which actually used IDE hard drives as the only common part between it and the PC)
A bare Amiga 2000 didn't have any hard drives. The earliest Amiga 2000 hard drive controller was ST-506 (MFM) and narrow/slow SCSI only, no IDE. You could boot off SCSI, but not MFM. Probably that could be solved with custom ROMs.
to a late 386 era PC and Mac Quadra to actually get any idea as to why any of these PC's were better than the other.
Not really. A great comparison was an Amiga 2500 (A2000 with an accelerator card) to a Mac IIci. The late A2500s and the IIci both had the MC68030, but an A2500 running an emulator was faster at being a IIci than a IIci was, because the Amiga had a superior hardware architecture.
The PC for what it's worth, was a far more upgradable thing,
Nonsense. Typical PCs and Amigas had fairly comparable-speed buses, while they were competing. By the time VLB came along (the first bus on PCs after ISA which was actually common) the Amiga was already over.
So what could have saved the Amiga was these Mac software packages being ported to the other platforms, or games being developed on the Amiga first.
What could have saved the Amiga was not being mismanaged into oblivion, and the new hardware being what it was supposed to be instead of a half-assed version.
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speaking of "fans"... I'd always thought that people who said Mac people were "fanatics" had never met any Amiga people
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Isn't that the truth. I've seen actual fights between Amiga and AtariST fans.
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That is what it was like around my parts too. The AtariST/Amiga and sometimes Mac owners always stared at each other with hostile intents. That is until a 8086'er walked by. Then we where firmly in the same camp. At least till they where out of sight.
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The Mac really wasn't architecturally better. It had a lot of hacks in it, but of course improved over time. The Amiga had a solid design and a solid OS (not counting the DOS layer TripOS). The Mac was also easily double the cost, and still couldn't do multitasking. The Mac had an interesting desktop design (borrowed from Xerox), but under the hood it wasn't that sophisticated.
When the Amiga 1000 came out, the competition was the Atari ST and Apple IIgs. At least that's how the media portrayed it. The
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Oh ya, some people spend that much on a black and white graphics card for the PC.
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The problem was, the average business person or home computer person had no knowledge to discriminate good computers or OSes or applications from bad
I don't think this is true. I remember seeing the first Amiga in the mid-80s, and it was obvious that it was superior to the x86-PC. But I didn't buy one, and neither did most other people because it didn't run the software we needed ... and software companies didn't port to it because the market was too small.
It was a classic chicken&egg problem. Once a "good enough" solution is entrenched, it is very hard to displace even if the replacement is superior in every way.
Another example is 5.25" vs 3.5"
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I don't think this is true.
Actually, that's about right when I look at my own history of computing in my family it was Civ 1 on a 286/386. My first PC was a 486. Most people buying computers back then were not savvy, people started to get savvy around 486/Pentium days (largely thanks to their tech dads or their kids) then it was a relentless march of CPU doubling their processsor power until 2006 when they hit the heat/leakage wall and then speedups came very slow and incrementally since most software is still single threaded.
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A more useful question might be why after 33 years are computer manufacturers and software publishers still not fully learning the lesson.
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I remember seeing the first Amiga in the mid-80s, and it was obvious that it was superior to the x86-PC.
Superior at what? At flashy scrolling graphics demos?
Did you ever try to add a hard disk to an Amiga?
The reason people bought IBM PCs was because they ran Lotus 123. They didn't care whether they had a genlock add-on or not.
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Superior at what? At flashy scrolling graphics demos?
Yes. Also the sound system was amazing. Before the Amiga, it had never occured to me that a computer could play music.
Did you ever try to add a hard disk to an Amiga?
No.
The reason people bought IBM PCs was because they ran Lotus 123.
Exactly. People didn't buy it because important software was not ported to it. The software was not ported to it because people weren't buying it.
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Did you ever try to add a hard disk to an Amiga?
No.
It was a nightmare, it just wasn't designed for it.
IBM PC's were.
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Did you ever try to add a hard disk to an Amiga?
No.
It was a nightmare, it just wasn't designed for it.
IBM PC's were.
I had an A2000 and it was simple. I bought a GVP board and a SCSI drive with a ton of space (120MB). It wasn't that hard. I did it myself and all I had worked with before was a C64. I still have that Amiga although the 1084S is acting weird.
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The hard part for me was that I bought the hard drive board, then went to Fry's to get a hard disk. The sales guy didn't want to sell me a hard disk without the PC hard drive board. I kept saying I just wanted the disk only, and the guy said "it won't work without a card!" Finally the manager said "just give him the drive"...
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The Amiga power users would make RAM disks, then load up the image from a floppy. Then a lot of stuff ran super fast, such as compiling and linking (many of the tools wrote to storage instead of RAM as they assumed you didn't have much RAM). I never met anyone with four floppies though, but two floppies was common, plus a big RAM upgrade.
If you're doing business stuff - spreadsheets - then the PC was ok because it had the popular spreadsheets by big name companies. The same reason the PC won in the long
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Superior at what? At flashy scrolling graphics demos?
well, yes, that at least. but I recall my A500 with 64 colours at 640x512 and 8 bit stereo sound when my friends were using 286's with cga/ega video cards and the PC speaker. the difference was huge. Games were a big part of it (I was in my early teens after all) and games on the amiga just looked and sounded better at least until VGA and sound blasters became a thing. Even then, PC's were held back with DOS and Windows 3.1.
ISTR the mid 90's taking my amiga into school so we could play alien breed, chaos en
Re:I was furious at Gates and IBM (Score:4, Insightful)
I will admit though that Lotus-123 was THE killer app for the PC. I liked that and learned it quickly, whereas today's Excel is just a lot of frustration.
Exactly Correct - Business Usage (Score:2)
If Amiga wanted to "win", they should have identified what the business world needed and marketed towards that. That's what all of those other wildly successful companies did, they provided products that met the ne
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I don't think they realized that a business-only computer was what was going to win. Ie, why would a business oriented computer do well in the home? They're different markets so it made sense at the time that there could be two types of computers there.
Also remember that in the business world, the PC worked not because it could do these business applications better than a terminal on your desk that connected to the mainframes and minis. It succeeded because it meant you could do computing on your desk wi
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> Did you ever try to add a hard disk to an Amiga?
It was easy enough on the Amiga 2000
although you still had to boot from a floppy disk until Kickstart/Workbench 1.3 came out
I never had an Amiga 500, I went straight from the 1000 to the 2000
Later on I also owned a couple of 1200 's and a CD32
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> Superior at what? At flashy scrolling graphics demos?
PCs were crap. They were inferior both in terms of microprocessor features and actually having the OS use them. Microsoft was the real villain here.
The 68000 was roughly on par with the 386 in terms of having a large flat addressing space and a large number of general purpose registers.
DOS subjected you to manual memory management. The whole thing was hard coded with limitations from the original IBM PC.
Then there's the whole sound and graphics thing
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Nope.
Direct comparable:
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Another example is 5.25" vs 3.5" floppies. 3.5" was superior in every way: smaller, higher capacity, faster, more reliable, etc. Yet 3.5" took more than 10 years to displace 5.25" as the most common format.
3.5" floppies were expensive for a long time because making a good one required a much higher quality oxide layer than making at least a DSDD 5.25" floppy, if not DSHD. DSHD 5.25" floppies have the least area per bit of all common floppy formats, while 360k 5.25" DSHD floppies have the most area per bit of pretty much any floppy under eight inches. When you put that together with requiring a new and more expensive drive, it made them a hard sell. But the 360k floppies were actually very reliable, and early
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Irrelevant and wrong. Amigas and other machines had 3.5 inch drives with cast frames, mostly. Cast lower, stamped upper. But the big cost item at the time was the head, not the frame.
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As a home computer, there wasn't much "needed" software. And even on the PC, if you needed stuff like a spreadsheet then you would often DOS instead of the clumsy Windows. For games, the Amiga held its own against anything on the PC. For video and audio, it had some of the best stuff until you had the budget for a professional set up. Remember too that Windows really struggled for awhile and had some serious competition, and in the workplace it didn't really get going until Windows 3.1. If someone had
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IBM PCs went to 3.5" floppys soon after.
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> IBM was putting hard drives in their PCs long before 3-1/2" floppies.
They were putting SMALL hard drives into PCs, if you were lucky and spent enough for your machine. Either way, there was still a great need for floppies and external storage in general.
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> 3-1/2" disks are demontratably less reliable.
There are legions of people that have contrary first hand experience.
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The problem was, the average business person or home computer person had no knowledge to discriminate good computers or OSes or applications from bad, so the cheapest ones won every time. Sad.
Consumers need usable apps before they would buy the hardware. In fact you could say the applications are what the user buys and the hardware comes along after it.
Commodore, or at least some senior people who worked there, were well aware of this. Back in 1986-1988 timeframe (I don't remember when) I visited them as a consultant because what they wanted was someone to write a good spreadsheet program to attract users that needed it. I really wanted that contract but the "internal issues" that the arti
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Why did Microsoft do such a bad job? Why does Comcast do a bad job? Or the old AT&T? Or the government? Or the airlines? Or taxicabs? Monopolies and oligopolies do a bad job in general. Why?
Because lots of people doing lots of things do a bad or mediocre job. When there's a monopoly, you're stuck with it. You have to deal with it for a long time. When there's not a monopoly, people choose someone doing a good job and the guys doing a bad job fade away and are forgotten. Or they shape up and sta
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Which meant diddly squat to the vast majority of businesses. Most businesses needed a computer to help crunch financial numbers and to track inventory and sales. That means a spreadsheet and database. Both of which were available at a professional grade on the PC, but not on
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First off, Gates was not involved.
Second, IBM PCs were introduced with 80 column high resolution text displays. Amigas had NTSC output which was useless for that.
"Technical elegance, power, and simplicity of the Amiga" only applies when all you care about is low resolution, color applications, not the PC target.
"The problem was, the average business person or home computer person had no knowledge to discriminate good computers or OSes or applications from bad, so the cheapest ones won every time. Sad."
You'
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Sort of agree here - Amiga wasn't ahead of it's time, the issue was that the rest of the microcomputer world was so backwards. The professional computing world was becoming sophisticated while the corresponding home market was like people were trying to invent a wheel from scratch without ever having seen one.
Now if the market was for computer hobbyists who don't mind cobbling together some parts and writing assembler, that would be fine, that was sort of what the pre-Microsoft world was like. But there wa
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Still furious. Literally shaking with anger right now. Might crap myself.
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Like the original PC from IBM? Or the locked down proprietary Windows that overtook DOS? Every single computer you bought from a store when the Amiga was new was proprietary.
Their graphics demo was astounding... (Score:2)
Image after image better than the last. Until it crashed. It would do this about every 5-10 minutes for some reason.
Not a good thing to see when you were at a university computer store and you're ready to write the check. Never figured out why it was doing this.
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They had an innate overheating problem. There was a piece of metal under the chip and when it got too hot, it'd flex and push the chip up, ever so slightly getting it out of position. Turning it off caused it to come back down because it cooled relatively quickly.
We used to have races where we'd write the most intensive code to heat things up the quickest. If you did a good job, it'd actually fully eject the chip - you could hear the 'ping' inside the case when it hit the side. Then you'd have to put it
No - it was exactly its time. (Score:3)
Microsoft and Intel held back progress in software and hardware for many years after the introduction 68000-cpu (Amiga, Atari ST, Mac) computers. (Along with some help from bad management at Apple, Atari, and Commodore. I don't know about Motorola management quality.) It was a lost decade in personal computing.
After the mid-late 90s, Microsoft and Intel finally started to produce software and hardware that was less of a garbled mess.
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and still no protected memory
Most Amiga's were 68000 with no MCU so no protected memory either.
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Of course meant MMU
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Agreed. The Amiga was not ahead of its time as much as Intel and Microsoft were holding things back.
The Motorola 68000 was a joy to program assembly language for.
I remember I borrowed a book on x86 assembly-language (16-bit) and was appalled at how primitive it was in comparison.
The hardware in the Amiga was basically a continuation of hardware in earlier 8-bit computers, the chief engineer Jay Miner having used many of the same concepts in designing chips for Atari's 8-bit computers and games consoles.
Once
Re:No - it was exactly its time. (Score:5, Informative)
That's nonsense. The PC had originally intended to use a 68K but changed to Intel due to problems with production commitment.
Intel had already made plans to transition from x86 to a different 32 bit architecture, the 960. IBM insisted, instead, on a followup product which it primarily drove, the 286. That product sucked not because of Intel and Microsoft but because of IBM. OS software, namely OS/2, also sucked because of IBM.
Intel finally realized that x86 was important so it repurposed the 960 to embedded and developed the 386. Then Microsoft took over 32 bit development. It was their willingness to overcome IBM's failure of leadership that advanced the platform. Prior to that, IBM was far more powerful than either Intel or Microsoft.
Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Commodore management messed it up.
The Amiga is the best computer ever made, and I doubt anything else in the future will have such a massive leap forward from what's around at the time.
The people who used one properly (not just to play games), realise what an incredible machine it was, and still is.
How do you use an Amiga "properly"? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's statements like this from Amiga proponents that I always felt was one of contributing reasons for its downfall. The Amiga was an excellent machine for its time and groundbreaking in terms of its graphics and sound capabilities relative to its contemporaries.
By saying you had to use it properly (and you're nowhere near the first person I've heard say this) means that the machine can only be used for certain tasks that it's best at and that you need to be either specially trained or uniquely intelligent
Re:How do you use an Amiga "properly"? (Score:5, Interesting)
You've misunderstood what I meant by 'properly'. I meant as a computer and not just a games machine. Some people never did anything apart from put in a game, play it, then switch it off. They never used the graphical operating system with a hard drive.
I used mine for playing games, programming, video production, making music, graphics work, printing, video and audio digitising, word processing, spreadsheets, emails, internet access, 3D modelling, emulation, and probably a few other things I can't think of at the moment. Pretty much anything I ever wanted to do. That's what I call using it properly. I had hard drives, a CD drive, a Zip drive, plus a printer. I actually still have it all now. Next to me.
You needed less special training to use an Amiga that you did to get a game running on a PC by setting IRQs and messing with Config.sys and Autoexec.bat, that's for sure.
It's say it was something like 10 years ahead of the PC. While the PC was making beeps and showing 16 hideous colours on a DOS screen, with no proper scrolling, hardware sprites, multi-tasking, etc. Oh, and paying about 3 times as much for it.
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It's say it was something like 10 years ahead of the PC. While the PC was making beeps and showing 16 hideous colours on a DOS screen, with no proper scrolling, hardware sprites, multi-tasking, etc. Oh, and paying about 3 times as much for it.
And the |BM PC with its beeps and clunky graphics was able to run Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect and dBase. The best computer hardware in the World is no good if it won't run the software that people want to use.
Re:How do you use an Amiga "properly"? (Score:4, Informative)
And the |BM PC with its beeps and clunky graphics was able to run Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect and dBase. The best computer hardware in the World is no good if it won't run the software that people want to use.
You do realize that they had Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect, and dBase for Amiga, right? And you're just trolling? Right?
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I remember laughing at PC users like you for spending a hell of a lot more for no sound, no sprites or hardware scrolling, no multitasking, almost no colours, lower storage on floppy disks, no joystick ports, no games, no graphical OS. If you wanted improvements to that you had to spend even more on add-on cards. I was playing games on my 576i RGB display with excellent sound, thousands of colours, built in joystick ports, and getting it all for £400. Yes, I was doing the laughing.
I didn't get prob
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How much training did it take for you to pretend you didn't have to deal with constant "Guru Meditation Numbers"?
No consumer operating systems had adequate memory protection at that time. MacOS didn't have any until 7. Windows didn't have any worth mentioning until Chicago/95. AmigaDOS never had any of its own, but Amiga users with processors with MMUs (which are horribly rare in Commodore's original designs, and also quite rare even in third-party accelerators) do have some options for preventing their OS from exploding regularly.
By the time PC users had to mess with "Config.sys and Autoexec.bat" and IRQs to "get a game running" the Amiga was dead and buried, except for a few morons who exist to this day proclaiming the virtues of their NTSC computer display.
I was doing both at once, so I disagree.
Eh, no? (Score:3)
The Amiga is the best computer ever made, and I doubt anything else in the future will have such a massive leap forward from what's around at the time.
I am pretty sure just 2 years after the introduction of the Amiga, the 1987 Acorn Archimedes was already a more massive leap forward (4+ MIPS at 32bit for just £800).
Sure, the Amiga was a leap in multimedia hardware when it came out and it is a shame it didn't come out with matching software and in the end didn't catch on more, but Amiga fans are very, very far off the mark with statements like "best computer ever made" etc...
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I don't think the jump from an Amiga to an Arc was bigger than from a C64/DOS PC to an Amiga, so I still think it was the biggest jump we've seen.
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Not to mention the ecosystem. I remember an insanley expensive HDD controller (I want to say $1000+ back in the 80's), and then it didn't even work right. The PC just worked back then, the Amiga never did.
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...and that was true in its heyday!
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
as well as upgradable hardware.
This. The PC was designed to be modular right from the get-go. Plenty of expansion slots. Need another parallel port? Buy a card. Need another serial port? There's a card for that. Need more memory? Card. Need Hercules graphics? Card. Need 32 serial ports and modems on a single card to run your BBS? Card!
This open design that let pretty much anyone with good electronics knowledge build their own specialized card for whatever reason is what kept the PC ahead of anything else. I don't doubt the Amiga was advanced in terms of graphics and even sound - when it came out. But things like Sound Blaster and Ad Lib and then graphics acceleration cards came out, and there went Amiga's advantage over PCs...
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And yet, look at the extreme loss in options we've had since.
Video chips, Sound cards and Network cards started getting integrated into motherboards as early as 1996 with Pentium-I era chips.
While that's true, it wasn't common for any of that stuff to be integrated until the following era. Integrated video was pretty much only included in the most cheap-ass systems, or on server boards, onboard networking was positively rare anywhere but on servers, and even onboard audio was fairly rare outside of low-profile machines with nonstandard motherboard footprints. By the K6/P2 era, adding that stuff to the motherboard was significantly cheaper than having it on option cards, but slotted video and so
laptops wifi cards are full pci-e / pci mini cards (Score:2)
laptops wifi cards are full pci-e / pci mini cards
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Acorn Archimedes (Score:3)
was really ahead of its time! [wikipedia.org]
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Yep. I had one and it could whip the Amiga's ass, doing more in software than the Amiga could do in hardware.
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No, but it could do higher resolution with 256 colors and the horizontal pixels weren't interdependent like on the Amiga.
Remember that the Amiga 4096 color mode could only change one of R, G or B at each pixel (HAM mode) so you couldn't use it for anything much other than showing photographs. eg. You couldn't draw a diagonal colored line across the screen because a colored line needs to modify RG+B at each pixel.
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Also: Turning on six bitplanes for HAM mode basically took all the RAM access cycles in the visible screen area. The CPU could only run in the border areas while it was showing a 4096 color image.
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...and the Archimedes in software could eat the Amiga blitter for breakfast and ask for a second helping.
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Many people could at first not believe that:
"You mean you can read MS-DOS formatted disks?"
"No, I mean that I use it to compile my Modula-2 programming assignments using the MS-DOS TopSpeed compiler - and also to run WordPerfect."
- 1988 Archimedes PC Emulator Manual [computinghistory.org.uk].
- 1988 Archimedes PC Emulator PCW Review [computinghistory.org.uk]
- 1991 Archimedes PC Emulator Manual [computinghistory.org.uk]
ARM was not so much known for its low power consumption at the time, but rather for its speed: the Archimedes was running circles around the Amiga and all other personal computers.
let's look at the meaning (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that "ahead of its time" doesn't really mean that a product had more advanced hardware. What it means is that there was a later time during which the public was ready and primed for its features and thus, if it had been introduced in that later time instead of the earlier one, it would have been a success.
Regardless, I'd agree that it was ahead of its time because I believe a fully modernized offering with some of the same concepts could be a cool offering.
One of the things I remember is a friend who was an Amiga maestro producing a nearly indistinguishable synthesis of my voice on his Amiga in just a few minutes in about 1989. Of course, it didn't have the right inflections, but the tone reproduction was right on. He did that for several people at that party in less than 30 minutes total time. It was very cool for the day and would still be cool for today.
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To be fair, every offering to the general home user was a decade or two behind computing in the commercial and academic worlds. Amiga was only ahead of it's time in the microcomputer arena. Whereas at the same time you had Unix workstations being the thing professionals wanted on their desks in R&D, there were Lisp Machines, giant timeshare computers running a full company, and so forth.
At the time it wasn't clear that the PC was really going to take off. It was expensive for the home market, and rath
It's pricing was ahead of its time (Score:3)
I was going to say that it's OS and UI were ahead of its time, but then I remembered the Lisa...
What I would say about it is that at $599 for the 500 (the first model sold) it was the first system to offer premium performance at lower brand cost - note that this includes very good sound & graphic capabilities that would be extras on IBM and clone systems. Going with the 68k as its processor meant that it had a better growth path than the IBM systems at the time.
At the time, I had a friend that was absolutely nuts about it and thought it would overtake the market - but early manufacturing/availability stumbles really did it in.
1st model was the 1000 (Score:3)
Development (Score:2)
From what I gather the issue with the Amiga was support for developers. For traditionalists, developing on top of an OS was a new experience. Granted you could kick the workbench out of the way and access the hardware, mostly, directly. But it was still a new experience for many. I've heard Commodore was pretty bad at support for these kinds of things. The differences between Kickstart versions 1, 2 and 3 were pretty substantial, and broke a lot of stuff, which also put off some devs.
Commodore wasn't the on
Good god yes it was (Score:5, Insightful)
Late eighties/early 90s I worked weekend and holiday job selling 16 bit games and computers. We were the first in the area to seriously specialise in them, so we got a bit of reputation. Sold a large amount of everything, then started moving into PCs. I could not believe the prices people were paying for such utter garbage - Amigas killed them.
Then there is programming. I remember looking at a declaration in C: far char *, and deciding never to do segmented memory model junk again and just do all my coding on the flat addressing of the 68000 range.
Amigas could have looked more professional and been built out of metal I think, and they would have been taken more seriously, But the my-mum-was-on-the-board-at-IBM-so-I-got-the-contract juggernaut of MS DOS, as hacked out and made ubiquitous by Compaq, had taken over by then and single manufacturer stuff was struggling to hang on - even Apple. The name Commodore was mostly associated with home gaming, so apart from Germany and Scandinavia it struggled to get recognition as a serious firm. Its own antics with suppliers and retailers didn't endear it much either - see Brian Bagnall's excellent book Commodore - A Company On The Edge [amazon.co.uk]. But the machines and capabilities themselves? Lightyears ahead.
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and the Am486 was cheaper and some where better then the early Pentium chips
Sinclair QL (Score:2)
Nobody knows about the Sinclair QL. If they know the name Sinclair at all, it's only for the lesser Z80 cousin that preceded it.
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It did have multitasking, and the built-in BASIC had windowing primitives. It was built on the 68000 series just like the Amiga, which also meant it didn't suffer from Intel's bizarre paged memory scheme.
No, it was not. (Score:2)
Computers constructed out of clusters of ASICs are a stopgap measure to compensate for slow central processors, and not "ahead of their time."
It's more the kind of propietary design a company would engage in to attain an "edge" in a market. A way to get a multimedia entertainment computer out ahead to consumers.
I remember being in a nuclear research facility (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I remember being in a nuclear research facility (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. (Score:2)
By a wide margin. I'd argue that the Fidonet even was/is superior to some aspects of the internet and its services.
A "What if" to consider.. Software distribution (Score:4, Interesting)
All the computers of that era suffered from one problem... Software distribution.
I'm sure the Amiga had killer apps somewhere that was comparable to anything on the x86 platform. My friends and I all had various computers from that era, my family was an Atari house. Others were commodore, some Apple, and some were PC. Some had access to BBS's that had software from the other side of the globe in the UK (We were US) The UK 16 and 8 bit scene were crazy compared to what we had here in the states.
That being said, the "What if" I want people to consider is.. What if the internet had existed back then?
Lotus only succeeded because they had MASSIVE distribution channels into every continent on earth. They had IBM's money behind them, and IBM was already everywhere with things like Selectric typewriters. Had the internet existed in a usable form for these other computers back in the day, we might have seen more than the x86 dominate like it is today.
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I'm sure the Amiga had killer apps somewhere that was comparable to anything on the x86 platform.
Not really, especially the office applications were lacking. Sure, that was BeckerText but it was even slower and less stable then Word at this time.
What if the internet had existed back then?
Actually the Amiga had a very active shareware scene based on disks. People used snailmail or went to shareware parties to exchange these disks.
And in 1992 Aminet [wikipedia.org] started and remained the largest public archive of software for any platform until 1996.
So the lack of distribution channels wasn't an issue.
What REALLY Happened (Score:4, Insightful)
Two things happened at the same time.
The IBM PC was only developed because it drove IBM execs nuts to see all the Apple IIs on desks in Austin. BTW, the x86 architecture was, and is, a pile of crap, with Intel often not the best producer (NEC on the early chips and AMD on the Pentium); the Intel chips are only good now because they run the x86 in emulation on a completely different architecture, as the Amiga did in the 1000. What spread the PC to homes was that at a lot companies "you could not get fired for buying IBM", regardless of how well or badly they worked. As PCs proliferated in offices, they were purchased for use at home by those with the means (they were quite expensive, compared to the Apple II, Amiga, Atari, ...) so they could continue working at home, often on pirated copies of same, also expensive, software. This provided a hardware base for the "fun" applications that, ultimately, could not be overcome, despite students often having Apple IIs in school.
Another aside on the PC/Intel thing: the only reason that the 8088 was in the PC is that, as a maker of third-class processors, Intel was going out of business, so IBM purchasing people overrode the engineers, who had designed around a variant of the much superior and mainframe-like Z8000, to buy cheaper CPUs. Further, IBM stupidly did not make MS-DOS a "work for hire", giving them exclusive rights, which, ultimately, brought in the clones.
The Amiga, OTOH, has a 32-bit CPU (for which Microsoft violated the software guidelines in their Basic, and broke a lot of applications when the 68020s and '30s were put into Amigas), rather than a 16-bit processor, meaning much more directly accessible address area, without segmenting and all of the "himem" silliness. As a much more capable computer than anything PC-ish until, approximately, Windows 3.11 on a 386, the Amiga had a large following in several industries, in addition to mainstream applications such as word processors (Word Perfect among them) and spreadsheets. AT&T had Amiga 3000s in their display booths for the release of UNIX System V Release 3. However, despite the greater power of the Amiga and its better price, there was no way for it to displace the "Daddy (later, Mommy, too) needs this at home, so it's what we're getting" of a PC or clone.
Finally, it did not help the Amiga, at all, that the management at Commodore saw it mostly as a cash cow and did not put much into mainstream marketing or to speed hardware development.
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I worked in a company that tried to sell Amigas (Score:2)
Yes it was, "but".
I worked in a company that tried to sell Amigas.
In Eastern Europe.
Around 1991-1993 or so.
At that time in that place, nobody was paying for software, ever. The prices were astronomical compared to the salaries and income. So we installed pirate stuff on anything that we sold.
For PC-s, this was easy.
Word (pre-windows!) or WordPerfect, Quattro, Foxpro or some other database, some games. This got most purchasers through their needs. The economy was changing fast - socialism out, capitalism in.
SGI Indy - way ahead. (Score:2)
MST3K (Score:2)
Good times. Good times....
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You are kidding right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: 1000 years from now... (Score:2)
Sure. But if you make a general purpose product that is only really useful to a TINY portion of a mass market industry, Your productâ(TM)s extinction is a virtual certainty.
Did it do stuff better than other platforms? Sure. Did it do enough stuff better to outcompete the others? Nope. Whose fault is that?